![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
From the Bookshelf: Irina the Vampire Cosmonaut 7
Irina the Vampire Cosmonaut, as an anime adaptation of a “light novel” series, offered a more satisfying stopping point by itself than some adaptations I’ve seen. Still, invoking “real space history” through its world not quite our own just might have done as much as its specific peculiar and amusing core concept to bump up my interest to the point of also buying its novels when they turned out to be translated. I did let them accumulate without quite paying attention to their back cover blurbs; once I’d read past where the anime left off, though, I wound up going through them at a fair clip.
The first part of the story in prose new to me headed to the other side of the space race and set up another pair of a human young man and a young woman descended from vampires. They’re part of the space program of the “United Kingdom of Arnack” (converting “the West” into a constitutional monarchy, with an idealistic young queen no less, could feel sort of peculiar), but not astronauts themselves. I was a little tempted to put together a post then and there. In the end, though, the descendents of vampires in the “UK” (the abbreviation might be part of the peculiarity) just happening to fill the role of a historical underclass starting to push for civil rights had me wondering about that seeming to omit people with darker skin from the world visible in the story and that never-ceasing awareness of how I’d once blithely assumed characters “localized” (in “the old days” of the mid-1980s) with Western-sounding names to be “just like me.” I concluded all the potential things to grapple with about that would wind up consuming a specific post.
As the story returned to the side it had started on and got further into “its” 1960s, I noticed it just happening to try and avoid some of the catastrophes of that time. One such catastrophe avoided seemed in the end to make no difference, though, and another one just turned into a bigger problem that I’d once seen speculation about before, such that in the end the side that had been pulling ahead at last didn’t have a spacecraft to launch from and return to the Earth in. That just happens to allow for the familiar protagonists, with some help from a samizdat book, to set up a joint lunar landing. It made for a different ending than “a surprise is sprung on the world” and a more interesting one than “the protagonists we started with just have to watch, just as in the real world,” but I did have to face how my impressions of what each side remained capable of didn’t match what they were accomplishing in the book. I also noticed a certain effort to keep the world from seeming “utopian” despite its cold war winding down, with a shadowy cabal insinuating it wants to keep things divided into two blocs for the sake of nobody getting mad at a “greatest power” and the intimation the lunar landing will be a one-and-done accomplishment. The cabal also tells the first man on the moon just what to say after setting foot on the surface, which isn’t quite as grand as what we’re familiar with; the first man delivers his line, but manages to embroider on it afterwards. Irina herself got to hoping things would go further from there, but that was where the story ended.
A light novel series running to seven volumes isn’t as lengthy as most of the other series I’ve pushed through, but in a way I appreciate it not running on. After noting previous afterwords from its author Keisuke Makino I’d been anticipating how that would wrap up as well, but the volume I have just happens to only mention “the afterword is online”; I’m not certain if anything more than was translated, though.
The first part of the story in prose new to me headed to the other side of the space race and set up another pair of a human young man and a young woman descended from vampires. They’re part of the space program of the “United Kingdom of Arnack” (converting “the West” into a constitutional monarchy, with an idealistic young queen no less, could feel sort of peculiar), but not astronauts themselves. I was a little tempted to put together a post then and there. In the end, though, the descendents of vampires in the “UK” (the abbreviation might be part of the peculiarity) just happening to fill the role of a historical underclass starting to push for civil rights had me wondering about that seeming to omit people with darker skin from the world visible in the story and that never-ceasing awareness of how I’d once blithely assumed characters “localized” (in “the old days” of the mid-1980s) with Western-sounding names to be “just like me.” I concluded all the potential things to grapple with about that would wind up consuming a specific post.
As the story returned to the side it had started on and got further into “its” 1960s, I noticed it just happening to try and avoid some of the catastrophes of that time. One such catastrophe avoided seemed in the end to make no difference, though, and another one just turned into a bigger problem that I’d once seen speculation about before, such that in the end the side that had been pulling ahead at last didn’t have a spacecraft to launch from and return to the Earth in. That just happens to allow for the familiar protagonists, with some help from a samizdat book, to set up a joint lunar landing. It made for a different ending than “a surprise is sprung on the world” and a more interesting one than “the protagonists we started with just have to watch, just as in the real world,” but I did have to face how my impressions of what each side remained capable of didn’t match what they were accomplishing in the book. I also noticed a certain effort to keep the world from seeming “utopian” despite its cold war winding down, with a shadowy cabal insinuating it wants to keep things divided into two blocs for the sake of nobody getting mad at a “greatest power” and the intimation the lunar landing will be a one-and-done accomplishment. The cabal also tells the first man on the moon just what to say after setting foot on the surface, which isn’t quite as grand as what we’re familiar with; the first man delivers his line, but manages to embroider on it afterwards. Irina herself got to hoping things would go further from there, but that was where the story ended.
A light novel series running to seven volumes isn’t as lengthy as most of the other series I’ve pushed through, but in a way I appreciate it not running on. After noting previous afterwords from its author Keisuke Makino I’d been anticipating how that would wrap up as well, but the volume I have just happens to only mention “the afterword is online”; I’m not certain if anything more than was translated, though.