Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Still working my way through the ebooks from my library I’ve gathered over time in a reader application’s queue-like function, I signed out at last an anthology of science fiction and fantasy with a somewhat generic title. I’m often conscious of a feeling, at least, that “I don’t read as much science fiction as I used to”; a complicated and unfortunate combination of things went into that over a number of years. The thought that short stories could be a way back was appealing (Ellen Datlow’s introduction talked up their appeal), but just getting started can remain a little intimidating.
( Blurred boundaries ahead )

Carving the time out of a week to “watch a movie” can take a bit of work for me. Finding the motivation to watch a movie in that time, rather than just winding up poking away at a bunch of things to perhaps be most left with worried thoughts about a “shortened attention span,” is a different challenge.

In going through the boxes of DVDs I recorded off Turner Classic Movies to make “disk image” backups, though, I did begin considering one title, then got around to watching it at last. It might not be “canonical” (although not that long ago I did manage to watch Singin’ in the Rain, which was entertaining even if I wondered about enjoying the non-musical parts more than its numbers, aware I haven’t had much engagement with “musicals”), but I was interested all the same in Captain Horatio Hornblower.
( From books to movie )

With one thing and another, I lost track of just-released translated light novels for a while. When I caught up with a bulk order, I wound up with two new volumes of Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki. Some ineffable mixture of good-enough translation, a fun-enough premise, and nice-enough characters had made that series one I’d read with interest. It might have been because of that, though, that I first plodded through two volumes of My Youth Romantic Comedy is Wrong, As I Expected. I don’t know if its translation is any worse, but something about it hasn’t grabbed me the same way; I got to considering “the sunk cost fallacy,” the collection of issues that get in the way of me reading novels originally written in English and presumably more engaging, and how I’ve gone from “reading that series because one day it’ll get past where the anime gave out” to “following where the adaptation went all the way to the end and still wondering if something about it goes over my head.”
( But with that out of the way... )

It wasn’t the first series of translated light novels I started buying to see just how their story continued after their anime adaptation gave out, but I did post here about the opening volume of “A Certain Magical Index.” I followed that up with another post when, after some early difficulties on finding the series’ translated prose not as engaging as first-written-in-English fiction and coming close to just letting the volumes build up on bookstore shelves (without having got past where the anime had left off), I managed to rally. Now, after managing to get (and get through) a copy of the twenty-second volume of the series, which I’d come to understand was a sort of “cliffhanger conclusion” before the books restarted with a new subtitle, the thought of wrapping up with one more post did come to me. However, I am conscious of the persistent feeling keeping up with the books had pretty much been due to some elaborate form of inertia.
( A certain elaborate inertia )

The holidays seemed a good time to make a bit more use of the ebook-lending services offered through my municipal library. (Not only can I borrow books from them without heading out to a branch, I can do that beyond the city limits.) I’ve had a few titles recorded in an iPad application to get around to, but sometimes I’ll call up that list to start sort of blinking at a book or two that isn’t even “available after so many days on the hold list” but can only be “suggested,” and I’m left wondering if I missed that when adding the title or if that had actually changed. The thought of that made me jump at one particular novel, Famous Men Who Never Lived by the enigmatically named K Chess. (There was an author’s photo and biography at the back of the ebook, though.)
( Lost world in a knapsack )

The official release date was marked in my calendar, but aware that books from at least some publishers sometimes show up in the bookstore ahead of those dates I did bother to take a one-week-early look at the science fiction section. Glancing past titles that do keep me aware I’m not plugged into “written science fiction discussions” to have a better idea of what new things might interest me these days, I found the translated-into-English volumes of Yoshiki Tanaka’s Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and then saw the “10” markings at the top of certain spines. It was with a certain solemnity that I pulled a copy loose from the shelf. After three and a half years, sales figures not dwindled to the point of “abandoning the project unfinished” after all, the conclusion to the story was available.
( The legend ends, and history begins... )

“A light novel not set in a fantasy world” got Sean Gaffney’s attention, and noticing his first-volume review on Manga Bookshelf piqued my own interest. An added bit of unusualness on this side of the Pacific was that the novel didn’t already have an anime adaptation to draw people into seeing how the story’s continued. Even so, I did go looking for “Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki” in the bookstore; it took me a little while to get around to reading it, having been focused on an “originally in English” echo of light novels. In the meantime, though, I did run across another positive comment or two on the translated work.
( An unbalanced game? )

The ninth translated volume of Legend of the Galactic Heroes I understood to be the penultimate instalment in the series. “Don’t count the volumes until they’re in your hand” still hasn’t left my mind, but the ninth volume did at least move beyond “Yang Wen-li fights an endless rear-guard action against ever greater odds on the historically informed thought even his decayed and unworthy democracy might yet be more capable of regeneration than Reinhard von Lohengramm’s fresh, enlightened despotism is capable of maintaining its obvious excellence.” The “new territory” reached, even so, is events I’m already familiar with from having seen the anime adaptation. Still, some of the details to what I was expecting might have faded from my memory over time.
( More than one upheaval )

Each successive volume of Legend of the Galactic Heroes arriving translated in print raises my hopes we’ll really get to the end of the series, even if it’s a conclusion I’ve already experienced through the anime adaptation. The eighth volume was where I supposed that this time for sure we’d be faced with a shocking development, one that would shake up certainties and leave the survivors in the story trying to make a new way forward. Once it had passed, though, I did have to recognize I’d forgotten some of the particulars of just how it had happened. In any case, with the various tactical schemes of the space opera battles easy enough to just sort of accept (a lot of the action in this volume is set in a choke-point in space set up beforehand as somehow constraining fleet deployment) the development did get away from everything else seeming to revolve around how enlightened a despot Kaiser Reinhard von Lohengramm is. Yang Wen-li, even holed up in a last redoubt, remained skeptical about what might happen “after Reinhard”; I’m afraid I was inclined to stay skeptical about the way Reinhard was himself presented and to muse about just what “the average folk” might wind up for whatever reason holding up, although it does seem like it just might be more interesting to provide an opposing argument by setting up a different fictional scenario than to just complain about the way a particular fictional scenario has been designed.

The omniscient narration of the book did seem to keep alluding to future developments I’m also familiar with. One thing that did surprise me, though, was a third translator showing up. I can’t say Matt Treyvaud’s work seemed any better or worse than what had come before; there was a certain bit of familiarity in the Imperial marshal Oskar von Reuentahl, who has one blue eye and one brown eye (a trait at least a minor fetish scattered through other anime series) being described as “heterochromiac.” I did look ahead again and see a pre-order listing for the ninth volume of the series, but it’s a long way away yet; even if getting to the end of the series keeps feeling a bit more likely, I can admit to feeling freer to wonder if that’ll happen this year.

I suppose I look at the "Manga Bookshelf" site fairly often. Seeing the eye-catching title "Last and First Idol" on its front page, though, left me with an impression of having been lucky to have had something so precisely combining diverging personal interests catch my attention before the steady march of new content could push it out of sight. Sean Gaffney's review had explained the electronic release from J-Novel Club was a collection of three short stories using idol singers and other tangents off the anime-manga nexus to set up some pretty hard science fiction. I could amuse myself wondering how many other people have not just some interest in idol singers (I might not have quite as much as some, but it seems "enough") but also some awareness of a science fiction book from the beginning of the 1930s, less a conventional novel than a "fictional history" of its near to a very far future, named Last and First Men by an English author, Olaf Stapledon.
( An existential widescreen yuri baroque proletarian hard sci-fi idol story )