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krpalmerI happened to look in the right direction at the right time to see Tor was publishing a piece of science fiction titled Hard Reboot by Django Wexler. Cover illustration and blurb alike promised “giant robots,” and human-piloted robots no less; I was well interested. Perhaps a more precocious viewer than some of Robotech in its first years on the air, I eked out eight years after it wasn’t on TV any more with its spinoff novels. While I did emerge from that decade to find a remaining handful of organized fans ready to put down the novels and their assorted inventions intended to justify things to a more critical audience (even as a good many other people in the English-language anime fandom now dismissed the series altogether), I had built up a considerable amount of suspension of disbelief towards that particular piece of fantastic technology called “mecha.” I still have to accept, though, that a good many other people don’t have anywhere near as much padding against just brushing the concept off. The apparent novelty of the new title combined with my long-standing general interest, then, to have me get around to looking for it. It turned up in an ebook search for what seemed a low price, but before I “jumped on the sale” I thought to check the ebook lending service offered by my library, and it just happened to turn up there too.
When I started into the ebook I did realise it had fewer pages than the novels I’ve read that way before; rather later I saw Hard Reboot classified as a “novella.” In its brief compass, though, it did manage a good bit of world-building on the scaffold of assumptions “mecha arena battles” set up for me (while avoiding the weightier assumptions “a war involving mecha” would have to deal with). For all the lamentations I make about not being connected to written science fiction the way I once was, I did seem able to pick up on and accept the concepts added to make the fictional world more unique and, perhaps, more “science fictional” to a broader audience. Toxic concentrations of malware surrounding the well-battered Old Earth and forcing mental disconnection from “the network” did seem to evoke a universe bigger and more advanced than can get sketched in around even “interstellar” mecha anime, although there did seem a firm nod to Battletech, its numerous novels placing it on the shadowy fringes of “respectable written science fiction,” in “older technology being more advanced than those from multiple cataclysms later.” (I do have to admit marking history in multiple “Empires” brings out the bristling democrat in me, as it has since the days of the Foundation Trilogy.)
So far as “putting people inside the giant robots can make for a more interesting story,” there’s a solid small-scale tale in this fictional world. Scholar Zychtykas Three (“Kas to her friends, of which she had none”) arrives at the well-battered Old Earth only to get suckered into wagering her expense account on a mecha battle; she winds up in a dangerous, double-or-nothing gamble that doesn’t wind up as quite a sure thing as might have been thought. The descriptions of action are vivid; so far as I could envision things in my mind’s eye they weren’t all that “anime-esque.” However, the story did just happen to set up and develop a same-sex relationship I have to admit to not seeming quite as able to just take in as part of the whole as I could have been; I had a number of uneasy thoughts about “what I would have made of a same-sex relationship with the other sex” (and why that hypothetical case might not have been written in, although they do get alluded to along the way too), the good number of manga I read which do advertise that straight off and my usual shrugging reaction to mere insinuations and invitations to “finish the job yourself,” and whether a mixed-sex relationship might have seemed “gratuitous” (or “just there to prove the alternative won’t happen,” as the accusation goes). Anyway, as a self-contained piece the story did wind up a good “a bit of a change of pace” for me.
When I started into the ebook I did realise it had fewer pages than the novels I’ve read that way before; rather later I saw Hard Reboot classified as a “novella.” In its brief compass, though, it did manage a good bit of world-building on the scaffold of assumptions “mecha arena battles” set up for me (while avoiding the weightier assumptions “a war involving mecha” would have to deal with). For all the lamentations I make about not being connected to written science fiction the way I once was, I did seem able to pick up on and accept the concepts added to make the fictional world more unique and, perhaps, more “science fictional” to a broader audience. Toxic concentrations of malware surrounding the well-battered Old Earth and forcing mental disconnection from “the network” did seem to evoke a universe bigger and more advanced than can get sketched in around even “interstellar” mecha anime, although there did seem a firm nod to Battletech, its numerous novels placing it on the shadowy fringes of “respectable written science fiction,” in “older technology being more advanced than those from multiple cataclysms later.” (I do have to admit marking history in multiple “Empires” brings out the bristling democrat in me, as it has since the days of the Foundation Trilogy.)
So far as “putting people inside the giant robots can make for a more interesting story,” there’s a solid small-scale tale in this fictional world. Scholar Zychtykas Three (“Kas to her friends, of which she had none”) arrives at the well-battered Old Earth only to get suckered into wagering her expense account on a mecha battle; she winds up in a dangerous, double-or-nothing gamble that doesn’t wind up as quite a sure thing as might have been thought. The descriptions of action are vivid; so far as I could envision things in my mind’s eye they weren’t all that “anime-esque.” However, the story did just happen to set up and develop a same-sex relationship I have to admit to not seeming quite as able to just take in as part of the whole as I could have been; I had a number of uneasy thoughts about “what I would have made of a same-sex relationship with the other sex” (and why that hypothetical case might not have been written in, although they do get alluded to along the way too), the good number of manga I read which do advertise that straight off and my usual shrugging reaction to mere insinuations and invitations to “finish the job yourself,” and whether a mixed-sex relationship might have seemed “gratuitous” (or “just there to prove the alternative won’t happen,” as the accusation goes). Anyway, as a self-contained piece the story did wind up a good “a bit of a change of pace” for me.