James Nicoll Reviews

Yoko Ogawa’s collection Revenge was first published in 1998 as Kamoku na shigai, Midara na tomurai. Under the current title it was made available in English in 2013 by Picador. 

Revenge includes eleven macabre short stories. The collection is not long but it is very good. 

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Nagaru Tanigawa’s 2004 The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya is the fourth volume in his Haruhi Suzumiya series. 

Together with the other members of the SOS Club — alien emissary Yuki Nagato, time traveler Mikuru Asahina, and ESPer Itsuki Koizumi — Kyon assists the determined Haruhi in her quest to find aliens, time travelers, and ESPers. And by assists, I mean ​“at any cost, prevents Haruhi from discovering her own true nature.” Just as Haruhi is oblivious to the fact her SOS is almost entirely staffed by the very exotic beings she yearns to find, so too is she unaware of her own nigh-godlike powers or her destructive potential. It is the job of the SOS Club to keep her unaware.

Keeping the ​“irritating sociopathic Genki Girl” (as TV Tropes puts it) too busy to truly see the world around isn’t safe and it’s often unpleasant … but at least it is never boring. Escape from the SOS Club appears to be impossible, so Kyon may as well resign himself to his fate.

And then one day Kyon discovers the world has been transformed.

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Appleseed Book Two: Prometheus Unbound picks up where The Promethean Challenge left off. While Briareos Hecatonchires recovers from the injuries he suffered in the previous volume, Deunan Knute is trying to fit into a police force made up of former cut-throats barely distinguishable from the criminals they oppose. She’s soon head-hunted by ESWAT (Extra-Special Weapons and Tactics), less for her remarkable skill set and more because the powers-that-be (or a faction thereof) want her somewhere where they can keep an eye on her. Deunan has, as she discovers, a closer connection to the founders of Olympus than she had ever suspected. 

The people running Olympus (the city) and Aegis (the world government it heads) have bigger problems than one survivor from badside. The world war was horrible, but it did allow Aegis time to consider and address the issues driving humans towards global suicide. Not enough time, it seems, which leads the Council, bioroids all ¹, to consider a bold strategy: apply bioroid discipline to all humans. The result may not be human as humans of the 22 ^nd Century define it, but at least it and the world it inhabits will be alive. 

Interestingly, it’s not the humans who object to this scheme. It’s Athena, Aegis’ senior politician and a bioroid herself. 

Athena finds it easy enough to deal with the council: detain them all. While they are in detention, Athena and her subordinates run the proposal through Gaea, the city’s supercomputer. Normally the council is plugged into Gaea while it cogitates, but obviously that won’t work in this case. The vast, cold intellect is free to consider the issue without human or bioroid moderation. 

What could go wrong? 

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For many people in North America — well, me, at least — Masamune Shirow’s Appleseed series was one of the first translated manga they ever saw. First published in 1985, it won the 1986 Seiun Award for Best Manga. Between 1988 and 1992, the series was published volume by volume by Eclipse Comics, which is the edition I first read¹. It was pretty addictive stuff back in the Reagan Era — no American comics I knew of explored SF themes like Shirow’s or had the same striking art — but how well does it stand up today? Does it still have the same punch in a world where many great manga are no further away than the nearest library?

Well, I just happen to have Appleseed: Volume One: The Promethean Challenge to hand.…

No country involved in World War Three resorted to nuclear weapons but there are other weapons of mass destruction. As the prelude puts it, ​“even without (nuclear weapons), the Earth became a quieter planet.”

Survivors Deunan Knute and Briareos Hecatonchires have settled in a very quiet, very peaceful neighbourhood. Before they came to town someone doused the place in sarin. The nerve agent is long gone, and so are the unfortunate inhabitants, leaving their material goods for the two soldiers to loot, and their homes for the woman and her cyborg friend to take for their own. 

But someone has noticed the pair.

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Salla Simukka’s 2015 As Black as Ebony is the third and (if trilogy is to retain any meaning) final book in her Snow White Trilogy¹.

Lumikki Andersson has returned from a diverting summer holiday in Prague to her parents and home in Finland. Her attempts to lose herself on the stage and in the arms of her new boyfriend Sampsa are doomed before they begin. She is haunted by the mystery she encountered in Prague: how can an only child like Lumikki have had a sister? Why can’t Lumikki remember her? Why are there no photos of the sister? Why have her parents never mentioned her? 

And, of course, there’s the lunatic stalking Lumikki. 

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Until Kitchener Public Library’s supply of volumes of A Bride’s Story runs out, I am going to keep revisiting this series. 

Unlike the previous two volumes, the focus in Volume Three isn’t on Amir, but someone previously a supporting character and info-dump facilitator: wandering ethnologist and linguist Henry Smith. In this volume the inquisitive Mr. Smith gains the answer to a question he never asked: 

Just how much trouble can an Englishman traveling alone in Central Asia get into?

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I am in no way obsessive but having read volume two of Kaoru Mori’s ongoing A Bride’s Story series without having read volume one induces a mild disquiet, as though a million rats were trying to claw their way out of my brain. Luckily for my brain, my local library had volume one.

At twenty, Amir Halgal is considered very nearly a spinster by her nomadic tribe. When the chance to marry her off presented itself, Amir’s family didn’t look too closely at the deal, or at her spouse.

Which is how twenty-year-old Amir found herself in an unfamiliar town on the Silk Road, married to twelve-year-old Karluk.

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When Yen Press sent me Emma Volume One, they also sent me 2012’s Kaoru Mori: Anything and Something. Unlike A Bride’s Story and Emma, this isn’t an installment in an ongoing series. Rather, it is a collection of Mori’s short pieces, an interesting introduction to her work if you’ve not read her before.

This will be short.

Mori provides such number of short pieces that they exceed my willingness to take this chapter by chapter. The volume is just under 210 pages and there are forty-four items listed in the table of contents. I could take them one by one, but that would result in a very long review. It has been my experience that the longer my reviews, the less likely it is that people will respond to them. As someone once said, More Words, Deeper Hole.

Mori leads with a selection of longer pieces (although if you have not noticed that the collection is to be read right to left, you may think she’s ending with longer pieces inexplicably printed in reverse). These tend to be standalone pieces, essentially short stories. The second half of the book has a selection of shorter pieces, some single page and other, like the extensive study of corsets, somewhat longer.

Although this isn’t a long collection, the number of works included means that the author can cover a fair range in terms of subject matter and tone. There’s screwball comedy, what appears to be a melancholy lesbian romance (or whatever you call it when neither person admits that’s what’s going on), something that may be intended to be to Bunny fantasies what ​“Hotel California” is to the American Dream, non-fiction, and more. Not bad for a book that’s not much over 200 pages.

The author also includes, where appropriate, commentary on the various pieces.

If you haven’t given Mori a try, this is a pretty good place to start. It’s not long, so you are not investing a lot of time, but the number and variety of pieces included means that a reader will get a pretty good idea of Mori’s range. 

Kaoru Mori: Anything and Something is available from Yen Press.

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No, not the Jane Austen Emma. Aside from nation of origin and sex, Kaoru Mori’s Emma has almost nothing in common with the more famous Emma; neither class, occupation, personal character, nor personal history.

Emma has no money, no family, no surname, and she owes her position as a maid (and her education and her glasses) to retired governess Mrs. Stowner’s generosity. Despite her lack of prospects, she gets lots of offers, being a comely lass. But Emma has no interest in matrimony

And then one day, Mrs. Stowner’s former student William Jones comes to pay his (extremely belated) respects to his former governess.…

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2003’s Black Lagoon manga collection is military fiction! it’s a translation! Two, two, two reviews in one! 

Although one might argue that this book is at best marginally SF, as the only aspects that seem at all speculative are the alternate laws of physics to which some of the characters appear to have access.

The crew of the repurposed WWII-era torpedo boat Black Lagoon (Vietnam War vet Dutch, nihilistic gun nut Revy, and hacker Benny) don’t bother with the conflicted personal histories of a Drake protagonist or the shiny white aura of a Pournelle mercenary. On the grand moral scale of sell-swords, they’re well towards the unabashed-villains end of the scale. The only reason they’re at all sympathetic is because their enemies are even more depraved (and because the plots conspire to keep them from giving in their their worst impulses). 

Enter the unfortunate Rokuro ​“Rock” Okajima, a salaryman who has the great misfortune to be in possession of a computer disk the Russian Mafia hired the crew of the Black Lagoon to … acquire. The crew have no problem snatching the disk and as an extra cherry on the sundae, they snatch the hapless Okajima as well. Why not? If he proves useless, they can always toss his bullet-riddled corpse over the side.

And it gets worse from there.

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