29 Jun, 2011
Haikasoru
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Slum Online
Hiroshi Sakurazaka (trans. Joseph Reeder)
Haikasoru/VIZ Media LLC
210 pages
$13.99/$18.99/8.99 UK
ISBN 9781421534398
April 2010
Fiction
We’re back to James praising Haikasoru books, although I do have one minor issue with this book.
22 Jun, 2011
Haikasoru
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Rocket Girls
Housuke Nojira (Trans. Joseph Reeder)
Haikasoru/VIZ Media LLC
214 pages
$13.99/$15.00/8.99 UK
ISBN 9781421536422
September 2010
Science Fiction
Why, yes, I am doing these so it will be easier to just c&p the publication data into any of the four incompatible formats I am asked to use.
In this [dead link] system, I would rate this as high on all three axes: it's optimistic, it mostly gets the science right and it's whimsical.
Yukari Morita is visiting Maltide in the Solomon Islands, where her father disappeared 16 years earlier while on his honeymoon, to see if reports of a Japanese enclave in the region have anything to do with her father. As it happens, not exactly: The Solomon Space Center is a privately owned, publicly funded Japanese launch facility, and one that has just had a string of catastrophic launch failures [1]. The failures have placed the facility's funding in jeopardy.
1 Jun, 2011
Haikasoru
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The Lord of the Sands of Time
Issui Ogawa (Trans. Jim Hubbert)
Haikasoru/VIZ Media LLC
196 pages
SRP: $13.99 USA/$18.99 CAN/£8.99
ISBN 9781421527626
The Canadian pricing on this seems … daring.
Some spoilers will follow.
A reader flipping through the early pages of this book could be forgiven for thinking this is a secondary world fantasy; Lady Miyo, out for a ride with her faithful slave Kan, encounters a mononoke, a demon of sorts, and survives thanks to the timely intervention by warrior in blackened, cracked armor, bearing a talking sword. There are hints that this isn’t the case: there’s a date, 248 AD, which ties it to the history of our world and the warrior and his sword do not speak in a way one might expect a warrior of the Yayoi period to speak but more like a pilot talking to their wingman.
There a number of hints early on that while this may be a 248 AD, it is not our 248 AD: