Spring 2016 Anime First Impressions

written by Laurie Tom

There are a lot of high profile anime series for the 2016 spring season, most of them being returning shows, but the new kids on the block have left me less impressed with only one series becoming a must watch. Ushio and Tora is back though, and that’s a good thing.

Of the new shows, there were six that I found worth checking out.

Ace Attorney

ace attorney

Why I Watched It: I’m a big fan of the Ace Attorney game series, which typically stars the defense attorney, Phoenix Wright (Ryuuichi Naruhodou). He bumbles his way through cases buoyed by sheer determination and a belief in his client’s innocence. The series is meant for humor, with many characters’ names being a series of bad puns. Interestingly enough, there are two sets of subtitles, one which uses the American names (which approximated the puns for English audiences), and one with the Japanese.

What I Thought: I opted to watch the subtitles with the Japanese names so they would match the audio and ended up wondering if that was a mistake as the whole episode (which covers the first trial of the game) did not feel quite as funny as I remembered. It may also be that the nature of the medium, game vs. TV series, did not allow for the same translation flexibility. The adaptation is fairly by the book, offering little for someone who has already played the game, but it’s easy to follow and I think people who haven’t played will be fine.

Verdict: I will probably end up watching it out of nostalgia when I have the time since rival prosecutor Edgeworth (Mitsurugi) is one of my favorite characters ever. The first case wasn’t the strongest even in the game since it was intended as a tutorial, and the real make or break point will be in the second when the female lead, Maya (Mayoi), is introduced.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Bungo Stray Dogs

bungo stray dogs

Why I Watched It: Early 20th century mystery and crime authors work together to solve supernatural mysteries. Sure, there have been variations of this over the years on Western shores, but I haven’t seen any focusing on the Japanese authors of the genre (though I’m told Agatha Christie will later make an appearance).

What I Thought: Despite the fact the authors come from a fairly uniform time period and their costumes are definitely period, this is not a period piece (there’s a modern skyline and modern motorcycles). I’m not entirely sure the members of the Armed Detective Agency are even supposed to be the authors in-universe, but they don’t appear to be named after the historical authors since even the newcomer/audience surrogate is named after an author. Despite a good action sequence at the end between main character Dazai and a giant tiger, the rest of the episode was slow and the humor forced. For some viewers, the fact suicide is used for humor will be offensive.

Verdict: I think I’ll pass. I wanted to like this one, and it’s really hard for me to turn down something with a weretiger who will likely use his transformation abilities quite often, but the show can’t seem to find its legs.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Flying Witch

flying witch

Why I Watched It: I wasn’t going, probably because of its generic English title, but I was hearing good things about this day to day, slice of life story about a witch in modern times that I decided to give it a shot.

What I Thought: Flying Witch has a Studio Ghibli-ish charm to it, with a young witch moving out to a rural town to live with a distant cousin. Magic simply exists in this world; some people know about it, some people don’t. While it lets Makoto fly on a broom, neither she nor her mundane cousin Kei see it as anything more unusual than being able to play the piano, which lends the opening episode a quiet bit of magic. Sure Makoto is a witch, but before she’s a witch, she’s a teenage girl who wants to make friends and get along with the family members she hasn’t seen in years.

Verdict: I might watch it. Slice of life isn’t my favorite anime genre, but this lightly supernatural take on it has the potential to be a lot of fun with the magic and the mundane combining (the mandrake at the end of the first episode was particularly entertaining). Fans of similar shows will probably be able to jump right in.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Haven’t You Heard? I’m Sakamoto

haven't you heard?

Why I Watched It: At one point this was voted the manga that most needed an anime adaptation. It’s a gag story about an impossibly cool high school student named Sakamoto who is the envy of all the boys and the idol of all the girls. No matter how his would-be rivals try to foil him, they only make him look cooler. Naturally, I want to see if he is that cool.

What I Thought: This isn’t a show I would normally watch and it didn’t live up to the hype. Though Sakamoto does evade the pranks of his classmates in unusual and unexpected ways, and they are as outlandish as I’ve been led to believe, they rarely hit my sense of humor, so there was more eye rolling than laughing. Even though Sakamoto is voiced by veteran voice actor Hikaru Midorikawa, it’s not enough to save him from being a one note character. Sakamoto is intended to be perfect so there’s really nowhere for his character to do. Either the audience is going to enjoy the gags or they’re not and I’m mostly in the latter.

Verdict: I’ll pass. Might work better for fans of slapstick. I’d still be willing to give it a chance in its original form as a gag manga, but it doesn’t have enough meat as an anime.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

Joker Game

joker game

Why I Watched It: I’m a sucker for period pieces, especially any with intrigue in them, so when I heard of Joker Game, I was very interested, because it could be either very good or very bad (in more ways than one). It’s set during a problematic time period, 1937, and stars a bunch of spies. To give this context, WWII is coming in two years to the rest of the world, Japan has already invaded Manchuria, and the Second Sino-Japanese War has just begun. I’m curious how the show will handle the heroes being on the side of the invaders.

What I Thought: The first shot post-opening credits contains a message over the bottom half of the screen saying that this is a work of fiction, events portrayed are unrelated to real world events, etc. I suppose that is at least some acknowledgement of the precarious ground the show is treading. It helps that the spies of D-Agency are specially trained from recruits outside the imperial army and their goal is to provide information to the government and prevent Japan from negotiating from a weak position with western countries (which had happened before in the face of western imperialism). Our viewpoint character is Lt. Sakuma who is a dyed-in-the-wool representative of the imperial army and completely baffled by D-Agency’s unorthodox tactics, which gets him tangled in a trap because he doesn’t understand the concept of or how to play the Joker Game.

Verdict: I’ll be watching. It still has a chance to take a hard turn south, but what it has happened so far has an excellent sense of tension and political intrigue. I like that Sakuma, who embodies the traditional Japanese military mindset (down to the assurance that sacrificing one’s life in the line of duty is expected and even a logical course of action) is ridiculed by the leader of D-Agency, who more or less tells him that his views are stupid and impractical. The opening episode is the first of a two-parter so I’m not sure yet how Sakuma is going to emerge alive from the game between his superior and the spies of D-Agency, but I’m looking forward to it.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

The Lost Village

lost village

Why I Watched It: It’s a mystery from the mind of Mari Okada, the series composition writer of m3: the dark metal, which I had enjoyed. Thirty people go on a bus tour to a mysterious village that turns out to be deteriorating and uninhabited when they arrive. Naturally they have to find out the truth about it before they can leave.

What I Thought: We don’t get to the village by the end of the first episode, which is probably the biggest disappointment as it robs the episode of a good hook. What we know is that almost everyone on the bus is there to start over so they signed up for the “First Life Do-Over Tour.” Nasaki Village is an urban legend where people disappear as if they were spirited away, but according to the tour guide, what actually happens is that they start new lives cut off from the old, and everyone on the bus is there to do just that. Nearly everyone is using a pseudonym, even if they already know each other.

Verdict: Not sure. I really want to like this one, but the first episode is pretty lackluster and it seems the mystery isn’t going to start until the second episode, since the first ends with the bus poised on the bridge that will finally take them to Nasaki. I’ll probably at least go to the next episode before making a decision.

Where to find stream: Crunchyroll

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 the Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction.

The Best of Cast of Wonders 2015

written by David Steffen

Cast of Wonders is the young adult fiction podcast. They have a broader definition of YA than you’ll typically find on bookshelves, especially in terms of the protagonist’s demographic–who need not be young adults. The podcast continues to be edited by Marguerite Kenner.

This has been a momentous year for Cast of Wonders. They announced their big news at WorldCon in August, and more widely in metacasts in October. Cast of Wonders is changing owners, from Wolfsbane Publishing to the Escape Artists family of podcasts. Escape Artists, before last year, consisted of Pseudopod, Podcastle, and Escape Pod. The non-audio publication Mothership Zeta launched last year two to make a family of five publications instead of three. Along with this change in ownership comes a major increase in pay for writers whose work is published as well, bringing them up to SFWA’s qualifying rate for original fiction. This change all has gone into effect as of the beginning of 2016.

In 2015, two of my own reprinted stories were published in Cast of Wonders.

“This Is Your Problem, Right Here” which starts out as a plumber explains to the owner of a water park how her pool filters have stopped working because almost all of the trolls are dead.
“Marley and Cratchit”, a steampunk secret history prequel to A Christmas Carol, which begins with Bob Cratchit as an alchemist and Jacob Marley as his business partner and financier.

Cast of Wonders published 30 stories in 2015.

The List

1. “The Mothgate” by J.R. Troughton
A mother and daughter hold their ground against monsters from another dimension.

2. “Wine For Witches, Milk for Saints” by Rachael K. Jones
Puppetism is both a curse and a blessing. It can be transferred but never cured. When a child is inflicted with puppetism, any other medical conditions they have are rendered into a puppet analog of the condition that is much easier to fix. A Christmas story set in an Italy where strategic transfers of puppetism are the basis of the medical system.

3. “Setting My Spider Free” by Caroline M. Yoachim
Humans, living in towers that rise above the clouds, have crafted a symbiosis with a race of giant spiders.

4. “Fairy Bones” by Guy Stewart
Fairy remains are discovered in owl pellets by a scientist and her visiting nephew.

5. “Amicae Aeternum” by Ellen Klages
Before leaving on a generation ship, how can you say goodbye to your best friend?

Con Report: SFWA Nebula Conference

written by Shane Halbach

The Nebula awards are one of the two big awards you can win in speculative fiction (the other being the Hugo awards). The Nebulas are put on by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), and include not only the big, fancy, academy award-style award ceremony, but also a conference for professional writers.

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So, the panels weren’t focused so much on writing, per say, (although there were a few) but more on all of the aspects of business around writing. Things like running a Kickstarter, how to teach workshops, questions on intellectual property, and how to be interviewed.

I was a speaker on two panels: “Social Media Puzzle Pieces” and a panel just entitled “Humor” (no pressure there — hey, stare at these people, they are HILARIOUS! Okay go!). I think they actually went really well (though of course nobody would tell me if they were awful, now would they?) I was particularly anxious about Humor, because…what do you say about humor? Who’s to say anybody should listen to me on the matter? Did someone think it was funny to schedule my panel in the absolute last time slot on the absolute last day of the conference, and then expect me to have enough brainpower left to be interesting, much less make people laugh??? But the panel was actually well attended, and I thought we had a very deep, intellectual conversation about humor (if not actually that funny).

In addition to all of the panels, socializing, and networking, you also get a HUGE PILE OF FREE BOOKS, plus the opportunity to buy more. There was even an enormous autographing session (open to the public) featuring over 80 authors signing books.

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(My haul)

The autographing session was certainly one of the highlights of the weekend for me, not only because I got to meet Naomi Novik and have her sign a copy of Uprooted (which would go on to win Best Novel), but also because I knew so many people that I hardly had time to say hello to everybody.

I think that’s ultimately what made this the best con experience I can imagine. Everybody was someone I wanted to meet or talk to. The Nebula Conference was actually very small (well, 300ish people small), and you couldn’t help but trip over everybody you wanted to see. It was the absolute crème de la crème of the writer’s world, and for the first time I actually felt like I was successful enough that these people were my peers.

I could start listing names, but seriously I would just end up listing every person who was at the conference. I met so many online friends that I had never met in person before. I met new awesome people that I didn’t even know existed before the weekend. People were actually excited to meet me, like I was somebody to meet. I chatted with Nebula nominees, SFWA Grandmasters, editors, and bestselling authors like it ain’t no thang. Lunches were had. Friends won awards. I spoke on panels like a boss.

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People make the distinction between introverts and extroverts: introverts “recharge” by spending quiet time alone, and extroverts “recharge” by spending time around people. By that definition, I am a classic extrovert, unlike 99% of all other writers. (“So you’re the one stealing all of our energy!” said my friend Danielle.) After spending all day Friday at the conference, I was charged up enough to arc lightening into anybody who sat close enough on the train home.

(Apparently this drink was called a “Hugo” which seemed both ridiculously appropriate and inappropriate at the same time)

I didn’t actually attend the Nebula awards ceremony; since I was local and since I had already called in all my favors to help watch the kids all weekend, it seemed like a good place to go home and actually help out around the house. My plan was to watch the livestream of the awards but…I may have ended up falling asleep at 8:30.

I wanted to mention my three favorite panels:

“I Remember When”
This panel was basically just the “elder statesmen” (and states-women) of SFWA telling stories about the good old days. These stories were amazing, and talk about name-dropping! These people remember a time when Asimov and Heinlein were members. There was something so adorable about Damon Knight secretly throwing peanuts at Joe Haldeman’s head. I don’t know, if this panel was scheduled for every timeslot of every day, I would just keep going to it.
“What Teens are Looking for in YA Literature”
Real, live teenagers talking about what they want and what they don’t want to see (love triangles) in their books. This panel was so great. These teenager were such teenagers, it was hilarious. They had strong opinions. I’m amazed that they could get up in front of a room of strangers and speak so confidently. Seriously, though, you can’t pay for that kind of insight.
“How to Give an Effective Reading”
Any time I have ever heard someone ask about giving a reading, someone directs that person to Mary Robinette Kowal’s website. So I was very happy to attend this one in person. Mary didn’t just tell you silly tips or something, she actually explained WHY you should do certain things. Like, the science behind it. This was by far the most informative panel I attended over the weekend.

The whole experience was absolutely amazing, start to finish. It was so amazing, that it’s almost like it wasn’t real. I feel like I forged some lasting friendships, learned a lot about the business of writing (a peek behind the curtain, if you will), and most importantly I feel like I gained a ton of confidence.

I fit in. I belonged among the best writers in the field.

It’s a magical feeling. So magical, in fact, that I had trouble adjusting back into the real world on Monday. It was how it must feel to be kicked out of Narnia.

Maybe time to start planning for Pittsburgh next year?

Shane lives in a secret lair deep under Chicago with his wife and three kids, where he writes software by day and practices his maniacal laughter by night. His fiction has appeared in Analog, Escape Pod, The Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction, and elsewhere. He plots (diabolically) at shanehalbach.com or can be found on Twitter @shanehalbach.

DP Fiction #16: “The Weight of Kanzashi” by Joshua Gage

In order to prevent contamination on the space station, all the members of the shuttle crew have to be thoroughly sterilized. This means systematically cleansing themselves and their skin of all potential contaminates, including their hair. All crew members have to be completely shaved and waxed before launch. Despite this being her seventeenth mission, Yukino Kojima is always stunned at how easily her hair falls away beneath the barber’s clippers, gathering around her ankles like strands of silver fog and leaving a gray fuzz to be waxed off.

The launch is scheduled for her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, so she gathers a lock of the shorn hair and places it in a black lacquered inro with a sprinkled gold, silver, and mother-of-pearl design as a present for her husband. He insists that the launch day is auspicious, and will tell anyone who would listen how honored he is that his wife, the renowned solid-state physicist, will soon hold the record for most recorded flights and for being the oldest astronaut in Japanese history.

To fill their personal preference kit, each crew member is allowed to choose up to 650 grams of personal items. Most of the crew choose less than this–a tablet computer and a few pieces of jewelry or other mementos. Some crew members take a good luck charm, a kotsu anzen or Daruma doll. Kenta Fujioka, the pilot, jokes that he could smuggle a carton and a half of cigarettes on board. Nobuyuki Koizumi, commander of the mission, laughs, and asks what Kenta will smoke the other 340 days they are on the space station. Yukino’s tablet is loaded with not just the usual books and music, but also with photos of her and her husband together. This being her seventeenth flight, she has little else that she needs in the way of luck or privacy.

Therefore, she is surprised to find a package wrapped in red tissue paper floating weightlessly up from the nylon bag of her kit after the shuttle docks with the space station when the crew has time to settle in before getting to work. She finds out later that Kenta and Nobuyuki gave up some of their kit weight to smuggle in a present from her husband for their anniversary. With tears in her eyes, Yukino unfolds the paper, and finds a deep mahogany kimono of the lightest, most ethereal silk with a shochikubai design embroidered upon it. Yukino fingers the delicate pattern, the dark viridian swirls of the pine trees, the slender stalks of the bamboo, and the blushing blossoms of the plum. Along with the kimono is a lacquered kushi, a hair comb, along with a matching hana kanzashi in the shape of a deep pink plum blossom.

Yukino presses the silk of the kimono against her lips, feels its cool weft. Holding the kushi to her head, she opens her locker and looks in the small mirror on the back of the door. The comb’s smooth shell and the variegations of its teeth are cold and scratch the stubble that is already growing back on her scalp. She puts it back gently, then holds the hana kanzashi above her temple. The soft fabric of its petals is like wind against her skin, and she weeps, remembering the smell of the ocean, the warmth of her husband’s hand in her own.

Author’s Note: I was inspired to write this story when I learned about Kishotenketsu plots via the StillEatingOranges blog. I was intrigued by the idea of a plot without conflict, and wrote a few stories to attempt that. This was one of them. I love the idea that a story can move forward merely by juxtaposing two things against each other, as opposed to having them in conflict with each other. I think that idea really appeals to my poetry sensibilities.

medium_Joshua_Gage Joshua Gage is an ornery curmudgeon from Cleveland. His first full-length collection, breaths, is available from VanZeno Press. Intrinsic Night, a collaborative project he wrote with J. E. Stanley, was published by Sam’s Dot Publishing. His most recent collection, Inhuman: Haiku from the Zombie Apocalypse, is available on Poet’s Haven Press. He is a graduate of the Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Naropa University. He has a penchant for Pendleton shirts, rye whiskey and any poem strong enough to yank the breath out of his lungs.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

Anime Review: Dance with Devils

written by Laurie Tom

dance with devils

Dance with Devils was a pleasant surprise considering that I almost didn’t watch it, and it ended up being one of my must-watch shows of the season. It’s not a brilliant show, but as a guilty pleasure? Hell yeah!

Ritsuka Tachibana thinks she’s a normal high school student, until her house gets ransacked by vampires looking for a mysterious Grimoire and kidnap her mother in the process. The various members of the student council turn up alternately trying to help or seduce her, as they’re all devils who are similarly after the Grimoire and believe she is key to finding it. And to top it off, her brother comes home from overseas and he’s secretly an exorcist, but that doesn’t mean she can entirely trust him either as there’s a lot he’s not telling her about their family history.

This sort of story has been done before, and in the anime format looks particularly like an adaptation of an otome game (dating game for girls), but surprisingly the game is actually coming later as it’s not out yet even in Japan. What makes Dance with Devils different from others of its kind is that it’s a musical, and things that are not quite so original, or even laughable, when taken as straight dialogue, are perfectly permissible when done in song.

The student council introduction number where each of the four male devils is singing about how badass they are pretty much won me over, and every episode since then finds a way to work in at least one song which showcases the personality of the character singing it. Not all the numbers do it for me, but the sheer absurdity of having singing devils and vampires goes a long way. It’s also hard to hold it against a show that manages to work in a number that features a chorus of demonic Pomeranian dogs.

As for the plot itself, there is one, but it’s fairly bare bones. Most of the series is comprised of Ritsuka trying to find her kidnapped mother and getting baited by vampires (who are definitely the bad guys) and sometimes by devils (who are the “good” guys but not necessarily nice people) while her brother goes full-on overprotective sibling over her.

Each of the devils falls in love with Ritsuka in his own strangely warped way which culminates in all of them fighting for her in the inevitable devils versus vampires showdown over the fate of the Grimoire. It’s clear from the narrative just which devil is the one intended to be her main love interest, though they oddly do not spend that much time together since this is a short series and each major character has at least one episode focusing around them.

Through the show, Ritsuka exhibits questionable judgment (walking down dark alleys with the last people any sane girl should be walking with), but she is ultimately responsible for saving herself in the final confrontation, which was much appreciated even though it felt a little too late.

That said, I did like her decision at the end of the story. It makes the ending a little bittersweet rather than the happily ever after one would expect in a show involving a single girl and a bunch of suitors, but I liked it for taking a more realistic route as Ritsuka is still a teenager and the choice she made feels like the right one.

Surprisingly, there is a stinger at the end of the series, leading to the possibility that there will be a sequel of some kind. If that’s the case, I would happily watch that one as well.

As a series on its own Dance with Devils is solidly B-material, but as a musical, it works so much better that I recommend it to anyone looking to try something new.

Number of Episodes: 12

Pluses: musical, protagonist is ultimately architect of her own destiny, devils versus vampires if that’s your thing

Minuses: characters are fairly unoriginal, protagonist spends a lot of time being pulled around by other people, most of the romantic leads are real jerks

Dance with Devils is currently streaming at Funimation and Hulu and is available both subtitled and dubbed (though dub requires a Funimation subscription). Funimation has licensed this for eventual retail distribution in the US.

The Best of Lightspeed (and Fantasy) Podcast 2015

written by David Steffen

Lightspeed is as good as ever, another big source for my award nominations each year. John Joseph Adams continues to edit the magazine. In 2015 they ran the wildly successful Kickstarter for their Queers Destroy Science Fiction special issue. The QDSF special issue was published in May, and the Queers Destroy Fantasy followup was published in the occasionally-resurrected Fantasy Magazine page in December. The QDSF issue was edited by Seanan McGuire, Steve Berman, Sigrid Ellis, Mark Oshiro, and Wendy N. Wagner. The QDF issue was edited by Christopher Barzak, Liz Gorinsky, and Matthew Cheney. Check out the Destroy site for more information about this series of projects (People of Color Destroy Science Fiction is the 2016 special edition upcoming)

Lightspeed publishes about half of their stories in podcast form. The Lightspeed podcast published 52 stories, and the QDF special issues published 2 more.

The List

1. “Nothing is Pixels Here” by K.M. Szpara
Compelled to seek out the rare glitches in a simulated world, a man and his boyfriend decided to visit the real world for the first time since they were kids.

2. “Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World” by Caroline M. Yoachim
A scientist is visited by an entity that calls itself Achron, that exists outside the ordinary stream of time. The story is split into sections based on fantastical versions of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World, which I enjoyed.

3. “Violation of the TrueNet Security Act by Taiyo Fuji”, translated by Jim Hubbert
The original Internet had been abandoned when the search engines went berserk and wiped everyone’s computers, locked everyone out of the Internet. Now there is only TrueNet, the next generation of the Internet, with human safeguards in place to ensure that automated programs can’t overrun everything again. But why did the search engines lock everyone out in the first place?

4. “Ghosts of Home” by Sam J. Miller
Very cool idea for a story, exploring the idea of household spirits in a time after the housing bubble popped. What happens to all the spirits in those empty foreclosed homes?

5. “Veil of Ignorance” by David Barr Kirtley
Based on the theory that difference in perspectives perpetuates inequality because a person is more willing accept bad things happening to people if they’re certain it will only affect other people, a group of friends takes a drug that makes them as a group unable to be certain which one of them they are, to put down a veil of ignorance to see if they will treat each other better from the simple fact of each person not knowing whether they are the one mistreating or being mistreated. Tricky point of view in this one, but I think it was pulled off nicely.

Honorable Mentions

“Werewolf Loves Mermaid” by Heather Lindsley

“Tea Time” by Rachel Swirsky

“The Lily and the Horn” by Catherynne M. Valente

Anime Review: Young Black Jack

young black jack Let’s start from the beginning with this one. Black Jack was an extremely popular manga that ran from the early 1970s to the early 1980s written and illustrated by legendary manga creator Osamu Tezuka (best known in the US for Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion).

Black Jack is the titular unlicensed surgeon who charges exorbitant amounts of money to perform his job. He gets away with his fees because he’s a medical genius who can save a life when no one else can, but despite his money grubbing image, he’s not as mercenary as he pretends to be.

Young Black Jack (based on the manga written by Yoshiaki Tabata and illustrated by Yuugo Oukuma) would presumably be the story of what turned Kuroo Hazama from a brilliant medical student into the unlicensed rogue surgeon known as Black Jack. Unfortunately, despite having a brilliant era of upheaval to work with by setting the story in the 1960s and having plotlines that run through Vietnam, American civil rights, and the Japanese medical student protests, it mostly manages to fall flat.

Any one of those events in the 1960s could have been enough to twist young Hazama’s ideals from becoming a doctor who helps everyone to the black market surgeon who notoriously only operates on people who can afford his price, but instead he goes through all those events and largely comes out the way he started, robbing him of the kind of growth we expect.

Instead the show feels more like a dry run of his future life, narrated oddly enough, by Akio Ootsuka, who is traditionally the voice of Black Jack (though Yuuchirou Umehara plays the younger Kuroo Hazama in Young Black Jack). Many of the early episodes and surgeries parallel chapters and scenarios from the original Tezuka manga, with the primary difference being several recurring characters and Hazama’s position as an untried medical student.

For instance, in the opening episode, a boy is injured in a train derailment and loses his limbs. When the hospital doesn’t think the limbs can be reattached, Hazama names a large price to the parents and promises to save the child’s limbs.

At first the parents are shocked, because it’s assumed that he’s being greedy, but Hazama immediately arranges for half his fee to be paid to a surgeon at a different clinic so he can use his operating room (the hospital being overwhelmed with other victims), and as promised he reattaches the child’s limbs. After the successful surgery the parents find out that he’s unlicensed because he’s still a medical student, and only pay him half the requested amount since they didn’t like being ripped off by a greedy man who isn’t even a real surgeon. This, of course, means that Hazama did the surgery for free.

Aside from the fact that he’s way too good at his first ever surgery (even for being a genius), it’s a very Black Jack story, but the problem is, we’ve seen it done before and the show doesn’t bring anything new to the table, not even when deliberately making it a period piece. Young Black Jack makes stabs at shaping Hazama through the events of the era, but instead it feels more like a greatest hits tour of the 1960s simply because that’s the time period when he would have been in medical school given when the original manga was published.

I do have to say though that the American civil rights arc did not offend me as much as I feared it would (Japan does not have a good track record of portraying characters of African ancestry), but it still feels like a gross simplification of real world events. Perhaps because the original audience is assumed to be unfamiliar with the civil rights movement, this was necessary to give them a baseline, but it feels like a missed opportunity.

Still, it’s encouraging to see African Americans represented not just there, but among other Americans in other story arcs. They might not be particularly deep characters (none of the Americans are, except for the one who is a surprise cameo of a character from the original Black Jack), but they’re represented, which is very rare in anime and probably owed to Tezuka, who was more conscious of race than most of his contemporaries.

Young Black Jack is a bit of a curiosity because it doesn’t seem entirely willing to be its own beast, and by retreading ground Tezuka himself has covered, it doesn’t feel nearly as fulfilling as going back and reading the originals. Oddly enough, the show also seems unwilling to let Hazama lose a single patient (short of outside interference), which despite being a genius, the older Black Jack does from time to time as a reminder that he’s not a god. He’s just a really good surgeon.

Though we see the road being paved for Hazama’s transformation into Black Jack by the end of the series, it doesn’t feel entirely earned, nor does it feel informed by his experiences. If it wasn’t for the fact this is tied to the original Black Jack property I probably would not have finished.

It’s not that it couldn’t have been good. The manga version of Young Black Jack might well be, considering it’s nine volumes and still running. But there are too many missed opportunities that I can’t recommend it except as a curiosity to existing fans.

Number of Episodes: 12

Pluses: interesting time period, a chance to see a rookie version of one of anime’s most enduring characters

Minuses: time period underutilized, start of Hazama’s transformation into Black Jack does not feel earned, Hazama is oddly more competent than his older self

Young Black Jack is currently streaming at Crunchyroll and is available subtitled. Sentai Filmworks has licensed this for eventual retail distribution in the US.

TV REVIEW: Wayward Pines Season 1

written by David Steffen

Wayward Pines was a 10-episode horror/science fiction miniseries written by M. Night Shyamalan which aired on Fox between May and July 2015, based on the series of novels with the same name written by Blake Crouch. It wasn’t clear when it aired, even when the season ended, whether it was to be continued or not, but at the time this article is posting Wayward Pines Season 2 is less than a week away.

The story begins as U.S. Secret Service agent Ethan Burke travels to Wayward Pines, Idaho to investigate the disappearance of two fellow agents who were last heard from as they approached the mysterious little town. After a car accident en route, Ethan wakes up in the Wayward Pines hospital, unable to contact anyone and unable to leave. In many ways it seems like a stereotypical small town, but there are big warning signs that something is not right in this little town–the strange things that people say, the strict rules the town keeps about not talking about your past and not asking questions. Meanwhile, back at home his wife and son are starting to wonder about him–as a Secret Service agent he can’t ever talk about his work, but after he’s been gone for several days without any news from his office, they set out to find him.

I started watching Wayward Pines with my family, expecting it to be fun and weird but probably not that memorable–it felt in its initial description and promotions to be something very much like Twin Peaks. Don’t get me wrong, I love Twin Peaks, but Twin Peaks is its own weird little thing and I’d be concerned that something that tried to be Twin Peaks would just be a pale comparison.

But it wasn’t a Twin Peaks ripoff in the slightest. Occasionally there was that same weird small town vibe, occasionally feeling like Twin Peaks in some small way, or like a Stephen King sleepy little town horror setting. But these similarities were passing and more to do with a well-captured mood than with deriving too closely from another show. It’s hard to say much more about what the events of the show without getting into major spoiler territory. Even though I started with a skeptical attitude, it got me interested in the first episode, and only increased my interest as the show went on.

One thing that made the show different in a way that might be considered good or bad is that it has major shifts in almost every episode. It’s a show built around mystery, but it’s not stingy with revealing the answers to those mysteries–almost every episode has a major revelation. I’m surprised that they put all of that into a single miniseries instead of expanding it out to a few seasons–some of the shifts would’ve made epic season finales and the shows events could easily have been spread out with plenty of good meat to fill several seasons of TV with gradual reveal of those mysteries rather than stacking them back to back. On the one hand, the show was over so quickly this way, on the other hand it’s fast-paced and never dull and kept me interested to the end.

What makes the best TV shows stand out to me tend to be the writing and the casting, and both are very good in this. Particularly notable in the casting were Matt Dillon, Carla Gugino, Melissa Leo, and Terrence Howard. Matt Dillon as Ethan Burke is not always likeable, and he’s made some bad decisions that still haunt him, but as the protagonist in this tight situation he is competent and compassionate and able to think on his feet. I’ve liked Carla Gugino for a long time, and this is probably my favorite of her roles–as a longtime resident of Wayward Pines she has had to adapt to survive in this strange little town and the conflict inherent in every choice she has to make is well portrayed. Melissa Leo plays Pam, the nurse at the hospital, the first face that Ethan sees upon waking up in Wayward Pines–her performance lends a lot of the initial sense of wrongness about the town in the way that she acts. Terrence Howard plays Sheriff Pope, the law in the town, and is the most clear villain in the beginning of the show, giving a great performance as a quirky but dangerous man.

It wasn’t clear when the miniseries ended whether this would be the end of Wayward Pines. The ending left some potential for that, and there had been some talk of the show being renewed, but some ads for the show referred to the final episode as a series finale rather than a season finale. Since watching Wayward Pines Season 1, I’ve also read the entire trilogy of books that it’s based on. As you might guess, the TV show has the same premise and has some similarities but some differences–I find such things interesting to view side by side as if they were alternate realities. The TV show is basically the trilogy of books tightly compressed, with a lot of subplots left out entirely to fit it into a miniseries. But the way that the miniseries ended is not even slightly compatible with anything in the books, so Wayward Pines season 2 cannot possibly be based on anything familiar. It’s going to have to be something entirely new building off of the familiar setting and characters, so that’s going to be interesting. A reader of the book would be able to spot many but not all of the major plot points in season 1, but readers will have no better idea than anyone what’s going to happen in season 2.

Sneak Peek: The New and Improved Submission Grinder

written by David Steffen

There’s been a lot of work going on behind the scenes at the Submission Grinder site in preparation for a big site upgrade.

ETA: The upgraded version is now on the main site. See the rest of this article for a list of some new features.

What you’re seeing is an overhaul of the site that’s been in the works for quite some time now. The new site includes all the features you’re familiar with, plus some exciting new ones. I’ve written this article to show off some of the new changes. As always, the site is free to use whether you register an account or not. I encourage you to go check out the new site for yourself, or for the first time if you’re a newcomer to the site.

Now that this big batch of features is rolled out, it should be much easier for me to roll out individual features as they are ready to launch. I have a lot of ideas that I think you’re all going to love; it’s just a matter of prioritizing them and finishing them one by one.

First, I want to thank a few people who have contributed to this new development.

First and foremost, thank you to Anthony Sullivan who wrote most of the code. You may remember that Anthony had co-edited Diabolical Plots with me for a number of years, and we collaborated to launch the Submission Grinder site in 2013. He wrote the entire original site in a very short period of time, as well as the majority of the feature updates to that version of the site over the last 3+ years. He also wrote most of the new version of the site, before he changed the focus of his work. Anthony is still around and contributing to the site to help with hosting and mentoring me as I learn more about web development. If you want to find out what he’s doing, you can check out his website, where he’s been working on video game development, at Zombie Possum.
Thank you to Stewart C. Baker and Matt Dovey, for your immense help with the CSS work to make the site much more friendly to mobile devices. I have very little experience with CSS, and it’s incredible to see what someone more knowledgeable than me can do to make the site much more usable. (There is still some work to be done yet to make the site entirely mobile friendly! But the parts that are mobile friendly are because of their excellent work)
Thank you to the beta testers who volunteered to pound out as many dents as possible on this site before it became the new official site, and for meticulously spelling out what you found so that I could track down and resolve those issues.
And thank you to all the users, especially those who donate, spread the word about the Grinder, suggest new features, suggest market updates, or help contribute to the effort in any other way.

Okay, now that all the sappy stuff is out of the way, let’s get to the new features! These are listed in approximate order of how excited I am about the feature, with the most exciting features first. (YMMV so of course it’s possible that you’re more excited about the last ones on the list, so this is far from a scientific sorting method)

Submission Timeline Graph

This is a feature I’ve been so eager to share with more people because it shares an incredible amount of information in a very compact space.

The graph is a bar chart. The X axis is time, covering dates between one year ago and today. The height of the bars is the number of recorded submissions sent to that market on that day. Bars representing submissions that have met different ends are stacked on top of each other–purple bars are pending response, red bars are rejections, green bars are acceptances. If you are logged in and you have a pending response to that market, your submission is shown as a black dot.

For a few examples (not necessarily all up-to-date graphs mind you):

You can see, in the Apex Magazine graph, that they were closed for submissions from about June through December, that they got slammed with submissions when they re-opened. On the far right side you can see what their current slushpile looks like (the purple portion of the graph), and the trail of small purple bars to the left of it are probably stories that have been approved by slushreaders and passed up to the editor and so are waiting a longer period of time outside the main slushpile. (The black dot there is my own submission that was held at the time I took this snapshot)

You can see in the Analog graph that, well, they don’t really stay on top of their slushpile. At the time this snapshot was taken in March no one who submitted more recently than the beginning of October has heard anything, and most people who submitted since the beginning of September has heard anything. Long waits here don’t mean much.

You can see in the Cast of Wonders graph that they closed for submissions from about September through December. You can also see that the volume of submissions has surged upward after they reopened. Not coincidentally, Cast of Wonders increased their payment rates from a flat 5GBP to a professional rate of 6 cents/word when they reopened (after a change in ownership as they were purchased by Escape Artists, Inc) which starts the timer for them to become a SFWA-qualifying market. This has clearly made submitting to Cast of Wonders more appealing to writers. You can also discern the shape of the slushpile and the hold pile pretty clearly here.

You can see in the Clarkesworld graph that they receive a lot of submissions all the time. They haven’t closed within the last year. And they are on top of their slushpile in an incredible fashion (look at how little purple there is!). If you want a quick response (maybe to get one last submission before you can send that story to something else before deadline), this graph tells you that Clarkesworld is a great place to submit. The statistics would’ve told you that before, of course, but the statistics are the summary of a year’s worth of responses, while this graph tells you what their slushpile looks like right now.

In the writers of the future graph, you can guess, without knowing anything else, that they have a quarterly deadline, and that lots of writers submit at the last minute. You can also guess the reason why because they can take a while to respond, and so why not wait until the deadline?

There are probably other things to be gleaned from these graphs, but these are the kinds of things that I’ve been very excited to see in these graphs.

Summarized Recent Activity

SummaryGrinder The Recent Activity list on the front page of the site looks different than you’re used to. You’re used to seeing a list of individual responses grouped first by day and then by alphabetical order of market name. One long-term frustration with that layout was that when an alphabetically privileged market, like Asimov’s, has a big push of rejections, then suddenly the one market would occupy most or all of that list.

Well, no longer! Now a market only has one line per day to summarize all of its rejections. And the page still shows the same number of lines, so you will often see more total information on that list than before these changes. Acceptances still always get their own line, since those are of special interest, and so if you have chosen to show your name for acceptances you will still see it on the front page. If you ever want to know the more detailed list you can always click the “details” icon to click through to that market page’s recent activity which lists all items from the last 30 days without summarizing.

Remember These Settings (Advanced Search)

On the previous version of the site, the Advanced Search page has had some limited memory of your choices, but I’ve never been entirely satisfied with the method of its operation. In the past it would remember the settings of a few of your choices in the exclusion section by using a cookie. But, this would not persist from device to device, it would only affect a select few parameters, and it would remember any change you made even if you didn’t want it to.

So, the new Advanced Search page has a choice to remember these settings. You pick what values you want saved, you check the box for “remember these settings” and then every time you load the page in the future it will have those same values populated. So, for instance, you can choose whether you want to see fee-based markets in the results, and you could set your minimum pay rate to Pro.

Zoomable Graphs

ZoomGraph

One occasional frustration with the market graphs on the previous version of the site was that if there had been a very long response reported the Turnaround Time graph scale would be very very long and it would be hard to make out much detail in the rest of the graph.

All three graphs are now zoomable, so you can zoom in on particular area of interest, see what specific days were associated with certain values, and etc, so this shouldn’t be a frustration anymore.

Average Response Days in Search Results

The Advanced Search Results and other market results pages now show the average response days for easy comparison of responsiveness.

Sortable Columns

The Advanced Search results and some other pages now can be sorted by in ascending or descending order based on several of the column headings (including the new average response days column).

Delete Piece Option

It was always perhaps a little bit odd that there was no way to delete a piece once you’d made it. Generally the easiest way to work around this had been to just rename the piece the next time you finish a story and use the record for that new piece going forward.

But now you can delete the piece, so you don’t need that option.

Alphabetical Market Listings

Why didn’t the site have alphabetical market listings before? I… really don’t remember. I guess people have usually either knownwhat the exact name of a market was already, or they were searching by attribute rather than name. So no one’s really complained about the lack. Anyway, whether it gets much use or not, it’s available. And it might come in handy if, for instance, you don’t remember how to spell Giganotosaurus.

Exclude Retired Pieces

On the previous version of the site the Manage Pieces page let you filter your list of pieces by checking the “Exclude Accepted” box so you’d only see unsold stories. A new box has been added to “Exclude Retired” (which are simply any pieces that you have marked as retired so they don’t show up in your dropdown list of pieces).

Grinder Favicon

The Submission Grinder site now has a favicon in the form of the site logo. This is what shows up on shortcuts or browser tabs. Might come in handy for spotting at a glance which tabs were Grinder tabs.

Anime Review: Fafner: Exodus

written by Laurie Tom

the perfect insider Fafner: Exodus is a series made for the hardcore fan. It’s a sequel to the 2004 Fafner: Dead Aggressor TV series and 2010 Fafner: Heaven and Earth movie, both of which have made it to the US, and also makes nods to the direct to video prequel Fafner: Right of Left, which did not make it to English language audiences. As such, this review will contain spoilers for previous entries.

Exodus makes only the barest attempt to catch up the audience on anything, and what does come out is mostly because of the three year time skip since the movie. The high schoolers of Dead Aggressor are now young adults whose time in a mecha is coming to an end due to the reduced compatibility that occurs as a pilot ages, so it’s natural to show how everyone is moving on. I think it’s telling that all but one of them has chosen a non-combat-related line of work prior to the start of the series. They’ve put in their time and none of them have been left unscarred.

The alien Festum menace still has not ended, but the Festum are no longer a united front, and there is a new hivemind (Mir, in the show’s parlance) that is heading towards Earth. If the humans of Tatsumiyajima Island can contact and befriend it before one of the other Festum, then there is a chance it can be persuaded to side with humanity.

Unfortunately, there are more than other Festum trying to stop them. The humans of the outside world (those who do not live on the island) were secondary antagonists before, but take center stage through most of Exodus, which results in a much different sort of show as the young pilots are not used to fighting people instead of aliens. Not even an alien invasion that has decimated most of the planet is able to keep humans united, but we knew that from the first series.

As in previous installments, Exodus introduces new pilots in preparation for losing the old. There is a lot of torch handing in the beginning, as a third set is drafted through a familiar sequence of Commander Makabe and Dr. Toumi visiting the parents of each pilot candidate to inform them that their teenage children are being drafted.

This once again results in a large cast of characters that needs to be juggled about, but though the new characters and the second set of pilots (who debuted in the Heaven and Earth movie) get a fair bit of screen time, they don’t feel quite as well developed as the older characters.

I think part of it is that Exodus is terrible at giving itself room to breathe, particularly in the first half of the series when it needs it the most. The original was very good at building the bonds between the pilots and their families, and then showing the cost of battle when those bonds are broken by death, which was frequent and unexpected. Pilots became casualties arbitrarily, and not because someone was clearly a less important character.

Exodus only has one casualty early on, and knowledge of it is limited to the viewing audience so there is no chance for it to affect the other characters. At times the series seems afraid to kill even tertiary cast members, which creates two problems:

Firstly, from a numbers perspective, there are just too many people to keep track of. The second set of pilots were prepared because half their predecessors were dying in the line of duty, but the third set is not replacing any casualties. Add in the assorted supporting cast, both allies and enemies (even different factions within enemy forces), and there are somewhere between 30-40 named characters. In the original series this was tolerable because of the high death count across the board, preventing too many people from sharing the stage at the same time, but with Exodus it gets out of control.

Secondly, it’s harder for the audience to get what the pilots are going through. Exodus can blow up hundreds of nameless civilians, but it’s not the same as losing a single pilot that the audience knows and cares about (either by proxy through a more established character, or for their own sake). For a show that spends so much time worrying over the human costs of war, it fails to make the audience understand what that means.

This creates a disconnect between the audience and the second and third sets of pilots who don’t feel as mature as they ought to be, given that the audience’s expectations are at the level of the original, retired pilots. When the originals are called back into service, it ends up feeling like a storytelling failure, as if the writer realized that the newer characters couldn’t stand on their own.

Not that I didn’t like seeing my favorite characters back in action, but I felt I should have enjoyed watching their successors just as much, and I didn’t. The return of the older pilots adds a layer of tension we don’t get with the newer cast. Not only is the situation desperate enough to need them despite their reduced compatibility (Sakura in particular is still physically handicapped from her trauma in the original series), but we’re aware that one way or another this is likely to be their final mission.

When the original pilots are deployed, you can see the difference in how they fight versus the newer pilots, and they’re more willing to make tough calls based on their past experiences. While it’s wonderful to have them back in action, it feels like their presence defeats the purpose of introducing a newer cast. Even with the pilots split between two locations for much of the show, they have more active mecha in each location than the first series ever did at one time.

The result is a jumbled narrative where dozens of characters are going places because that’s apparently where they need to, fighting because enemies happen to be there, and characters alternately dying or coming back from the dead depending on the needs of the story. It doesn’t always make sense and if you’re invested enough to make it to the second half the best advice is to just roll with it. With all the alien junk going on everything probably makes as much sense to the audience as it does to the pilots.

I suspect that if I had binged watched Exodus I would have been able to make more sense out of it, but as a weekly show I kept losing track of who all the people were in the Neo UN (why so much infighting?) and what everyone’s long term objectives were.

If the pilots weren’t such sympathetic characters it would have been a lot harder to watch this show.

In the end, Exodus is probably best read as a confusing love letter to the long time Fafner fan. Those who have been along for the ride since Dead Aggressor are the most rewarded as the surviving pilots from the first show have grown up for the better.

Number of Episodes: 26

Pluses: sympathetic protagonists, rewarding relationships for long term Fafner fans

Minuses: nonsensical story, alien phenomena just happen rather than being expected based on prior experiences

Fafner: Exodus is currently streaming at Crunchyroll and is available subtitled.