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From the Bookshelf: Mardock Scramble
Jul. 10th, 2015 08:53 pmI've said a few times already how I was impressed by the first Mardock Scramble anime movie, more or less because of the surprising impression it felt "just like" the science fiction movies and OVAs that often featured at my university's anime club showings two decades ago, only with the added polish of an age when certain people kept complaining how that kind of stuff wasn't being made any more with dark allusions to the current tastes of the paying audience in Japan. I waited for the two movies to follow to both be available over here so I wouldn't be leaving off on another cliffhanger, but in that wait I happened to buy the seven-volume manga adaptation, and then the translated novel both of those versions were based on. It didn't take too long after watching all the movies for me to get to the manga, but it did take me a while to start into the doorstop of the novel, wondering a bit about how I read plenty of non-fiction these days but not much prose fiction.
I worked my way through the novel all the same; the translation seemed more than competent. What I did find myself thinking, though, was that it didn't seem that different from the movies in particular (the manga invented and tweaked a few things along the way); I could definitely bring the animated visuals back to mind, and didn't get too much of a feeling that things were being "explained at last" after what had been established in the anime and manga. (I did notice, though, that one of the grotesques sent after the heroine Rune Balot and her talking, transforming mouse companion Oeufcoque to set up the action climax of the third part had just "modified his voice to sound like a woman's" rather than having started that way.) I did, in any case, seem to pick up on all the "egg"-related names just a bit more than before; maybe it would have been different when they were English words mixed in with Japanese. As written science fiction I did get to wondering if it might not be rated as highly as works that "work through their ideas" instead of just invoking what others have already developed, but as a character study it remained interesting.
I worked my way through the novel all the same; the translation seemed more than competent. What I did find myself thinking, though, was that it didn't seem that different from the movies in particular (the manga invented and tweaked a few things along the way); I could definitely bring the animated visuals back to mind, and didn't get too much of a feeling that things were being "explained at last" after what had been established in the anime and manga. (I did notice, though, that one of the grotesques sent after the heroine Rune Balot and her talking, transforming mouse companion Oeufcoque to set up the action climax of the third part had just "modified his voice to sound like a woman's" rather than having started that way.) I did, in any case, seem to pick up on all the "egg"-related names just a bit more than before; maybe it would have been different when they were English words mixed in with Japanese. As written science fiction I did get to wondering if it might not be rated as highly as works that "work through their ideas" instead of just invoking what others have already developed, but as a character study it remained interesting.