Instead, it’s a meandering display of fundamental ignorance about what we call “world science fiction.” The column was brought to my attention thanks to this line:

With the exception of the Japanese, I at least, am at a loss to point to any science fiction that I know of that has evolved independently in non-European languages or cultures disconnected therefrom.

Anyone who has read one of our lovely Haikasoru titles would stop there. Japanese SF certainly did not evolve independently of that well-loved European culture…the United States? (We’ll see soon that Spinrad includes most of the planet in “Europe” for some reason.) I spent a few hours some time ago digging up a copy of an obscure van Vogt story from 1944, “The Harmonizer”, as it is this story from which the titular character of our forthcoming The Stories of Ibis is named. Surely that doesn’t spoil a sixty-six-year-old story, right? Also, author Hiroshi Yamamoto named a chapter of his book The Universe on My Hands after the Fredric Brown short story collection Space on my Hands. Japanese SF authors will often proudly wear their influences on their sleeves, and those influences include American science fiction writers of the Golden Age and New Wave, as well as manga, the space race, philosophy both Western and Eastern, etc.

Spinrad’s claim is simply inaccurate, but what really upset people was this:

So, for now at least, and in the apparent absence of a significant body of science fiction written by born and bred Africans, this Caucasian American is probably the closest thing there is or has been to an African science fiction writer, with the exception of Octavia Butler. Who did write the same sort of thing, and did it well, and was Black to boot, but I use that politically incorrect word rather than “African American” because aside from her genetic heritage she was no more African than Mike Resnick.

Very silly. Forget the fact that the film District 9—directed by South African Neill Blomkamp—was recently nominated for an Academy award. (This is rather aside than one what thinks of the film or its depictions of Africans, specifically Nigerians.) There are African science fiction writers: Nnedi Okorafor comes immediately to mind. By definition, of course, any African SF writer would be better at being an African SF writer than non-African Mike Resnick, despite non-African Norman Spinrad crowning him as such.

The problem is that Spinrad is just making an appeal to ignorance. He’s not familiar with the many writers of world SF, so he assumes they do not exist. For whatever reason, though he could be familiar with Japanese SF as some of it has been translated into English, he decided to ignore actually existing Japanese SF. He also utterly ignores Chinese SF, which has been a going concern since 1904 at least. China is also the home of Science Fiction World, the most widely read SF magazine on the planet.

Further, Spinrad isn’t necessarily a good judge of how writers tackle other cultures. He lauds Ian McDonald’s Brasyl which for the first 200 pages was indeed a very strong novel. It devolved utterly into a series of silly fights and battles though, and at least some of the silliness can be laid right at McDonald’s feet. He credits the Brazilian martial dance capoeira, for example, with a martial prowess it simply doesn’t have. That’s especially sad as there is a native Brazilian martial art which is one of the most formidable in the world: Brazilian jiu-jitsu. BJJ even has multicultural origins (based on Japanese Judo and Euro-American catch wrestling, perfected by a Scottish-Brazilian family: the famous Gracies), which is one of the themes of the book. Sounds like nitpicking, but much of Brasyl’s climax does hang on the efficacy of capoeira and anyone familiar with Brazil’s martial or street cultures knows that it just doesn’t work outside of its own set of highly stylized competitions. McDonald stumbled in my view—the last 100 pages of Brasyl just felt like action-packed “fan service”—and Spinrad didn’t notice the fall at all.

Of course, Spinrad has also managed to declare Latin America, thanks to Spanish and Portuguese, “not entirely culturally disconnected from the self-styled First World.” Indeed, but Japan isn’t so disconnected either. Indeed, nor are the science fiction writers of the Philippines and the Indian sub-continent, many of whom write in English as either their first language or as a close second. One cannot even appeal to the paucity of translations to defend ignorance of these SFnal traditions, as increasing amounts of SF in English from these countries has been becoming available thanks to the Internet and global publishing. Part of what makes the First World the First World is that it is nigh impossible to be culturally disconnected from it, after all.

In the end, it just feels as though Spinrad isn’t making a cultural argument, but a racialist one. Japan was occupied by the US and the origins of modern Japanese SF are most often located by historians to that occupation and subsequent cultural exchange. (Even the pre-war Japanese SF, of which there was some, was heavily influenced by translations of Western SF and mystery stories.) Why insist that Latin America is essentially connected to the “First World”, but that African and Asian countries—which include many Francophones and Anglophones thanks partially to colonialism—somehow are not. (And thus have no SF!) In Spinrad’s essay, there appears to be an unexamined assumption that Africans and Asians are fundamentally different than Europeans—and “Europe” for mysterious reasons includes the peoples of the Americas. This is not even due to a dependence on the old framework of First/Second/Third World, as Spinrad acknowledges how problematic these terms are. Ultimately, Spinrad doesn’t know much about world SF, and feels entitled to project his own vision on terra incognita, thus his insistence that white American midwesterner Mike Resnick is as close as the world has come to an “African science fiction writer.”

As world SF becomes more popular, such attitudes will surely be corrected one way or another, but right now it is quite disappointing to see such a wrongheaded essay in the country’s leading science fiction magazine.

And yet, there is another possibility for the future. São Paulo, Brazil recently eliminated most of its outdoor advertisements. This YouTube video gives us a good look at the city that once lived under an exoskeleton of what some call “visual pollution”:

Will this catch on? In Vermont, there is a law against billboards, though a few have been grandfathered in. When I lived in Brattleboro, a local drug store had and even occasionally touched up an ancient advertisement for Carter’s Little Liver Pills (not recommended for the liver since 1951):

So, what will the future be like? São Paulo, Tokyo’s Akihabara district, or a four-stoplight “city” in Vermont? Probably a bit of each. But what future would you prefer to live in?

Further, Space.com has video! (Sadly, it’s not embeddable, but click the link.)

It was kismet I thought, as I just got back the pages to The Next Continent as laid out by our wonderful freelance designer, and that novel is not just about a private mission to the moon, it really does have a strong subplot dealing with what people might want to eat when they get there. Japan is one of the great foodie cultures of the world as anyone who has seen Iron Chef or read the VIZ manga Oishinbo knows, and The Next Continent holds true to that tradition. Can’t wait for you all to see it in May! Hell, I just can’t wait for the book to be off my desk!

Eric didn’t know what wtfpwned meant. WTF was easy enough to explain, but pwned’s origin is already obscure. “It means owned,” I told Eric. “As in thoroughly dominated. But with a p, so it’s ‘poned.’” (And yes I know that the pronunciation of the word is also a matter of debate.)

And then Eric just looked at me.

And I said, “You’re old.”

He had to agree.

And then I told him that he should blog this but he didn’t want to! So I did! Twenty-three skidoo!

Ogawa has picked a horse in this international space race and it’s…care to guess? Nope, not Japan, but China! The Next Continent begins with our heroes visiting a somewhat haphazardly maintained Chinese moon base after buying tickets on a Chang’e spacecraft. But then, of course…nope! The US! They open up “Liberty City”, after being inspired to rejoin the space race. (It’s not really a city though—that’s just political spin.) Well then, certainly…nope! Private enterprise, albeit a Japanese firm, they’re the ones who finally open up a lunar leisure center you’ll have to read about to believe. Be sure to check out The Next Continent this spring, if you’re looking to make any off-world travel plans in, say, 2035.

“Loups-Garous shows us a weird future, complete with A Clockwork Orange-style lingo, that’s scarier than the monsters.” — Carrie Vaughn, New York Times bestselling author of Kitty’s House of Horrors.

Teen girls, A Clockwork Orange, two great tastes that go great together. I’m especially thrilled by this blurb as I’ve been following Carrie’s career for just about ten years now, since finding some of her eerie and wonderful short stories in the now sadly defunct magazine Talebones.

Loups-Garous is coming your way in May. Check it out.

Yukikaze: That Damn Good

Mr. Mamatas has graciously invited me to guest blog here on Haikasoru.com about a new book that I (being the complete sucker for scifi/military/social commentary/satire/suspense tales that I am) most happily did the editorial grunt-work for.

That novel is Yukikaze. And in truth, to call it “new” is a bit misleading. It’s new to the English-language audience, certainly, but the translation that Haikasoru published is actually that of the 20th anniversary edition of the book, which included some minor emendations by the author, Chohei Kambayashi.

So who is Kambayashi that he merits 20th anniversary editions of his books? The short answer is: the Philip K. Dick of Japan. But that sounds like the punchline of a bad joke, and, more importantly, is dismissive of and condescending to an entire body of another country’s literature. (Nothing against St. Phil. And yes, dear reader, speculative fiction is literature, although that’s for a thousand grad students to argue, not me.)

The long answer is that Kambayashi is one of the most esteemed and prolific speculative fiction writers in Japan. His corpus displays a breathtaking range of format (short stories, novellas, novels) and content (running the gamut from the dead serious to the antically comedic, hard science fiction to straight-up adventure), and even a cursory review of his work explains why he’s been the recipient of armloads of awards. In short, the man is a damn good writer.

And what is Yukikaze that it merits a 20th anniversary edition? The short answer is: a damn good book. The long answer is that it’s one of the seminal works of the “Third Generation” of Japanese science fiction, and one that has spawned an array of spin-offs, from video games to toys to dramatizations to manga to anime.

This last, the anime, is how almost everyone outside of Japan first became aware of Yukikaze. Bandai released it in the U.S. in 2006, and then again on Blu-Ray in 2008. The consensus among anime fans is that it’s a beautiful work, full of what I and one of my colleagues affectionately refer to as “plane porn,” but a somewhat baffling one. The bafflement is due to the fact that the anime’s producers compressed the content of two very dense books—Yukikaze and its sequel, Good Luck, Yukikaze—into roughly three hours of animation. And so one of my hopes for the publication of this book is that it will help fill in the gaps in the story. (By the by, the translator of the book, Neil Nadelman, also did the translation for the anime, in both instances heroically slogging through a wilderness of military and scientific terminology.)

I came to Yukikaze through another vector, the manga, which is in turn quite different from both the book and the anime. It was created by one of the biggest names in Japanese alternative comics (yeah, world famous in Poland, I know, but trust me), a woman by the name of Yumi Tada. I had been a longtime fan of Tada’s work, which for the most part consists of what’s usually described as “urban realism,” hard-bitten yet romantic tales of small-time hoodlums, two-bit hookers, rockers, drifters, and other societal marginals. So when I picked up her version of Yukikaze, my first reaction was: Huh? But I quickly became interested (okay, a little obsessed) with it. (OCD can be a beneficial editorial trait. Betcha didn’t know that.)

Apparently Tada sensei became obsessed with Yukikaze as well, because she went on to do the character designs for the anime and became a story consultant for it as well. Her influence is what accounts for what another one of my colleagues refers to as the, ahem, “bromance” between Lt. Fukai and Maj. Booker in the anime, which is absent from the Kambayashi’s work. And if Rei comes across as a slap-worthy emo boy in the anime, you can lay that blame on her creative doorstep too. But better yet, take a look at the manga if you have the chance since it adds some interesting backstory to how Rei wound up on Faery.

When you read Yukikaze you might notice that it’s not structured as holistically as many of us would expect when reading a novel. This is largely the result of the fact that the content originally appeared in serial form in a science fiction magazine, but it’s also due to a difference in emphasis between Western novels and Japanese novels. As a gross (really gross) generalization, Western novels tend to focus more on plot and story—the actual mechanics of what happens and how—whereas Japanese novels tend to focus more on character and causality—the reasons for why things happen and why the people who make them happen do so. In line with that, Kambayashi’s concern in Yukikaze is not to “narrate” and explain the war with the JAM so much as to explore how Rei understands his place within that conflict and his heroic struggle to try and formulate answers to the same hard questions that have always confronted humans: Who am I? What am I doing here? What is it that I’m supposed to be doing here? Is it possible to truly understand another sentient being?

It’s Kambayashi’s deft treatment of these questions that has secured Yukikaze’s place in the ranks of classic speculative fiction. Strap in and enjoy the ride.

P.S. I’m gonna take the opportunity here to answer a question that came up in a couple of reviews: Yes, the correct transcription of the names is “Booker” and “Lydia,” not “Bukhar” and “Rydia.” Ah, the joys of translating katakana…

Ted Seko’s favorite movie is The Omega Man. He also likes Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green, and (I presume) Charlton Heston.

Seko, a talented artist from Torrance, Calif., has parleyed his obsession with World Gone Mad movies into a brand new comic book called Zombieman Zero, A Science Fiction Comic Book Fantasy. See the promo trailer here.

Like the movies he loves, Seko has delivered a Post Apocalyptic comic book with a “freakin’ hardcore hero.” In line with Heston’s memorable movie characters, Zombieman Zero fights for mankind (The Omega Man), for the truth (Soylent Green), and for Lady Liberty (Planet of the Apes). “The funny thing is,” writes Seko, “even in Pre Apocalypse we all struggle desperately to survive and find peace.” That’s true, but thankful we have yet to encounter any mutant cults, talking apes, or evil companies like Soylent Corporation. For the first issue of Zombieman Zero, contact the artist at pictureperfectpress@hotmail.com

Jeff was pleased to blurb the forthcoming Slum Online, writing, “Online slummer Etsuro’s quest to find and defeat ‘Ganker Jack’ is exhilarating, but his parallel search for love and purpose (and a blue cat) in Real Life is just as affecting. Intriguing, thought-provoking, and unexpectedly action-packed!” He’s right.

You’ll be hearing more from Jeff in the future since SONY just bought the movie rights to Jeff’s novel series. Clearly, given the parallel tracks of our lives, soon my own biography will be made into an anime. Right? Right?

Anyway—Slum Online, coming soon. Jeff Somers likes it. Everyone likes Jeff Somers. So everyone will like Slum Online. That’s math!

And after every task was completed, there was communication with Beijing Flight Control. Cui had constantly checked his wearcom during that first day’s tour―not only to monitor the time, but to send text updates to Beijing. His refusal to do updates via voice link reflected his irritation with having to do it at all. This was not hard to understand. It was his duty to contact Control even when he visited the toilet.

Yet there were times when Cui set aside his usual dour mood. One evening after dinner, Ma suggested they watch a movie together, and Cui revealed another side to his personality.

The movie was not streamed from Earth. Ma had carried it with him on a memory card. It was not the kind of entertainment Beijing would have transmitted via one of their communications satellites; it was an erotic comedy from Hong Kong. Taé averted her face in confusion. Sohya was embarrassed for her, but Cui paid no attention. For a short time, he became a different person, exploding with laughter throughout the film. Still, the rest of the time he remained difficult to approach, while Commander Peng and Jiang were easy to deal with.

After several days, the reason for the irregular scheduling suddenly dawned on Sohya.

A huge amount of the crew’s time was monopolized by repair work. Every crew member was occupied with something during waking hours, but a third of the work was devoted to repairs to the cooling system, the air and water purification devices, and the base power supply. Next in terms of demands on their time came looking after the creatures and harvesting the experiments in White Tiger. These tasks clearly limited the time available for other scientific work, so the only way to solve that problem was to skimp on sleep. Even the crew’s strict adherence to the evening meal schedule was a reflection of the overburdened working day. Without at least having an unhurried evening meal, they would not have been able to cope with the pressure.

It seemed to Sohya that Kunlun Base was barely holding together. A more charitable way to put it was that the base was operating at the limits of its capacity. The coolant leak they saw that first day proved to be a daily occurrence, and a sweet smell wafted throughout the base from pools of ethylene glycol beneath the floor. The solar panels installed outside the modules were exposed to direct sunlight with no intervening atmosphere to reduce its intensity, so the older panels were beginning to sustain damage which sometimes pushed the base’s power supply to dangerously low levels. As an outsider, Sohya might never have noticed this, except for an incident that occurred just after they had bedded down on the fourth day.

Sohya was about to doze off when he heard a crash and opened his eyes. The endless whirring of the purification fans and the droning of the reverse osmosis unit made for a surprisingly noisy environment, and it was never easy to sleep. Sohya drowsily opened the door to his sleep station to find Peng lifting a familiar-looking tank from the floor.

“Still working, commander? Don’t you guys ever get any sleep?”

“Sorry to disturb you. Please go back to bed,” said Peng. He glanced at Sohya and tightened a valve on the tank. Sohya heard a loud click and without thinking, asked, “It says SFOG on the tank. What does that stand for?”

Peng shook his head slightly, looking uncomfortable. “So you noticed that. It stands for Solid Fuel Oxygen Generator.”

“Oxygen generator?” Sohya said sleepily. “Are we short on oxygen?”

“Of course not. Everything’s fine. We do this all the time.”

“Oh, okay…” Sohya climbed back into his hammock and closed his eyes. He needed the sleep.