Planetes is a manga by Makoto Yukimura, complete at five books (four volumes, but the fourth is split into two parts). It’s small-scale science fiction, set in 2074, that follows a ship’s crew as they collect debris in near-Earth orbit. It appears to be much-praised by critics and much-recommended by sf fans. It has meticulous, easy-to-follow art, which is often put to good use depicting space; characters from different nations, races, and genders [*]; and numerous musings on the meaning of, and motivations for, space travel.
I didn’t like it.
I thought the main turning points were so obvious as to be boring and, indeed, annoying. More, they were made obvious by moving the characters like little puppets, which I just don’t have any patience with.
[*] Though race and gender roles seem to be stuck in the early 2000s, or earlier.
There are approximately two character-development arcs within the series. The first focuses on Hachi, who is obsessed with leaving the garbage runs and joining a mission to Jupiter. The second focuses on the ship’s pilot, Fee, who is faced with moral dilemmas at home and at work.
(The series shifts back to Hachi at the end, which feels almost superfluous. I certainly found it an anti-climax.)
Hachi’s arc, which really starts in the second volume, is the worst offender in the “too obvious” area. He goes further and further into an extreme personal philosophy, and is opposed by a new crew member, Tanabe, who is just as tedious in the other direction. Actual dialogue between Tanabe and Hachi, upon finding the body of an astronaut:
“Instead of rushing into the cosmos and exposing himself to lethal amounts of radiation, he should have thought about [his family]. He should have stayed on Earth!! He made a loveless choice . . . and that is always the wrong choice.”
” . . . Love? Who gives a crap about love? Go back to Earth, throw on some John Lennon and hug some trees. Your ‘love’ doesn’t belong out here. It’s a weakness. That guy had a passion for the stars and there’s nothing wrong with that. [ . . . ] We live alone and we die alone. And that suits me just fine!”
(Ellipses in original, except for the one in brackets.)
I presume you can see where this eventually goes from about a mile away, without binoculars. (Even David Welsh, a reviewer who likes the series more than I do, admits that Tanabe is a major problem with the series.)
Fee’s arc, later on, is set up just as obviously. The minor plot point, which is used as inspiration for her actions in the major, is neighbors complaining about her family’s many dogs barking. All night. In a city apartment building. Fee takes a neighbor’s suggestion and uses collars that spray nasty stuff into the dogs’ faces when they bark, telling her son that “Sometimes you have to be cruel. That’s real life. You’ll understand when you’re older.”
Naturally, she changes her mind and removes the collars, and then uses the memory of her son’s reaction to decide something at work . . . because if she’d used any of the many cruelty-free ways to address her dogs’ barking, well, there goes the handy parallelism, doesn’t it?
(Also, this annoys me because, hello, her neighbors have a point! And I speak as a dog owner.)
Seriously, it’s almost enough to make me re-read Saiyuki for an essay I originally thought about doing, on independence/dependence and attachment/detachment, just to see how these kind of themes can be done well. (I gave up the idea when I realized that I would have to discuss literally every plot arc within the series.)
Moving away from my complaints, there are a couple of other things that I should just note about the series. First, though it’s science fiction, it has a mystic or fantastic streak. Hachi has a couple of conversations that could be his imagination, could be hallucinations, or could be actual manifestations; it’s hard to tell. I’ve seen one of these sequences called a “vision quest,” which is as good a label as any. Second, there is at least one odd little episode that never goes anywhere, which could either be good or bad depending on one’s tastes.
I wanted to like this, I really did, but its virtues couldn’t outweigh how cranky it made me.