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krpalmer“Almost the countdown to Vostok 1... but with a teenaged girl vampire stuck on an unacknowledged test flight for the not-the Soviet Union” provoked a few amused “only in anime” thoughts. I did figure out, though, that Irina the Vampire Cosmonaut had been adapted from “light novels.” When I saw those novels had been translated into English, aware the anime hadn’t looked all that great I decided to take a chance on buying the story’s print version instead.
As ever some trace of distinctiveness to the story seems to go some way in whether I can get engaged with translated light novels, what with the double strike of “this is basically reading ‘young adult fiction’” and “I’m not even reading something crafted in its original language” to grapple with straight off. To go along with that, the translation here did seem more adequate than some I’ve plugged great distances through. On a more visual note I was interested to find a recognisable map at the start of the book that established Irina’s homeland as corresponding to the Baltic states, but I did wonder after a little while if Moldova might have been another option, given it had been part of Romania before the Second World War. It would be easy enough to say the illustrations by Karei had more “character” than the anime, but I did suppose their military uniforms were less obviously based on Soviet models.
Some ways into the novel I hit on a small yet significant moment, mentioning how the over-idealistic candidate cosmonaut Lev had been the single person who’d taken his shoes off before clambering into a prototype spacecraft. Recognising that as lifted from reality and implying in advance the role Lev will fill regardless of lessened ideological adherence still gave the sense Keisuke Makino had done some research writing this book, and I kept reading along with interest. I have a certain sense now the first volumes of light novel series are written so as to try and stand by themselves should they not sell well enough to become series, and this novel got about halfway through the anime by itself. I do know there are more volumes translated now than would seem to make up the anime, and I am ready to wonder where else they might go.
As ever some trace of distinctiveness to the story seems to go some way in whether I can get engaged with translated light novels, what with the double strike of “this is basically reading ‘young adult fiction’” and “I’m not even reading something crafted in its original language” to grapple with straight off. To go along with that, the translation here did seem more adequate than some I’ve plugged great distances through. On a more visual note I was interested to find a recognisable map at the start of the book that established Irina’s homeland as corresponding to the Baltic states, but I did wonder after a little while if Moldova might have been another option, given it had been part of Romania before the Second World War. It would be easy enough to say the illustrations by Karei had more “character” than the anime, but I did suppose their military uniforms were less obviously based on Soviet models.
Some ways into the novel I hit on a small yet significant moment, mentioning how the over-idealistic candidate cosmonaut Lev had been the single person who’d taken his shoes off before clambering into a prototype spacecraft. Recognising that as lifted from reality and implying in advance the role Lev will fill regardless of lessened ideological adherence still gave the sense Keisuke Makino had done some research writing this book, and I kept reading along with interest. I have a certain sense now the first volumes of light novel series are written so as to try and stand by themselves should they not sell well enough to become series, and this novel got about halfway through the anime by itself. I do know there are more volumes translated now than would seem to make up the anime, and I am ready to wonder where else they might go.