BOOK REVIEW: The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett

written by David Steffen

The Shepherd’s Crown is the fifth installment in the Tiffany Aching subseries set on Discworld, written by Terry Pratchett, published on September 1, 2015. Pratchett passed away earlier this year and this is his final published work. On a personal note, it is a somber thought to think that I have read every Discworld story there ever will be.

Tiffany Aching is a full witch these days, the only witch of her homeland known as the Chalk, a land of sheep and plains, though she has a strong bond with the witches of Lancre who trained her in witchery. She spends her days taking care of the business of witching, which is mostly a matter of taking care of practical everyday things–bringing food to the homebound elderly, helping people with their ailments, being a sort of broom-flying country doctor.

The elves across the world boundary in Fairyland are stirring, and starting to verge into our world again. As before they are terrific, terrible, glamorous, horrible creatures who take delight in torture and pain and who wrap themselves in beautiful glamours that make you want to love them. They used to cross into our world frequently, but after past incursions (including the book Lords and Ladies as well as the first Tiffany Aching’s entry into Fairyland in the The Wee Free Men if you want to get a sense of the elves before reading this one) they have stayed on their own side of the boundary for quite some time. Something has changed, and to save the world from an invasion of elves, Tiffany Aching and the other witches must find a way to fight them off and send them back to Fairyland.

The Shepherd’s Crown is the final Discworld book, the final published book written by Terry Pratchett. This alone makes it a book that will always be memorable. Even more so because for a good stretch of the book it feels like Pratchett is eulogizing himself–which is a plausible idea since he knew his death was coming long before it came. This book was hard to read, knowing it would be the last new Discworld I would ever read, and even more so because of that feel that he was aware of that fact as he wrote it. The experience was very bittersweet, because I have come to feel like I know Pratchett after reading so many of his books and came to understand some extent of his views based on the compassionate way he wrote his characters. When Pratchett died, I cried. I hadn’t expected to cry, but I hadn’t realized until I heard that news just how much his books had meant to me, both just as simple entertainment that any good book can provide, but also in his attitudes toward certain subjects helping to shape my worldview. Especially on the topic of death. Death himself, as the scythe-toting robed skeleton figure, is a recurring character in the Discworld series, even starring in a number of his own books as the protagonist. Even in the books where he might not be said to play a major role, Death shows up when characters die, and usually has at least a small bit of dialog with the newly-departed soul before he helps it cross over to the next life. I’ve found this concept to be incredibly comforting to imagine that when someone dies, there will be someone there who means them no malice, just a person who is doing their job in the wider scheme of things, and that the person needn’t feel lost or alone. The act of dying can be scary, but the thought of someone being there as a guide is powerful, and I’ve grown to love Discworld’s Death as though he were a friend.

Anyway, all that to say, this book tugged at my hearstrings in a powerful way. I imagine it will for any Discworld fans. Big things happens, there are heroes, there are villains, and there are the terrible terrific elves. I quite like Tiffany as a character, very relatable practical compassionate person. Even if it weren’t Pratchett’s last book, it would still have been a very memorable one in the Discworld series. The book felt rather unfinished, the ending felt rather rushed, but judging by the afterword, it was probably not finished to Pratchett’s satisfaction–he would write a book and then go back and adjust things several times before it had to go to the publisher, and this one hadn’t finished that full set of revisions. It is a complete story, no doubt about it, it’s not incomplete, but the ending just felt a little off-pace with the rest of it.

In the afterword, there is also mention of the other Discworld books that Pratchett had incompletely written that we will never get to read, and it even gives one-sentence sum-ups of those stories. And that brought on the sad again.

Anime Catch-Up Review: Tokyo Ghoul

written by Laurie Tom

tokyo ghoul

Tokyo Ghoul is a messy bag that almost made me quit watching twice, but the thing is, when it’s good, it’s powerful stuff. It’s unfortunate that the audience has to deal with so many ups and down that it gives the impression that the showrunners really had no idea what they were doing when they adapted Sui Ishida’s manga.

The premise is that there are monsters called ghouls who look like ordinary humans until they attack, during which they can project additional weaponlike appendages from their body and the whites of their eyes turn black. Their presence is known to the world and there is a government agency that monitors their behavior to keep them in check since they prey on humans for food.

College freshmen Ken Kaneki is attacked by a ghoul named Rize when an “accident” at a construction site crushes them both. Though severely wounded, Kaneki is not dead, and the surgeon at the hospital transplants Rize’s internal organs into him to keep him alive. Not long after that he discovers he can no longer eat human food without throwing up, and to his horror, the only thing that smells tasty to him is recently killed human.

Tokyo Ghoul starts dark and ends dark, but it doesn’t consistently stay that way. After his rough introduction to ghoul life, Kaneki settles into his new reality in a surprisingly comfortable fashion, considering that he’s now a human-eating monster.

Part of this is due to the fact that Kaneki is quickly adopted by Anteiku, the advisory body of ghouls that maintains harmony between their fellows in the 20th Ward of Tokyo. In addition to mediating in-fighting over hunting territory, Anteiku also provides for ghouls who are unable to hunt for themselves, generally by finding the bodies of humans who’ve committed suicide. This allows Kaneki to eat without the moral burden of having killed someone.

The other part is that ghouls are quickly portrayed as not that much different from humans. Some will only use their powers to protect their families and others will abuse them for personal gain. Ghouls marry, have children, and depending on the individual, may choose to do their best to participate in human society. What makes them different is that they must eat humans to survive.

The first half of the series focuses on the ghouls around Kaneki and what their day to day lives are like. Some of those episodes are good, like the storyline with the government investigators, when Kaneki realizes that he’s the only one who can see both ghouls and humans as people, but other episodes never rise above being a general action show, and just about any scene with Shu Tsukiyama is nauseating. That character alone almost made me stop watching. I’ll take buckets of gore over watching Tsukiyama getting off on huffing Kaneki’s blood one more time.

Kaneki starts out a timid and passive protagonist, refusing to kill and can barely be convinced to fight, but while it’s easy to see both sides of the human/ghoul conflict through him, he’s actually not that interesting because other people tend to drive the events around him, leaving him a passenger in his own life.

That is, until the mid-series finale, which is probably one of the darkest episodes of any anime that I’ve managed to stomach.

It’s not that it’s overly gory, but it’s emotionally visceral. Natsuki Hanae renders an riveting performance as Kaneki that takes the audience along with all the agony he’s experiencing, and combined with what we can hear but can’t see, the episode is intense enough that it can be uncomfortable to watch. It is probably the best episode in the series and very well done, but at the same time I don’t think I want to watch it again.

Post-trauma Kaneki is very difficult to reconnect with, which is the reason I almost dropped the show again, but after a few more episodes, I realized he was finally the protagonist that I had wanted from the beginning. It just took three quarters of the series to get there.

The second half brings the conflict between humans and ghouls to a climax, and the narrative does a good job of portraying both sides as neither good nor evil as it ramps up to the finale. A minor character might be just another enemy to the other side, but the audience goes in knowing that everyone matters to someone else.

The ending, while it doesn’t wrap up all loose ends, is thematically powerful enough that I can almost forgive everything else that slipped along the way, but there’s no getting away from the fact Tokyo Ghoul is stuffed with missed opportunities, unanswered questions, and odd pacing issues.

As far as the gore goes, Tokyo Ghoul censors all the worst bits. Partially eaten bodies are always just out of sight. There is definitely blood, sometimes buckets of it, but the worst bits of on camera violence are the ghoul against ghoul combat scenes, who due to their regenerative powers, can afford to be run through. Even the torture scenes in the mid-series finale don’t actually show what’s happening.

Because of the subject matter and the uneven presentation I find Tokyo Ghoul difficult to recommend. It’s not consistently dark, particularly in the first half, so I’m not sure horror fans would make it to the end without getting bored, and because of the very premise of the story I can’t recommend it to anyone with a sensitive stomach.

When Tokyo Ghoul is at its best it’s really good, but there’s a lot of slush in the middle and mileage may vary depending on the viewer’s acceptance of less horror-oriented fare in what is essentially an action horror series.

Number of Episodes: 24

Pluses: Interesting take on the ghoul monster, government ghoul hunters are pretty effective antagonists despite not having special powers, neither humans nor ghouls are uniformly bad people

Minuses: Main character Kaneki feels like he’s just along for the ride for much of the show, storytelling is really uneven, fate of many characters left unresolved

Tokyo Ghoul is currently streaming at Hulu and Funimation and is available both subtitled and dubbed (dubbed at Funimation only, only partially complete at this time). Funimation has licensed this for eventual retail distribution in the US.

laurietom
Laurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published in Galaxy’s Edge, Strange Horizons, and Crossed Genres.

Anime Review: Gunslinger Stratos

written by Laurie Tom

Gunslinger Stratos is the rare show I decided to watch despite having low expectations of it. It’s based off an arcade game only released in Japan, and because of being an arcade game, I was not expecting much of a plot. Mostly, I wanted to watch it because it had an interesting concept involving parallel timelines and the potential for really cool anti-gravity gunslinging combat scenes.

Unfortunately, Gunslinger Stratos largely fails to exploit either of those, which is a pity because it could have been a really cool action show.

Tohru Kazasumi is a typical unassuming “nice guy” anime protagonist in high school with a girl, Kyouka Katagiri, who likes him, but they aren’t dating (yet). They’re just friends.

In the 22nd century they live in, the world is tightly controlled by the government and due to a war some decades ago, Japan no longer exists, but outwardly the place they live in looks fairly advanced and on the surface, even utopian, with lots of greenery among all the beautiful white buildings.

Contrast that to a different timeline, where the people in the 22nd century live among rubble, scraping to survive, and the world has never recovered. In this world, Tohru Kazasumi has never gone to school, and he and Kyouka Katagiri have formed a family consisting of them and other orphaned children who work together to make sure there is enough food and clothing to make it to another day.

The two timelines clash when the mysterious Timekeepers intervene and ask both timelines to play a deadly game against one another in order to stop a phenomenon that is causing people around the world to mysteriously disintegrate into sand. Winning teams receive rewards that vastly improve their technology, making them stronger for the next round.

For some reason, this involves sending both teams back in time to a phantom 21st century where they battle one another using energy weapons provided by the Timekeepers and the combatants fly around in with anti-gravity assists, which have the potentially to be visually amazing (as they are in the Tohru vs. Tohru fight in the opening credits). Unfortunately the show itself never reaches that level of excellence.

The story works best when the characters consider what it’s like facing themselves (is it murder when they killed their counterpart?) and when we, the audience, see how the characters have turned out differently due to their environments.

But there’s not nearly enough of that. Most of the story is focused from the point of view of the timeline that recovered from the war, so it’s harder to get a feel for what it’s like for the team living in Frontier S (the harsher timeline), barring a single episode when main timeline Tohru crosses over. It’s too bad because that’s a missed opportunity to build more sympathy for the other side.

Also, quite frankly Frontier S Tohru is more interesting than main Tohru because he’s more willing to do whatever it takes to get a job done due to the losses he’s experienced. Main Tohru goes through a lot more questioning and angst that has been done before in other shows, but even when he loses teammates it doesn’t feel as strong as it does for Frontier S Tohru, because we know the latter has changed because of it.

Related to losses, there are a surprising number of characters who bite the big one over the course of the show, but most of them fail to matter for the audience. In some cases we might have seen them for all of five minutes before they die, but clearly they are someone due to their unique character designs.

I suspect this is a case of trying to shoehorn in all the playable characters from the arcade game, but someone who has never played the game would probably need a wiki to identify them all.

Even the lack of character development would have been all right if the imaginative fight scenes had been there, but after the early establishing episodes, the story attempts to move into a deeper plot and spends too much time on the true purpose of the Timekeepers and a strange detour with a secondary villain that didn’t need to happen.

There’s a lot of talk about changing the future while a particular future is trying to enforce, if not accelerate its existence, but the dialogue drowns it in a lot of pseudo-tech talk. By the end of it, I was pretty sure that if the Timekeepers had never intervened, they would have gotten the best outcome for their cause, but then we would not have had a reason for the story to happen in the first place.

Gunslinger Stratos has some nice ideas, but in the end I can’t really recommend it.

Number of Episodes: 12

Pluses: interesting concept, surprisingly sweet epilogue sequence, memorable J-pop themes for opening and ending credits

Minuses: shallow character development, nonsensical storyline, doesn’t live up to potential

Gunslinger Stratos is currently streaming at Crunchyroll and is available subtitled.

BOOK REVIEW: Chasing the Phoenix by Michael Swanwick

written by David Steffen

Chasing the Phoenix is a science fiction novel by Michael Swanwick, published by Tor Books earlier this month.

The book stars Swanwick’s recurring characters, the con men Darger and Surplus. As the story begins, Surplus is journeying through a future China with the Darger’s corpse carried on the back of a yak, seeking the services of the legendary healer the Infallible Physician to raise Darger from the dead. Once that’s happened (it happens early enough in the book that I don’t think that counts as a spoiler). Considering greed a virtue, the con men are always looking for ways to profit from their circumstances. Surplus, who is an anthropomorphic dog, has used his appearance to his advantage by pretending to be an immortal, and with Surplus rising from the dead they have soon gained the attention of powerful people involved in a brewing civil war. Even among one side of the war, there are always those jockeying for power and willing to kill to get their way, and soon the two con men are working all sides just to stay alive.

Since Darger and Surplus are recurring characters, of both novels and short stories, a valid question would be: Can this book be read out of order with the rest? Yes, you can. This was my first Darger and Surplus story, though I was familiar with the characters from short nonfiction segments that had featured on the StarShipSofa podcast on the subject of the art of confidence tricks. My only prior knowledge was that they were con men, and that’s obvious very early in this novel. I had no trouble picking it up. I expect that there are probably some references and in-jokes about previous books, but nothing that interfered with my understanding.

I imagine that some people enjoy going on adventures with these con men characters–presumably they are recurring characters because books about them sell. Honestly, I just found them irritating. Not because of their professions, necessarily–their ethics are certainly different than mine, but I have related to such characters before. I just found them… I don’t know what word I’m looking for… smarmy, perhaps? I didn’t really care what happened to them, and if the book had ended with them both dying I wouldn’t have really minded. I don’t know if this book is representative of them or not, but I probably won’t try to read any more Darger or Surplus stories unless I hear this one wasn’t representative.

I did read through the whole book. I was curious how it would turn out. There were some interesting challenges that the pair faced, varying from war strategies, to battling against future technology, to interpersonal challenges that they were coerced to help resolve. The challenges and the stakes rise throughout the book as they con men play people off of each other and the war goes on. A few times in the book the characters they seem to be in an impossible situation and those were the parts I was most interested in, to see how these two could turn things around… but more often than I thought was reasonable things would just take a turn of circumstance and save them at the last moment. In the end there turned out to be some explanation for this, but I felt like it was a cheat and took the enjoyment out of the part that I really wanted to see–these two actually facing a real challenge. Apart from those apparently unsolvable challenges, they breeze through the rest of the book, never stymied by anything. Although the stakes go up and up, they just cut through the challenges like butter.

So, this book is clearly not for me. I didn’t like the protagonists and I thought the book was too easy for them. I imagine that fans of Darger and Surplus stories might like it, though I don’t know if this story is representative. Swanwick is a good writer, and I’ll happily pick up other works by him that star different characters.

BOOK REVIEW (Conclusion): The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (Translated by Ken Liu)

written by David Steffen

Less than a month ago, just before the Hugo Award voting deadline, I gave a preliminary review of the first 100 pages or so of the Hugo-nominated novel The Three Body Problem. I gave the partial review then to get it published before the Hugo deadline, but since then I’ve finished reading. This review will be pretty brief because I don’t want to spoil everything, and the truth about what exactly explains the weirdness that’s happened so far in the book takes a while to unroll.

As mentioned in the partial review, I thought the beginning was much too slow, going into a lot of background detail on a character who was important to the story but didn’t end up being the main point of view character.

I continued to especially enjoy the in-book game titled The Three Body Problem in it’s weird representation of a world with chaotic seasons, and generally found those sections more compelling than the other parts of the book. The book in general is more distantly told than I prefer, often with the POV character bringing up a topic that he said he’d been planning with no prior note about it. I’m not sure how much of that is a language or cultural difference in the expectations of storytelling but I was interested enough to keep reading.

I guess I hadn’t paid enough attention and hadn’t realized that this was book one of three until it ended. Some things are resolved by the end of the book, but I wouldn’t call it a real complete story arc on its own–its very much a Part One, not a standalone story. Without getting into spoilery specifics, I thought the tension kind of ramped down near the end, so I’m not really sure how that’s going to carry over into the next book.

I enjoyed reading the book, finding out what was behind the weird occurrences, and finding out more about the in-book game. But with the generally slow and uneven pacing the ramp-down in tension near the end I’m not sure I’m into it enough to want to keep reading books two and three.

Anime Review: Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works

written by Laurie Tom

fate stay/night: ubw Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works is based on the Unlimited Blade Works storyline from the adult-rated Fate/stay night visual novel. Unlike in the US, it’s not unheard of for erotic games to be repackaged for a broader audience with the explicit scenes removed and for an anime to use the cleaned up version of the storyline.

In the world of the Fate series, there is a tournament held every few decades where seven Masters summon seven Servants and battle to obtain the Holy Grail, which will grant the winners a wish. The Masters are all supposed to be powerful wizards in the present day world, and the Servants are legendary heroes from across time. Each Master and Servant pair work as a team towards their goal and each of them will get their own wish.

The battles don’t need to be to the death, but the only way to eliminate a Master from the tournament without killing them is to kill their Servant, but because the Servant is typically the more powerful of the two, killing the Master is considered easier.

The story revolves around Shirou Emiya, a teenager with some weak magus blood in him that by rights shouldn’t be enough for him to summon or sustain a Servant, but for reasons unknown he manages to summon a Saber-class Servant (considered the strongest one) completely on accident.

When his schoolmate Rin Tohsaka (also a magus) brings up him to speed on the purpose of the tournament, he decides to participate, because really, he doesn’t have much choice. Outsiders are supposed to be killed for witnessing any battles.

I suppose this is how magic stays hidden from the general population, though the series never comes out and says it. Considering the widespread destruction some of the battles cause I’m rather surprised magic has managed to stay hidden at all.

Though well-intentioned, Shirou tends to come off as a bit of a chauvinistic moron. Saber is clearly capable of fighting. The fact she is a Servant means that she was one of the greatest warriors of myth and legend, but he spends a lot of time trying to protect her and Rin (who is a much more powerful magus than he is), even when it doesn’t make sense and results in him just getting the way.

Shirou is the kind of guy who will throw his life away because he thinks it’s important to have made the gesture. It’s sort of a headbanger how idealistic he is, but instead of being endearing it just makes him look stupid.

But even if Shirou’s characterization is its weakest component, and the storyline itself sometimes stretches the bounds of believability, Unlimited Blade Works shines when it comes to its battle scenes, which are gorgeous. Clearly all the attention went to giving the audience a spectacle to remember and the final battle in the last episode does not disappoint.

I admit I don’t quite understand why the Fate series is so popular considering that Fate/stay night is presumably the one that inspired them all, since it’s not all that strong and many times characters do not get a full story arc. I recognize that’s probably a holdover from the game, where some characters get more to do in one storyline than another because of player made decisions, but it doesn’t feel like even the main plot of UBW entirely comes together.

For instance, it’s not until episode 22 (of 24) that the real villain’s name is spoken for the first time. It’s not that it was supposed to be a secret, we’ve seen him lurking around since the first half of the show, but when it finally comes out, he’s not even on camera so if I hadn’t been browsing a wiki for more context I might not have even connected the two of them.

The series suffers a little bit from expecting the audience to already be familiar with the franchise, and to some degree that is probably not surprising. The Fate storyline of Fate/stay night was already animated back in 2006 and the prequel Fate/zero was animated in 2011, and Unlimited Blade Works itself had been done as a movie in 2010, but I still feel that as a storyline based on the original game that started it all, Unlimited Blade Works the TV series should have been understandable and self-contained on its own.

The plot does get more engaging overall in the second half though, because Shirou and Rin eventually start working together instead of passive-aggressively trying to keep each other out of the way, and because by then the other Masters have started falling. It’s clear who the frontrunners are for winning the Holy Grail, and it’s not them.

I do have to mention though that Fate/stay night is not kind to its female characters. There are some creepy male gaze scenes when Rin and Saber are captured at different points in the series and though both of them are portrayed early on as competent and fully capable of looking after themselves, their roles are vastly reduced in the final third while Shirou gets the opportunity to come into his own.

Overall I wouldn’t say Unlimited Blade Works is a bad series, but it’s not a particular good one either, and it’s most saved by its animation quality. I like Rin as a protagonist, and would have been much happier if the series had been following her story rather than Shirou’s. She has a much more realistic outlook than he does while still remaining a person with a good heart.

Number of Episodes: 25

Pluses: gorgeously animated fight scenes, interesting world building

Minuses: treatment of female characters in the second half, plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, most characters aren’t well fleshed out

Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works is currently streaming at Crunchyroll and Hulu and is available subtitled. Aniplex has licensed this for eventual retail distribution in the US.

Summer 2015 Anime First Impressions

written by Laurie Tom

Unlike summer on American TV, new anime debuts year round with every season, and this summer in particular looks like fun times, with multiple shows I’m interested in following. It’s like winter 2015 all over again, where there’s more than I can keep up with, but this time there are no returning series vying for my attention and all of the interesting things are new.

It’s going to be hard to limit my viewing pool to my preferred cap of three shows! There is one exception though, due to a very special bonus show I’m including at the bottom.

Aoharu x Machinegun

aoharu x machinegun

Why I Watched It: Cross-dressing girl ends up entering a survival game where it’s assumed that she’s male. I like the character designs and I’m fond of genderblender characters in anime. Hotaru’s same design could be a male character voiced by the same actress in a different anime and actually be male due to the fact teenage boys are frequently voiced by women, so it’s extremely easy to buy into her ability pass.

What I Thought: Hotaru is a hot-blooded class president who for reasons unknown, prefers dresses in the male school uniform. Most people who don’t know her assume she’s male. This is even more obvious in Japanese where her word choices indicate a very masculine speaker. She also shouts a lot and is willing to beat up people for social infractions, which makes her pretty fun to watch. It turns out she’s really good at reading people in a fight, so when a misunderstanding leads to her wrecking a host club she gets press-ganged onto a survival game team to pay off the debt.

Verdict: I’d like to watch, but this season is pretty crowded with good stuff. Hotaru’s short fuse is a bit much, but I like that (so far) she just seems to be a girl who likes to wear the male uniform and there’s no tragic backstory to it, and her personality is not one that girls are frequently allowed to have as a starring protagonist. I’m a bit disappointed though that the survival game appears to be paintball or airsoft as I thought it was going to be a more literal survival.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Charlotte

charlotte

Why I Watched It: The latest series from the writer and character designer behind Angel Beats. Writer Jun Maeda is known for pulling on the heartstrings so there will probably be a lot of light-hearted moments before ultimately delving into a tissue box at the finale.

What I Thought: I usually don’t like jerk protagonists, but Yu is the creative kind. In middle school he discovers that he can possess other people for 5 seconds while his own body falls comatose, and as expected for his age, he decides to use his power to get back at other people and also to cheat his way into an elite high school by temporarily possessing other students who are smarter than him so he can read their answers while taking exams. He might not be book learned, but he’s definitely clever and incredibly manipulative. His shenanigans catch up with him though and he is forcibly transferred to another school that is intended for people with powers like him, where he presumably will turn out to be a better person by the end.

Verdict: I’ll be watching. Given the series’ pedigree and the similarly stunted powers the other students have (being invisible to only one person at a time, superspeed without the ability to slow down equally fast) it looks interesting.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

GATE

gate

Why I Watched It: A generic-looking medieval fantasy world invades modern day Tokyo and Japan needs to fight back. Normally I wouldn’t be watching, but the protagonist is a 33-year-old fanboy who also serves in the Japanese Self Defense Force, and getting a thirty-something protagonist in an anime is pretty rare!

What I Thought: In some ways better than expected. I like that it’s an anime that actually includes the appropriate military response when invaded by another dimension and an appropriate timeline for Japan to send invasion forces of their own in reply. On the other, it looks like the thirty-something fanboy soldier is going to gain a trio of teenage fantasy world inhabitants for traveling companions and they’re all girls. That’s going to look creepy. He’s not the only one sent through the gate though so it looks like we’ll get to see a modern army vs. a medieval fantasy army.

Verdict: Going to pass. Looks like it has the potential to be fun, but there’s more than enough going on this season to keep me occupied.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Monster Musume

monster musume

Why I Watched It: I was not going to watch this one on account of it being a harem show (one male character surrounded by multiple love interests vying for his affection), but I had heard from other women who had watched it that it’s unusual for its kind, and not just because all the girls are monsters.

What I Thought: It’s a raunchy romantic comedy with an unfortunate put-upon human male who, no matter what, must avoid having sex with his hot female lamia housemate who was unexpectedly assigned to him as part of a species exchange program (otherwise she will be deported and he’ll be arrested). She doesn’t take the threat seriously though, and really, really likes him. Monster Musume asks questions like, how does a lady who is half snake use a toilet and does she wear underwear? It was surprisingly funny and I felt a little sorry for protagonist Kimihito because Miia is a constrictor so she kinda likes crushing him in her affectionate coils.

Verdict: It’s funny, but I’ll pass. I’m sure the tone of the story will change when more monster girls are introduced, and there will be the usual lack of relationship progress to keep open the possibility that Kimihito could end up with any of them (next episode promises a centaur and a harpy), but it’s a cut above the usual for it’s kind.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Overlord

overlord

Why I Watched It: This was a moth towards the flame sort of attraction. Though I’m tired of stories where people find themselves living inside of a video game or a video game-like world, this one twists a little differently in that there’s only one person left in the game and he’s not your typical hero-type.

What I Thought: Overlord surprised me with its first scene past the opening credits. Guild leader Momonga’s sadness over the shutdown of his favorite MMO and memories of all the good times shared with his guild are instantly relatable to anyone who has gone through something similar. I also didn’t expect that Momonga would be a working adult in his real life (that we don’t see). Given his weariness towards his day job, it’s not entirely surprising when he wonders if he would want to leave this new reality he’s in, supposing he could even find a way out now that the game controls and any ability to contact the GMs have disappeared. Momonga was previously a max level player and in charge of a massive fortress (built collectively by his guild), and now that all the NPCs have come to life, he has a small army of monsters at his command. They treat him like an overlord, but he’s not really. He just plays one.

Verdict: I’d like to find some time for this, at least long enough to see where it’s going. I particularly like the disconnect between Momonga’s internal thoughts, rendered in a normal voice, and his external ones, which are voiced like you would expect from a skeleton lord. He’s very concerned about staying in character in front of his underlings.

Where to find stream: Funimation and Hulu

Ranpo Kitan: Game of Laplace

ranpo kitan

Why I Watched It: Ranpo Edogawa is one of the classic mystery writers of Japan. 2015 is the 50th anniversary of his death and in honor of that, Ranpo Kitan: Game of Laplace is a series inspired by his body of work, which is still read today.

What I Thought: The first episode is based on one of Edogawa’s stories, “The Human Chair,” that will likely end up as grisly as it sounds. Middle school student Kobayashi is an unusual POV character and I’m not even sure he’s intended to be the main character. He wakes up holding the weapon responsible for his homeroom teacher’s murder with no memory of the crime or even how he got into the classroom where it happened. He’s oddly plucky for someone accused of murder, and readily accepts the challenge set by irritable teen detective Akechi (based on Edogawa’s most famous detective character, who was not a teen in the original) to clear his name and catch the real criminal.

Verdict: I’ll be watching. I love a good mystery, and while Kobayashi doesn’t do anything for me, I’m really interested in Akechi who seems to have some malady that requires him to regularly take painkillers. Akechi might be a detective, with special dispensation from the government to work as one on account of his age, but he’s clearly willing to bend his commitment if it suits him.

Where to find stream: Funimation and Hulu

Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers

rokka braves of the six flowers

Why I Watched It: Pleasing art style and I read that the premise involves a slight problem in that the Goddess of Fate had chosen six heroes to save the world, but seven people have answered the call.

What I Thought: The Mesoamerican setting is unfortunately just superficial window dressing as everyone’s names feel more at home in the Old World, and the costuming of the main characters, judging by the opening credits, follows typical anime conventions in that they dress however they want and Mesoamerica is not what I would have guessed. Adlet Mayer’s interruption of the holy ceremony at the start of the show feels especially egregious in that you have a pale person with a European-style name ruining the local ceremony run by brown people (not to save a life, but because he wants to be the chosen one), and he’s the hero. It probably doesn’t play out with the same racial implications in Japan, but as a PoC in America it’s rather cringy.

Verdict: Going to pass. I don’t like Adlet, or the hare-brained princess who’s taken a shine to him. If the Mesoamerican setting was more involved I’d be inclined to give it another shot, but since they’ve left the city at the end of the episode I think it’s going to look more like a generic fantasy from here on out.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Snow White with the Red Hair

snow white with the red hair

Why I Watched It: Not based on the Snow White of European fairy tales. This Snow White is a healer with unusual red hair, caught between two suitors with nary an evil queen in sight. Clearly looks like a romance/adventure story.

What I Thought: When Prince Raj requests Shirayuki (literally translates into “Snow White”) for his concubine, she doesn’t meekly give in. Shirayuki runs away to the kingdom’s border and through luck meets up with a young man named Zen and his companions. The show plays on the fairy tale a bit with poisoned apples showing up to show Shirayuki that she hasn’t escaped Prince Raj’s notice, and Raj is the one who asks a “mirror” about the fairest in the kingdom, but otherwise the story doesn’t care much about the original. While I like the chemistry between Zen and Shirayuki as romantic leads, I dislike that the climax of the episode still relies on Zen saving Shirayuki from Raj. It’s a good play on Zen’s part that hinges on the reveal he’s also a prince of a neighboring kingdom, but I wish that Shirayuki had been able to get out of the problem herself.

Verdict: I’d like to watch, but I’m probably going to wait due to the other shows this season. As far as fantasy romance goes though, this looks like a good bet.

Where to find stream: Funimation and Hulu

Ushio and Tora

ushio and tora

Why I Watched It: Ushio and Tora was one of the first anime I watched, and was the very first manga I ever bought, even though it was in Japanese. It’s a buddy adventure story between a middle school kid and the demon who wants to kill him (seriously!). Since the first anime was only a direct to video release of some of the early story arcs and the manga went untranslated I was disappointed that I never got to experience the whole thing. That’s changed now!

What I Thought: The opening plays out a little differently from what I remember back in the 90s, but doesn’t deviate from familiar territory with the same antagonistic dynamic that will eventually become a budding friendship between the human Ushio and the demon Tora that makes the series what it is. It covers how Tora got impaled with the Beast Spear and offers a compelling reason for just why Ushio would free a human-eating demon. No effort has been made to update the art style, making it look a little dated, but it has all the story bits in the right places and Ushio’s brash personality is one that we rarely have in protagonists these days.

Verdict: I will be watching! Definitely looking forward to more adventures with these two. The show plans for an eventual 39 episodes broken into two parts, and they’re going to cover the entire manga!

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Bonus!

The following is not an anime, but is based on a popular manga, and thus likely to be of interest to anime viewers. Other people might have heard of this series but just can’t get into watching animation or reading comic books, in which case, this is also for them.

Death Note

death note live action

Why I Watched It: Death Note has been one of the most popular series in recent years, featuring a protagonist who discovers a supernatural notebook that allows him to kill people by writing their name in it. The original manga and popular anime series tells the story of the cat and mouse game between Light Yagami and the people trying to catch him as he tries to change the world for the better by murdering criminals. The new live action series promises an alternate storyline featuring the same characters, most likely because Death Note has already been adapted as a live action movie before, and this offers viewers something new.

What I Thought: I like the new Light, who despite all his murders, is a much kinder, more sensitive person than the original, though it’s harder to buy into his first attempt to kill the detective, L, because of it. Death Note lives or dies by its protagonist, and I was concerned about changing Light from a brilliant high school kid to an average university student, but surprisingly it works well. The original Light (for all his brilliance) was pretty arrogant and willfully made mistakes to rub his rival’s nose in it. New Light makes the same mistakes, but it’s because he’s not two steps ahead of the game. His struggle makes him more relatable, but also makes me wonder just how well he’ll be able to hold off L, who is clearly still a genius. Since the show is live action the shinigami are portrayed through CG, which is kind of janky since it’s not running on a Hollywood budget and so far is the weakest part of the production as the show doesn’t seem to be able to use Ryuk very well.

Verdict: I’ll be watching it. Though circumstances have been rearranged, all the major story beats from the early part of the manga are still there so it’ll be interesting to see new interpretations of them. Light has always wanted to make the world a better place, even in the original, but the original crossed the moral horizon and accepted his role as judge and executioner very quickly. I’m looking forward to a Light who will struggle longer.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Hugo Novel Review (Partial): Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu)

written by David Steffen

I’ve been reading as fast as I can before the Hugo voting deadline on July 31st, but there’s been a bunch of things competing for my time and so I haven’t been able to read as many of the nominees as I like. I am only part way through The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu, published in English by Tor Books, but since the Hugo voting deadline is almost here I wanted to give a partial review–I’ll give a complete review when I have had the time to finish the book.

The story starts in China in 1967, during the Cultural Revolution (a social-political movement started by Mao Zedong whose stated goal was to preserve the “true” Communist ideology from the corrupting influences of capitalist and traditional elements from society. Ye Zhetai is a physics professor at the time, trying to teach his students without coming under the ire of the movement, but in a debate about relativity he is struck dead. His daughter Ye Wenjie follows in his footsteps, becoming a physicist as well, and ends up being recruited for a top-secret research project.

In the present day Wang Mao, a nanomaterials researcher, is called into a meeting between top researchers and military officials, where a list of physicists who has committed suicide is revealed, each for apparently the same reason, leaving long essays as suicide notes. It has something to do with the organization called Frontiers of Science which are considered radical by the rest of the scientific community, to answer the question: “What is the limit of science?” The implication seems to be that something about what they have found in their research is driving them to kill themselves. He starts seeing elements pointing to a countdown in impossible places. A countdown to what? Wang Mao takes a position at the Frontiers of Science, and he sees fellow researcher Shen Yufei playing a game called The Three-Body Problem, which is based in a fictional world where there is no discernable pattern to the seasons and the challenge of the game is to find some pattern so that a civilization can be established in a stretch where the weather is favorable.

And that’s about as far as I’ve gotten in my reading.

The novel is very slow to begin. It seems like half of what I’ve read so far didn’t have much relation to the other half, but I’m still in the first quarter of the novel so at this point I’m assuming it all ties together to justify that slow start. I also figured that there might be some cultural differences about the expectations of story structure so I didn’t want to give up on the story until I’d given it a good long time. I really felt like I got hooked as he was playing the Three Body Problem game, the details of that game and the strange challenges were interesting and caught my attention. The problem of the physicists committing suicide has a bit of a Lovecraft feel to it–forbidden knowledge that drives one mad, though in general it feels more science fiction-y than horror-y.

Anyway, I’m interested in how it turns out, I’m enjoying the read, but without more pages consumed, I can’t say overall whether I like it or not. I’ll let you know soon.

Hugo Novella Review: “Flow” by Arlan Andrews, Sr.

written by David Steffen

“Flow” by Arlan Andrews Sr. was published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Analog published it free to read online as part of the Hugo season.

Rist and Cruthar live with their people in the Tharn’s Lands where the world exists in unending hazy twilight. They make their living by riding icebergs that break off from the greater ice mass to sell them to warmlanders further south. In this story Rist takes his first berg-riding trip to the south, where the sky is blue and the light burns brightly in the sky. They are only meant to take the iceberg as far as the ice broker, but Rist gets the idea to ride the iceberg further south, and so he and the more experienced Cruthar go on to the strange lands of the south for an adventure. People from different lands have lived separately long enough to gain differentiating racial features, including extreme farsightedness so that none can see things clearly up close in favor of far vision. The people of the Tharn’s Lands used carved figurines for writing, and Rist keeps a journal of everything he does, and everything he learns to share with his family (both on a philosophical level and things that might have applications in their merchant business).

For me this story brought a lot of the good old “sense of wonder” of golden age science fiction. Both the Tharn’s Lands and the warmlands are foreign and interesting, and because the character is learning about the warmlands as the story goes on and contrasting it with his home, the story gets a lot of this comparison in. As the story goes on Rist keeps his journal, and I find his insights about the other world interesting, to reinforce his worldview that is very different from mine–even considering the sun and the moon to be foreign concepts because of the haze of the Tharn’s Lands.

The only part that got a little bit annoying was that Rist repeatedly went on about the breasts of the women of the warmlands–it makes sense in some fashion because apparently the Tharn’s Lands women don’t have prominent breasts (another genetic differentiator like the eyesight, though it wasn’t clear why this particular thing would differentiate while leaving the two races sexually compatible) but it felt rather random and distracting in a story that I otherwise thought was quite solid. It also struck me as unimaginative in an otherwise imaginative story that, of course a man who has never seen breasts would find them attractive, when really there could be a variety of reactions that would be more interesting–concern about her health, wondering if they hurt all the time, or being put off by their strangeness since to him they may not seem natural. But, really, that was the only sour note in the whole thing for me, and a pretty minor one at that.

A note at the beginning of “Flow” indicates that the characters were first seen in “Thaw, which was previously published in Analog. I could definitely see the shape of that other story, with some references to past experiences together in this one, but I thought this story stood well enough on its own, and I always felt like I had enough information.

I quite enjoyed this story and I recommend it for those who like a little longer stories with a sense of adventure and exploration of one fictional culture from the perspective of another fictional culture. It has my top vote in the Novella category.

Hugo Novelette Review: “The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale” by Rajnar Vajra

written by David Steffen

“The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale” by Rajnar Vajra, published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, is nominated for the Hugo Award this year in the novelette category. Analog has posted this story for free for the voting period.

The protagonists of this story are a trio of Exoplanetary Explorers: an earthling, a silver Venusian, and a golden Martian. They get in a bar fight, which puts them on thin ice with their commanding officers. Their punishment is to be assigned to a mission doomed to fail–there is a planet on which they wish to establish a colony, where they have learned that the residents are intelligent but have failed to establish true contact with them. Priam, the Martian, raises the stakes by promising that they can establish contact and offering up their jobs if they fail.

I am not the audience for this story. It does evoke a sense of golden age SF, but not in a way that I found appealing. The conversational tone of the narrator only came across as irritating to me, right from the first lines: “A silver Venusian, a golden Martian, and an Earthling walked into a bar. Sounds like a joke, right? Nope. Actually an unfunny blunder the three of us made that Friday evening.” I didn’t care about the fate of any of the characters, and Priam who is portrayed a the smartest of the trio, I found particularly annoying in his thoughtless raising of the stakes for all three of them based on his own arrogant assessment of his own intelligence which, because this harkens back to golden age SF, is of course completely justified in the end because the smart character always wins the day. It was kind of interesting to try to figure out the mystery of the intelligence, but as tends to happen when a story tries to put together a puzzle that is set up as being unsolveable by most people, it didn’t actually succeed in convincing me that it wouldn’t’ve been solved before this point. The stakes of the story were entirely unimportant to me, or rather I was more rooting for them to be kicked out of the Exoplanetary Explorers but also had no doubt whatsoever that smart Priam would save the day because the shape of the story was so familiar.

So, as I said, I’m clearly not the target audience for this tale.