Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

In some fashion or another I became aware of a “light novel” named Qualia the Purple translated from Japanese, but long enough ago I don’t quite remember the specifics. I do have the impression some brought up Last and First Idol while mentioning this new release, which would have got my attention. There was also a bit of “positive recommendations that tried not to give too much away,” which I suppose always has me wondering if I just wind up being vague. Still, when I did get around to picking up the novel at last from where I’d had a copy waiting, I read it with growing interest.
( What do you see? )

When I bought a new-to-me refurbished mini-iPhone I was offered trial periods for Apple’s subscription services. I’ve run through some of the trials and cancelled them before starting to be charged, but I did go ahead and pay for a month of “Apple TV+” to finish “Masters of the Air.”
( Some other things sampled )

Happening on a movie I want to see in the assortment of streaming services I can access can feel a stroke of luck. When I came upon Alphaville on Kanopy, made available through a library in my area, that got my attention. Quite a while ago I read Jerome Agel’s The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, and some of the reviews mentioned Alphaville in the context of HAL 9000’s voice. Some time after that, Rick Worley’s “How to Watch Star Wars” included a good number of clips from the movie, at once suggesting it was another film Star Wars quoted and it quoted other works itself. I am conscious that in being more aware of Alphaville as “science fiction” than as “a film by Jean-Luc Godard” I might be out of my depth in trying to discuss it. At the same time, it was intriguing.
( In a distant time and place )

After extracting the tenth Eighty-Six novel from my almost depleted pile of that translated series, I was a bit surprised by its cover and the back-cover blurb, surprised to the point of starting to wonder if I just might build a post about it after having read seven volumes of the series while supposing “it’s not good to push yourself to type out and share an opinion about everything.” My interest in the story continues to outweigh any possible objections about “this translated prose is tough to get through”; in the war against artificial intelligence weapons that have run amok and evaded their shutdown timers through ghoulish means, the main characters who survived the first novel have gone from nation to nation in “a world not our own,” pulling off dangerous missions, edging towards the possibility of winning the war, and managing some character development along the way. The tenth volume looked to return to the grimmer circumstances of the original novel and fill in the backstory of one of the most important characters, the ace-of-aces mecha pilot Shin. I did get to thinking about the series looking to do something more with a concept it had left behind early on; I suppose in retrospect there could have been the perpetual question of “when you have to weigh your own ideas against new ideas from the original author...”
( The first circumstances )

Enough political opinions get pushed into the fray online that I do try and keep my own often-definite preferences to myself beyond possible allusions. Today I do have to admit thoughts came to mind again to the point of my wondering if I could dare an oblique approach, if back to a point I made earlier this year.

Whether or not this has something to do with moping that I don’t feel as if I read science fiction the way I once did, since early in my life I’ve found stories where hereditary nobles wield apparently unconstrained power over interstellar states provoke feelings of resistance and suspicions of “there’s too much of this in the genre; I’d rather see varied and unusual (yet soft-focus?) speculation” in me. At the same time, I don’t seem troubled by real-life constitutional monarchies where the head of state appears to be a figurehead, and there’s one science fiction story where “royal titles” neither bother me nor get me working on suspicious interpretations. Beyond simple acceptance that “Princess Leia and Queen Amidala both seem devoted to public service,” I did start wondering if the fairy-tale overtones of “Star Wars isn’t suggested to be an evolution from here and now” keep me from supposing the Organas “seized control when democracy on Alderaan collapsed under its own weight.” At the same time, I suppose I’ve long been interested by an early suggestion the “election of the queen” on Naboo amounts to “formalized public approval of a ritual or even random selection.” The thought that “political objections to Star Wars” are one more way to distract from showing offence at “corniness instead of uninterrupted coolness” might only provoke as detailed a criticism as overt political content might, of course; there, maybe, I’m just stuck thinking back to how the group of “saga-positive fans” I managed to luck into at last over a decade ago was small enough people with different political opinions (of the time, unfortunately) had to get along with each other.

Reassured reading the first translated volume of Eighty-Six I might not be “plodding” through an already-accumulated stack of later instalments, all the same I didn’t start rushing down that pile. Perhaps a bit more confident about the readability of “light novel” translations from J-Novel Club over Yen On, I went on to the second instalment of Otherside Picnic and read a bit past where its anime adaptation had left off (an adaptation somewhat less impressive than Eighty-Six’s). With that taken care of, I picked up the second volume of Eighty-Six, to the best of my understanding going into it still all material adapted.
( Filling things in )

Had 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 and afterwards )

As “post something every so often” started nudging me harder, I realised I didn’t seem to have any ideas to write about. While I have been working my way through a few things I thought I might comment on, I haven’t finished them yet. Not altogether satisfied with the last few posts I’ve made and remembering how the arid patch that had pushed me to sign up for Tumblr hit in a February, I went so far as to reconsider something I’d watched through an educational channel’s streaming service and dwelt on an unfortunate announcement reminding me of something I’d drifted away from a while ago. At the same time, though, I did get to wondering whether “expressing an opinion about everything taken in” is really that great, even if I might not be quite in a “get led along with ‘likes’ for the sake of selling online ads someone else makes money on” position.

Then, while going to a space news site to see how the checkouts of the James Webb Space Telescope are progressing, I happened to see an item about a search for extraterrestrial intelligence looking at the centre of our galaxy. The search didn’t turn up anything, and so long as that’s the case people will keep worrying about “technological civilizations expiring in short order.” Even so, and acknowledging it would be a foolish thing to let “science fiction” decide everything for actual science, I did happen to think of Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, where towards the centre of the galaxy thought itself flickers out but “space opera” machinery works further out than we are. (I then thought of Poul Anderson’s earlier Brain Wave, although its “smart zones of space” aren’t in the same configuration.) So far as another predilection of Vinge and others goes (and acknowledging it might just be unproductive wishful thinking), I also got to thinking about “why not speculate about ‘advanced civilizations’ getting to a point where they aren’t detectable from a distance with our current technology?”

A post on my reading list passing along the attention of an online critic for who manga is just one part of a speculative whole and seeking to pick up that title too turned my own attention towards a series that had been running for a while, the distinctively titled Dead Dead Demon’s DeDeDeDe Destruction by Inio Asano. While my manga-reading habits often seem to amount to “either jumping on board with new series or just letting them pass me by,” this title might have looked just interesting enough with the attention from unusual directions to start me speculating about trying to catch up. At the same time, I’m aware of recent comments about translated manga being bought up quickly to become as elusive as “comic books older than a month” once seemed to be to me. When I did some searching on the online store Right Stuf, though, all nine volumes in print by that point were in stock. As I make large orders from that store all for the sake of “free shipping” (and pile up anime faster than I can watch it), I was willing to take a big chance on the series.
( Nine volumes of twists ahead )

A number of the sites preloaded into one of my RSS readers started mentioning a short film recreating the enigmatic final minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey for our current age of protective isolation. (The first of the Apple-focused sites does seem to be run by someone impressed with Stanley Kubrick’s cinema, although I wound up noticing just a bit of Apple product placement in the video.) I was impressed by the matchup, but did get to thinking Lydia Cambron’s apartment seemed a good enough place to spend time in, tidy, bright, and attractive. (There’s always the contrast between Kubrick’s artistic chambers and the more mundane contemporary hotel suite Arthur C. Clarke described in the novel, even if not that long ago I started wondering about a way to rationalize Dave Bowman’s aging on film. While I have to admit to an instinctive negative reaction to Clarke’s final novel on the subject suggesting all of a sudden “there was actually no travel to another solar system; it all happened inside the monolith,” I happened to imagine interpreting the movie as “Bowman’s already ceased to exist physically even if that happened in another solar system, and is relinquishing his mental image of himself.”)