From the Bookshelf: 86 [Eighty-Six] 1
Apr. 14th, 2022 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerHad I been clear straight off the translated “light novels” of a series called Eighty-Six were a “mecha story” at least so far as the young soldiers “stripped of their humanity” on the desolate front lines of “a war without casualties” were in fact piloting machines with legs (if four rather than a more humanoid and heroic two), maybe I’d have bought them one at a time starting with their opening volume. A few simple recommendations nudging me to to the point of ordering a bundle of the first six volumes was memorable in its own way even so. For one reason or another they wound up stacked and waiting while I watched their anime adaptation, but I remained aware my own track record with long series of translated-from-Japanese novels is spotty. By the time I’d been able to see the adaptation’s last two episodes I’d added another two volumes to the stack and had two more on order, to boot. I picked up the opening volume quite soon after watching the last episode (at which point “seeing where the story goes” might have become a bit less pressing), but with genuine uncertainty.
First impressions weren’t altogether encouraging. That awkward feeling I keep assuming amounts to “budget translation” was pretty obvious in the prose; I could imagine rewriting sentences from scratch to make them snappier, and I don’t write as well as I’d like to. There was something of an “omniscient narrator” sense to the exposition that set things up as well, and I do tend to suppose that sort of thing is looked down on from some great height by science fiction writers who can build worlds through throwaway comments.
For all of that, though, the story that had caught my interest in animation kept me reading in prose. Then, one bit of exposition very much caught my attention. The “Para-RAID” the story’s officer at the homogenous centre, Vladilena “Lena” Milizé, uses to talk to the more visually diverse “Eighty-Six” cast out to the front lines wasn’t just “a fancy radio” (a stylish and removable choker for Lena, a metal clip stuck on the ears of the pilots), but a sort of artificial inducer of long-range psychic communication, transmitting a breath of emotion along with voice. A lot of peculiar moments scattered through the anime made much more sense all of a sudden, wiping away recurring impressions of “sudden further impositions on my initial suspension of disbelief.” I was left wondering whether I’d managed to miss some vital early bit of dialogue in the anime; even so, going back to check does seem it might be time-consuming.
Just because “extrasensory perception” was more fundamental to the story than I’d thought when it had seemed to keep popping up for obscure reasons in the anime, though, didn’t mean I was going to stop contemplating its presence. I have a sense (and the awareness I might be provided with counterexamples at any moment to show that sense is wrong) the science fiction that sprang from magazines to “serious” novels hasn’t touched as much on that subject as it once did. A part of me wonders if the popular culture at large became a bit too credulous and ready to believe it around the 1970s; another part of me wonders if everyone moved away from the subject after John W. Campbell was dead, taking certain obsessions with him. While plenty of science fiction springing from less respectable media that got brushed off with “oh, that’s not serious stuff” did keep invoking the topic, in this context my thoughts do drift to the Robotech novelizations. A handful of peculiar moments in the animation of Southern Cross and Mospeada, and the dialogue laid over them, did seem to wind up being interpreted in an “everything and the kitchen sink” way.
The Robotech novelizations (which had kept up my interest in a cartoon vanished from Saturday mornings and my sight until that interest could transfer all of a sudden to “more animation like it from Japan,” for whatever good that did me when I was squeezed on two sides, by those who’d been much quicker at sorting out where the show came from and turned their noses up at the compromises collected getting it into syndication and by a handful of fans who hadn’t quite done that but still disdained the assorted inventions of the novels) had come to mind before when I’d just begun watching 86 and had wondered how well “mecha action beginning as prose” would work, or indeed how much of it would be there at all. In this new novel, though, the first major battle in the second chapter was actually kind of impressive. After that, the story did seem to begin making more use of dialogue, and that didn’t feel quite as stiff as the initial exposition had. Some stronger language than I associate with the target audience for translated light novels did get mixed in, but the world of the story’s certainly one where it can be anticipated. In any case it was introduced with an obscenely enthusiastic message chalked up in the frontline base, one that also got into the anime.
When the chalkboard was introduced in prose, however, a dark secret behind it was revealed at once rather than drifting into sight as it did in the anime. The story as a whole isn’t so much “exciting science fiction action” as “a grim weight settling as things come undone, by small bits to start with and then much faster.” I did get to wondering about how the anime at least had a character design for everyone in the squadron where in the novel some people might not even have names, although there was one moment very near the end that hit hard in an understated way. Remembering where the anime’s story had left off for its midway-through break and how that had left me uncertain just what was actually going to happen in all of those novels piled up, I pondered where things might leave off in the first novel even as I pushed harder and harder through it. In the midst of thinking “if things leave off not quite where the anime paused, this first part of the story would at least be open-ended and as hopeful as it managed,” there was a surprise in jumping ahead to where the second block of episodes had ended. For all that the anime’s continuation had quite impressed me for not “brushing the steepest consequences away and putting things back as close as possible to the way they’d been,” in reading the novel I thought “so it hadn’t been even as close to ‘finding one way or another out of a corner’ as I’d imagined.” All the same, I did speculate for a moment or two about “additions for a new edition on discovering there’d be a series after all,” but then I told myself that seemed all too much like “no evidence that contradicts a first reaction is to be allowed,” and that sort of thing threatens to pull you into conspiracy theories. In any case, I am looking forward to where the story goes from here even if I’m still plugging through the translated novels of other series as well.
First impressions weren’t altogether encouraging. That awkward feeling I keep assuming amounts to “budget translation” was pretty obvious in the prose; I could imagine rewriting sentences from scratch to make them snappier, and I don’t write as well as I’d like to. There was something of an “omniscient narrator” sense to the exposition that set things up as well, and I do tend to suppose that sort of thing is looked down on from some great height by science fiction writers who can build worlds through throwaway comments.
For all of that, though, the story that had caught my interest in animation kept me reading in prose. Then, one bit of exposition very much caught my attention. The “Para-RAID” the story’s officer at the homogenous centre, Vladilena “Lena” Milizé, uses to talk to the more visually diverse “Eighty-Six” cast out to the front lines wasn’t just “a fancy radio” (a stylish and removable choker for Lena, a metal clip stuck on the ears of the pilots), but a sort of artificial inducer of long-range psychic communication, transmitting a breath of emotion along with voice. A lot of peculiar moments scattered through the anime made much more sense all of a sudden, wiping away recurring impressions of “sudden further impositions on my initial suspension of disbelief.” I was left wondering whether I’d managed to miss some vital early bit of dialogue in the anime; even so, going back to check does seem it might be time-consuming.
Just because “extrasensory perception” was more fundamental to the story than I’d thought when it had seemed to keep popping up for obscure reasons in the anime, though, didn’t mean I was going to stop contemplating its presence. I have a sense (and the awareness I might be provided with counterexamples at any moment to show that sense is wrong) the science fiction that sprang from magazines to “serious” novels hasn’t touched as much on that subject as it once did. A part of me wonders if the popular culture at large became a bit too credulous and ready to believe it around the 1970s; another part of me wonders if everyone moved away from the subject after John W. Campbell was dead, taking certain obsessions with him. While plenty of science fiction springing from less respectable media that got brushed off with “oh, that’s not serious stuff” did keep invoking the topic, in this context my thoughts do drift to the Robotech novelizations. A handful of peculiar moments in the animation of Southern Cross and Mospeada, and the dialogue laid over them, did seem to wind up being interpreted in an “everything and the kitchen sink” way.
The Robotech novelizations (which had kept up my interest in a cartoon vanished from Saturday mornings and my sight until that interest could transfer all of a sudden to “more animation like it from Japan,” for whatever good that did me when I was squeezed on two sides, by those who’d been much quicker at sorting out where the show came from and turned their noses up at the compromises collected getting it into syndication and by a handful of fans who hadn’t quite done that but still disdained the assorted inventions of the novels) had come to mind before when I’d just begun watching 86 and had wondered how well “mecha action beginning as prose” would work, or indeed how much of it would be there at all. In this new novel, though, the first major battle in the second chapter was actually kind of impressive. After that, the story did seem to begin making more use of dialogue, and that didn’t feel quite as stiff as the initial exposition had. Some stronger language than I associate with the target audience for translated light novels did get mixed in, but the world of the story’s certainly one where it can be anticipated. In any case it was introduced with an obscenely enthusiastic message chalked up in the frontline base, one that also got into the anime.
When the chalkboard was introduced in prose, however, a dark secret behind it was revealed at once rather than drifting into sight as it did in the anime. The story as a whole isn’t so much “exciting science fiction action” as “a grim weight settling as things come undone, by small bits to start with and then much faster.” I did get to wondering about how the anime at least had a character design for everyone in the squadron where in the novel some people might not even have names, although there was one moment very near the end that hit hard in an understated way. Remembering where the anime’s story had left off for its midway-through break and how that had left me uncertain just what was actually going to happen in all of those novels piled up, I pondered where things might leave off in the first novel even as I pushed harder and harder through it. In the midst of thinking “if things leave off not quite where the anime paused, this first part of the story would at least be open-ended and as hopeful as it managed,” there was a surprise in jumping ahead to where the second block of episodes had ended. For all that the anime’s continuation had quite impressed me for not “brushing the steepest consequences away and putting things back as close as possible to the way they’d been,” in reading the novel I thought “so it hadn’t been even as close to ‘finding one way or another out of a corner’ as I’d imagined.” All the same, I did speculate for a moment or two about “additions for a new edition on discovering there’d be a series after all,” but then I told myself that seemed all too much like “no evidence that contradicts a first reaction is to be allowed,” and that sort of thing threatens to pull you into conspiracy theories. In any case, I am looking forward to where the story goes from here even if I’m still plugging through the translated novels of other series as well.