James Nicoll Reviews

The Stories of Ibis

Hiroshi Yamamoto (Trans. Takami Nieda)

Haikasoru/VIZ Media LLC 

423 pages

$15.99/$19.99/9.99 UK

ISBN 9781421534404 April 2010 Science Fiction

For anyone keeping track, this would be the third Haikasoru book I’ve read and the third one I liked, which given that there are fewer than a dozen and half titles to select from isn’t a bad average. It’s not as close a fit to my main obsessions as the previous two but there are definitely items of note to me.

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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.

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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.

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Harmony

Project Itoh (Trans. Alexander O. Smith)

Haikasoru/VIZ Media LLC

252 pages

$14.99/$19.99/9.99 UK

ISBN 9781421536439

July 2010

Science Fiction

If I thought that more than half a dozen of you would get the reference, I’d say this reads like Peter Watts flipped through a copy of Caduceus Wild and thought to himself ​“I can do this a lot better. And I could make it a lot more depressing.“¹ So instead let’s say that Watts and Greg Egan decided to collaborate on a medical dystopia/thriller.

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Dragon Sword and Wind Child/Tales of the Magatama, Book I

Noriko Ogiwara (Trans. Cathy Hirano)

VIZ/Haikasoru

$13.99 USA / $18.99 CAN / £8.99

352 pages

ISBN: 978−1−4215−3763−4

I don’t know why but recently I’ve been encountering fantasies where the existence of marriage counselling services would have avoided a lot of bloodshed and misery all round.

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