From the (Library) Bookshelf: Mecha Corps
I was headed for the checkout desk of the city library when I decided to pass by the shelves of paperback science fiction novels, for all that I might not have been expecting anything more than the melancholy feeling of disconnection from the titles on the spines. One of them, though, caught my attention. "Mecha Corps" registered just with the "a"; I've long connected "mecha" to anime and supposed that to knock the "a" off, as with Battletech, is to try and "westernise" the concept... although there, I've also been more than aware of a sort of dismissive "bipedal walking machines are no match for actual tanks without animation on their side" attitude. Still, I was amused enough to take the book off the shelf.
The cover didn't look out of place among the "military SF" subgenre, with a photorealistic fellow in uniform in the foreground and some sharp-edged mechanical figures with just a bit of resemblance to the "walking scrap piles" of the live-action Transformers movies. Still accepting this, I glanced at the back cover blurb and then opened the book up. There were two quotes in the front. One was from Douglas MacArthur, which again didn't surprise me too much, but the second was from a character from the anime Gundam Seed...
That really got my attention. As one particular subfranchise in the whole Gundam property, I knew it had sold well in Japan (and is now being rebroadcast over there to mark its tenth anniversary), but there are plenty of people in the English-language mecha fandom at least who'll never miss an opportunity to proclaim that liking that particular show proves there's something wrong with you... (That may account for why I'm not that inclined to follow the English-language mecha fandom.) Whether it was just a matter of the author "delving deeply but not quite deep enough" or a subtle measure of defiance, it got my attention, and I signed the book out.
As it turned out, I wound up deciding there was a point of resemblance between that particular Gundam subfranchise and the story world, which included a war between humanity and the "HuMax" in the backstory. Most of it, though, was the story of Matt Lowell working his way through a familiar enough sort of tough training to get to pilot the "almost alive" Mecha now replacing the mere mechanical sort of war machines. That, in turn, made me start thinking of a different set of novels connected in their own way to anime, the Robotech novelizations. Years after I'd turned to them to keep my awareness of the distinctive cartoon alive in my mind, I'd run into a bunch of fans complaining "people don't wear mind-reading helmets all the time in the animation, and holes in ships don't just grow closed!" Knowing that Battletech had also included "mind-reading helmets," I suppose I could look at how the mecha in "Mecha Corps" "Meshed" with their pilots and could "Merge" not just with each other but with other machinery and wonder if this was somehow reflecting a common supposition in Western science fiction.
The subtitle "A Novel of the Armor Wars" did make me wonder if I'd happened into another one of those series of uncertain lengths, but things concluded just with sequel hooks instead of an outright cliffhanger. With a sort of "it's not profound, but it was at least interesting," I turned to the last page and noticed the author's biography mentioning "Brett Patton, in the words of a friend, 'was watching Evangelion while you were reading Heinlein.' Actually, don't tell anybody, but he was doing both. And actually, don't tell anyone, but he's also taking liberties with the quote." The first part of the quote seemed one more bit of evidence towards a modern sort of blending.
This entry was originally posted at http://krpalmer.dreamwidth.org/176353.html. Comment here or there (using OpenID) as you please.
The cover didn't look out of place among the "military SF" subgenre, with a photorealistic fellow in uniform in the foreground and some sharp-edged mechanical figures with just a bit of resemblance to the "walking scrap piles" of the live-action Transformers movies. Still accepting this, I glanced at the back cover blurb and then opened the book up. There were two quotes in the front. One was from Douglas MacArthur, which again didn't surprise me too much, but the second was from a character from the anime Gundam Seed...
That really got my attention. As one particular subfranchise in the whole Gundam property, I knew it had sold well in Japan (and is now being rebroadcast over there to mark its tenth anniversary), but there are plenty of people in the English-language mecha fandom at least who'll never miss an opportunity to proclaim that liking that particular show proves there's something wrong with you... (That may account for why I'm not that inclined to follow the English-language mecha fandom.) Whether it was just a matter of the author "delving deeply but not quite deep enough" or a subtle measure of defiance, it got my attention, and I signed the book out.
As it turned out, I wound up deciding there was a point of resemblance between that particular Gundam subfranchise and the story world, which included a war between humanity and the "HuMax" in the backstory. Most of it, though, was the story of Matt Lowell working his way through a familiar enough sort of tough training to get to pilot the "almost alive" Mecha now replacing the mere mechanical sort of war machines. That, in turn, made me start thinking of a different set of novels connected in their own way to anime, the Robotech novelizations. Years after I'd turned to them to keep my awareness of the distinctive cartoon alive in my mind, I'd run into a bunch of fans complaining "people don't wear mind-reading helmets all the time in the animation, and holes in ships don't just grow closed!" Knowing that Battletech had also included "mind-reading helmets," I suppose I could look at how the mecha in "Mecha Corps" "Meshed" with their pilots and could "Merge" not just with each other but with other machinery and wonder if this was somehow reflecting a common supposition in Western science fiction.
The subtitle "A Novel of the Armor Wars" did make me wonder if I'd happened into another one of those series of uncertain lengths, but things concluded just with sequel hooks instead of an outright cliffhanger. With a sort of "it's not profound, but it was at least interesting," I turned to the last page and noticed the author's biography mentioning "Brett Patton, in the words of a friend, 'was watching Evangelion while you were reading Heinlein.' Actually, don't tell anybody, but he was doing both. And actually, don't tell anyone, but he's also taking liberties with the quote." The first part of the quote seemed one more bit of evidence towards a modern sort of blending.
This entry was originally posted at http://krpalmer.dreamwidth.org/176353.html. Comment here or there (using OpenID) as you please.