Author: katenepveu

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Yukimura, Makoto: Planetes

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.

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Crusie, Jennifer, Lori Foster, and Carly Phillips: Santa Baby

I bought the romance anthology Santa Baby because Jennifer Crusie has a novella in it. Knowing that the other two stories would look really flat in comparison to Crusie’s, I tried reading Lori Foster and Carly Phillips’ contributions first.

I couldn’t make it through even chapter one of Foster’s story, “Christmas Bonus”: I found its prose stilted, its characters insufficiently engaging (especially since the heavy breathing started right away), and its plot annoying—and worse, it could have been an interesting inversion of gender stereotypes if it had gone the other direction (I flipped to the end to check). I did finish Phillips’ story, “Naughty Under the Mistletoe,” but it was more out of habit than anything, and I won’t remember a thing about it in a week. Its prose was a bit awkward, but more importantly, it failed to overcome the problem inherent in short stories within the romance genre: unless your characters knew each other already, it’s really hard to convincingly portray their falling in love in such a short space.

Fortunately, Crusie’s story, “Hot Toy,” was as fun as I expected. I mean, how can I resist a story that starts with a character searching desparately for a Christmas toy called a “Major MacGuffin”? The explanation given for the MacGuffin is, of course, not in the least sensible, but who cares, because this is pure distilled Crusie goodness: funny, fast, and energetic, with family and a consistent and satisfying emotional theme.

(Not reading the back cover of the book made this story a different, and I think mildly better, experience, as I was in the same state of ignorance about something as the point-of-view character. Of course, now that I’ve said that, anyone with the book is automatically going to look at the back cover, so never mind.)

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Duane, Diane: (104) A Wizard Abroad (audio)

I’ve never booklogged Diane Duane’s A Wizard Abroad, so I might as well say something briefly about it after listening to the audiobook.

This is the fourth book in the series, in which Nita goes to Ireland. It’s something of an interlude between the first three books and the continuing developments that start in the next, and has always felt somewhat to me like an excuse to write about Ireland, where the author moved a few years before this book was published. It’s not a bad book (at least not to this non-Irish person whose culture and history aren’t being appropriated left and right), but it is a letdown after High Wizardry.

As for the audiobook, Christina Moore, as always, does a very nice job narrating. In particular, she manages the Irish accents well—or, at least, as they’re described in the text, which specifies numerous regional differences.

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Snicket, Lemony: (08.5) The Unauthorized Autobiography

While Lemony Snicket’s The Unauthorized Autobiography was published between books 8 and 9 of A Series of Unfortunate Events, I only read it over this weekend, thanks to a reminder in comments.

The book is as metafictional as promised by the title. I am particularly fond of the index:

  • code of V.F.D. See codes
  • codes. See noble causes
  • noble causes. See necessary evils
  • necessary evils. See moral uncertainty
  • moral uncertainty. See villainy
  • villainy. See conspiracies
  • conspiracies. See overall feeling of doom
  • overall feeling of doom. See doom, overall feeling of
  • doom, overall feeling of, ix-211

As for its relationship to the series, it seems to me to fill in some backstory that is interesting but doesn’t necessarily affect my understanding of events to date. However, I’m only through book 11 of 13, so that assessment may change—I’m told that something in book 12 is only explicable with information in this volume. (Remember: only cake-sniffers spoil people!) And I wonder if the author had a better idea along the way, as certain things in The Slippery Slope don’t seem consistent with a strong suggestion in this book.

Anyway, if you like this series, it’s certainly worth grabbing from the library.

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Snicket, Lemony: (11) The Grim Grotto (audio)

The eleventh book in A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Grim Grotto, takes place almost entirely underwater and makes a concerted effort to muddy the waters of the series, a phrase which here means “tries to suggest that people are neither essentially noble nor essentially villainous.” I’m not sure how effective this is. On one hand, the series has made a point of showing the foolishness of blind adherence to simple mottos [*]; on the other, the characters have so consistenly fallen into clear categories — good, evil, or indifferent — that book 11 of 13 seems a little late in the game to be injecting nuance. (Okay, yes, there was that brief bit in book 10, but it was really brief.) I’m not objecting to nuance; I’m just wondering whether it can be managed at this late date.

(Also, I think the details somewhat undercut the effort. ROT13: juvyr svban pbzrf npebff nf guerr-qvzrafvbany, ure fvoyvat qbrfa’g, rfcrpvnyyl ng gur raq.)

[*] For instance:

Having a personal philosophy is like having a pet marmoset, because it may be very attractive when you acquire it, but there may be situations when it will not come in handy at all. “He or she who hesitates is lost” sounded like a reasonable philosophy at first glance, but the Baudelaires could think of situations in which hesitating might be the best thing to do. . . . But despite all these incidents in which hesitation had been very helpful, the children did not wish to adopt “He or she who does not hesitate is lost” as their personal philosophy, because a giant octopus might come along at any moment, particular when the Baudelaires were on board a submarine, and the siblings would be very foolish to hesitate if the octopus were coming after them. Perhaps, the Baudelaires thought, the wisest personal philosophy concerning hesitation would be “Sometimes he or she should hesitate and sometimes he or she should not hesitate,” but this seemed far too long and vague to be much use on a plaque.

Other than that, I am amused to note that I am clearly more awake than I was for the last book, because I figured out the solutions to all of the plot dilemmas well, well in advance. It is a known disadvantage of the format for me, but I like Tim Curry’s reading well enough to put up with it, and I’m mildly annoyed at having to wait to start book 12 (I would have had to stop about halfway through for holiday travels, which is sub-optimal).

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Snicket, Lemony: (10) The Slippery Slope (audio)

I think I may do a single run at finishing A Series of Unfortunate Events, now that the last book’s out and I’m in the mood for some frivolity. At any rate, I just finished listening to the tenth book, The Slippery Slope, as read by Tim Curry, and went straight into the next one.

The theme of The Slippery Slope is aptly described in its opening paragraph:

A man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called “The Road Less Traveled,” describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used. The poet found that the road less traveled was peaceful but quite lonely, and he was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less traveled, the other travelers would be on the road more frequently traveled and so couldn’t hear him as he cried for help. Sure enough, that poet is now dead.

The Baudelaire orphans find themselves on various roads less traveled in the Mortmain Mountains, where they meet a number of unexpected characters, some new (and occasionally surprising, at least to me) and some old; face serious (though obvious) moral dilemmas; experience at least two landmark events in their lives; and learn a bit about the mysteries surrouding them. We the readers learn more [*], which is perhaps unfair, but that’s what happens to the Baudelaire siblings.

I forget how many days prior books have taken, but this one took only three by my count, and it introduces a hard deadline just five days away. The relationship of that deadline to the overall series’ progression remains to be determined. I haven’t heard howls of indignation from anyone who has finished the series, though, so I’m guessing that however we get there, the destination won’t suck. (Remember: only cake-sniffers spoil people for things they haven’t read yet!)

[*] Specifically, it seems (ROT13’ed for spoilers): gurve sngure vf hadhrfgvbanoyl qrnq; gurve zbgure znl or yrzbal favpxrg’f fvfgre, naq vs fb, fur’f nyvir; naq gel nf gurl jvyy, gurl jba’g svaq gur fhtne objy.

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Robb, J.D.: (23) Born in Death

J.D. Robb’s Born in Death is the book where poor Mavis finally gets to give birth. (She’s been pregnant since book 15, Purity, and this is #23. This is what happens when books take at most a month each.) I got it out of the library a couple of weeks ago.

The problem with writing in the mystery genre is that, paradoxically, the genre itself sometimes removes suspense. When one of Mavis’s friends disappears, it’s pretty clear that since we’re already halfway through the book, the disappearance must be related to the ongoing mystery, and given the existing setup, it’s not hard to guess how. I found the book a little flat as a result.

As for the plot itself, I have one quibble and one internal debate. The quibble: I would have preferred just a little more attention to a key underlying assumption of the underlying conspiracy. The debate: whether the stuff that made it traumatic for Eve was gratuitous.

However, Mavis finally has her baby, and it’s all heartwarming and stuff, which is what I was reading the book for anyway, so I can’t complain too much.

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Christie, Agatha: ABC Murders, The (radio play)

In The ABC Murders, Hercule Poirot gets a taunting letter warning him to look out for Andover on a certain date, signed “ABC.” Of course, someone is murdered on that date, and an ABC Railway Guide is found near the body. More murders follow, and Poirot must track down an apparent psychopath.

As usual, I listened to this as a radio play, so I’m not sure whether the presentation of a particular form of misdirection originated in the book or in the adaptation. The misdirection worked almost too well: I said to myself, “ugh, is this the kind of story we’re getting?” and stopped giving it my full attention. It seemed to end satisfyingly, however, and in a way consistent with the characters. I should remember that my skepticism apparently is reduced when I’m tired.

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Wrede, Patricia C., and Caroline Stevermer: (03) The Mislaid Magician

The Mislaid Magician is the third book in Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer’s series of epistolary novels set in an alternate Regency with magic. However, that description isn’t quite accurate any more, as the subtitle “Ten Years After” indicates:

6 March 1828
Tangleford Hall, Kent

My dear Thomas,

 . . . Our new prime minister found some letters that had been sitting unopened in the “Secret” packet since October, if you please! Some Prussian railway surveyor has gone missing in the north. It ought to have been looked into at once, but Lord Wellington has had his hands full with the royal family since he became PM last month. King George has never seen eye to eye with his brothers on political matters, and he and the Duke of Cumberland have had another row about the succession. Something about the Duchess of Kent and her daughter, I believe. It was all Old Hookey could do to keep it out of the papers.

But that business has blown over, for the time being at least, and now Cecelia and I are off to Leeds to see what we can find out. . . .

Meanwhile, if you have forward me any information on the theoretical interactions between magic and railway lines or steam engines, I’d appreciate it.

Yours,
James

8 March 1828
Skeynes

Dear James,

Make up your mind. Railway lines or steam engines? The current state of opinion on theoretical interactions varies considerably with whom you ask. As usual. . . .

If you care to hear my theory, although God knows you have seldom paid the slightest attention before, I think the steam engine is certain to lend itself to some exceedingly useful interactions. Nothing so thoroughly comprised of the elements of earth, water, air, and fire could fail to do so.

I am of two minds on the questions of railway lines. On the face of it, the lines should great promise as a way to link two (or even more!) points with a durable physical connection. . . . Yet, because railway tracks are made of many bits of metal placed end to end, considered as a staging point for a spell, it would be like running the Derby in installments. The enterprise might eventually work, but one would need a dashed good reason to take the trouble.

I plan to be in town before you . . . . The Bull and Mouth is far from elegant, but I suspect your children will love the bustle of the place. For once they will behold chaos they did not create themselves. I’ll meet you there.

Sincerely,
Thomas

Yes, we’re back to a letter-only format, adding Thomas and James’s correspondence to Kate and Cecy’s, and we’re out of the Regency and fully into the Industrial Revolution. While they investigate, Cecy and James leave their children with Kate and Thomas; the book is not overburdened with children, however, as only three of the collective six are particularly visible. (I was, in fact, able to keep James and Thomas straight now that they’re apart. Oddly, I could keep all their children straight too, which I did not expect.) Thomas and James’s letters are a nice addition to the narrative, and of course it’s always good to see Kate and Cecy again.

Separating the characters gives the added bonus of generating more than enough plot to go around, as stuff must happen at both ends of the correspondence to keep the book going. (Though at one point, things are so quiet at Kate’s home that she reports the solution to a mystery without even noticing that she’s done so. I’ll forgive her lapse of analytic reasoning under the circumstances, and, more importantly, forgive the authors for getting that bit of information in through her lapse.) All in all, then, this was as enjoyable as I’d hoped. My only quibble turns out to be with the previous (second) book, not this one: there, we were told in passing that Aunt Charlotte had apparently become a magician in the short time since the first book. It was such a small reference that I missed it, and so initially thought this book had mixed up the aunts when Aunt Charlotte’s magicial ability suddenly became relevant. Not the case, though, and don’t fear, there’s not very much of Aunt Charlotte in this book either.

If you liked the first one, you’ll like this one. If this one sounds interesting, you could start here perfectly well, but you might as well read the first one too. I don’t know if the authors contemplate any more: the ending is a satisfying conclusion but creates the possibility of further book-worthy happenings. I would certainly welcome reading about the characters for as long as the authors want to write about them.

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Minekura, Kazuya: Saiyuki, vols. 1-9

A long-delayed post: all nine volumes of Kazuya Minekura’s Saiyuki. (I booklogged volume 1 nearly 18 months ago). The delay is because I’d been doing LiveJournal posts on the art (spoilers inevitable), wanted to finish those before writing up the story as a whole, and never got around to volume 9 until just now. I haven’t re-read the other eight volumes for this post, but I’m mostly going to speak in generalities anyway to avoid spoilers.

First, a couple of notes on structure. Saiyuki is a nine-volume action/fantasy manga that sends four characters off on a roadtrip to save the world (see the volume 1 post for more details). The ninth volume wraps up a couple of arcs, but the story continues in Saiyuki Reload, which is still in progress; Tokyopop has currently released five volumes. There is also a prequel, Saiyuki Gaiden, which is set 500 years earlier when the major characters were in Heaven together; it’s almost finished and Tokyopop has licensed but not yet released it. I think you can pretty well get the general idea of Gaiden from the references in Saiyuki, but it probably helps to know that the backstory does exist.

[Spoil me for Reload and die. Since Gaiden hasn’t been released yet in English, spoiler-protect any comments referring to it with ROT13.]

(Oh, and there is an anime; apparently it is awful.)

The nine volumes of Saiyuki, as was helpfully pointed out in this LiveJournal post full of spoilers, have their own internal structure. The initial volumes superficially introduce the four main characters and then move beyond that to the backstory of three of the four (the fourth, Goku, gets his backstory in Gaiden, basically). The story then moves to the two strongest relationships within the four, Hakkai & Gojyo and Sanzo & Goku, and then to the weaker but still important relationships between the other pairs. (One of the things that I like about the series is that they each have distinct interactions and relationships with all the others.) Finally, the story considers the four collectively.

This summary suggests three things that I want to highlight about the series. First, it is ultimately character-centered: pretty much everything in it eventually comes back to the characters. Second, the pasts of the characters are vitally important; they didn’t just appear fully-formed one day when they were needed to save the world. Third, the series gets better as it goes along. I hate recommendations of the form “well, you really need to read eight gazillion volumes before it really gets good, but it’s worth it!”, but, well, the first volume in particular is not very strong. We get hints about the depths of the characters, but not more than that until the end of volume 2. Since the plots tend to be very character-centered, they aren’t that strong in the early volumes either.

(Also, the art in the early volumes isn’t exactly bad, but it also gets noticeably better in the later volumes: the lines are cleaner and the characters’ jaws get much less pointy. As I said in the original post, however, the page layouts are quite easy to follow—Minekura is very good at composing panels and pages so that the text and shapes naturally drawn the reader’s eye in the direction it ought to go. Since manga is read right-to-left, and since Minekura’s layouts are rarely rectangular boxes in succession, this is not insignificant.)

Right. I think those are all the caveats: on to the gushing.

Since, as I said, this is an ultimately character-centered story, the characters are naturally the main attraction for me. Like a lot of people, I started by liking one character best, but very shortly I found myself liking them all equally, and then loving them all. The characterizations are angst balanced by humor, threaded through with complex relationships, and anchored by really distinct voices (Tokyopop’s translation is apparently quite good), all wrapped around running themes of independence/dependence, attachment/detachment, Buddhism, and moving forward (there’s a reason this is a road trip). The series doesn’t have the deliberate and thorough worldbuilding of Fullmetal Alchemist—indeed, the world is deliberately anachronistic and the epic nature of the quest is frequently undercut—but it shares the virtue of carrying out sustained examination of themes through putting the characters in difficult positions.

The plots get better as the series goes along, partly because they are so strongly character-centered, and partly because they start inverting and subverting prior understandings in fun and interesting ways. I haven’t been panting after reading Reload because I knew it wasn’t complete yet, but I’m very much looking forward to seeing where Minekura takes things after the happenings of volume 9.

Anyway. As suggested by the fact that I wrote several posts analyzing just the art of the series, I really enjoyed this, both in itself and as an introduction to manga. If it sounds at all interesting, give it a browse.

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