I decided a little while ago to go into the city and attend an outdoor book fair. While I’ve been to it before, I was wondering about what, if anything, I’d buy there. That thought could have strengthened as I passed by the kiosk for a notable science fiction bookstore, conscious all over again of what frayed if not snapped certain of the strings connecting me to the genre in print.

When I saw a small hardcover on a table, though, I picked it up and looked at the blurb inside the front cover. Mason Coile’s Exiles promised “the first people arrive on Mars to find the robots that put together their base in disarray.” While the book seemed pricy (I suppose I haven’t been looking at hardcovers too much of late), I kept thinking about it, and then I bought it, not as my only purchase at the fair.
( It was a speedy read )

Five years ago, I was able to go back to all of the anime OVAs I saw at the first anime club show I attended at university (and a movie that was mentioned on that first show’s poster but apparently not screened that night, according to the page of “previous shows” I found in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine). Five years before that, I made a point of watching through some long series from past decades. Five years before that, I watched one sample episode from each year stretching back into the 1970s (although there were gaps in the series I then had available from that decade, something I strove to redress in 2023, a general rather than personal anniversary year...) Five years before that (before I began posting here), I’d accumulated enough anime to schedule a series of “personal showings” revisiting bits of what I’d seen at the club, dropping in on the titles I’d seen someone call “the four revolutions of anime,” and striving to look ahead by returning to bits of some pretty new series that had impressed me. Five years before that, I was still managing to get back to university and stay with younger acquaintances from residence while going to the club shows (even if I’d made it through some “gap months” far from the university on a work contract I’d supposed didn’t pay well enough to seek out VHS tapes, much less those new-fangled DVDs, to start a personal collection with...) Five years before that, I was at that first show.
( Added up, that amounts to... )

Hearing “asteroid” in a next-episode preview had me thinking The Twilight Zone would be getting back to something I could point at and say “science fiction” for the first time since its first episode. I also have to admit I thought again of certain comments returned to not that long ago where faint praise for Rod Serling seemed directed more at his non-science fiction scripts, and of different comments over the years that Star Trek establishing the fixed setting of a roving spaceship was a way to avoid just how cheap everything would look should you have to create a strange new world from scratch week after week on a television budget...
( Variation on a theme )

Every once in a while I drop into an independent movies-and-music store that’s stayed open in the area mall. Most of the time this amounts to looking and leaving, but a little while ago I noticed a complete Twilight Zone Blu-Ray set there. Having been aware of the show for a very long time without ever having managed to see any of it, I wound up succumbing and using cash I’d taken out of the bank just in case I wanted to buy things at the recent anime convention. I did wind up thinking, though, that I’d once bought a “first season” DVD set of the show from a yard sale of some sort and never got around to watching it...
( Getting started )

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 )