Watched the one-off anime movie The Silent Service last night.  Made in 1995 and based on the manga of the same name, this movie tells the story of an advanced sub, the ‘Sea Bat’ – ultimately renamed the ‘Yamoto’ – built as a cooperative venture by the US Navy and the Japanese Self-Defense Force.  It is staffed by an all-Japanese crew, but an American captain is included as (presumably) an overseer.

{{Spoiler Alert}}

As the post-WWII treaty between the US and Japan forbids Japan to have any nuclear weapons (not sure if this is in fact really true, but it seems likely), this sub is to sail under the command of the US 7th fleet, but the story implies it is effectively a Japanese vessel, given its crew. And its captain states that belief outright during a conversation, then shortly thereafter steals the sub – the rest of the movie concerns the various diplomatic and international situations created by this action.

This is an interesting movie, for several reasons.  First, it plays like a combination of ‘Red October meets Red Storm Rising‘ given the regular interplay between the military action vs. the diplomatic wrangling.

It’s also well written (but for a couple minor gripes, see below) – I really didn’t know what the heck Captain Kaieda was going to do at any turn once he stole the Sea Bat/Yamoto.  While the characters are otherwise fairly typical anime (one or two silent know-it-all guys; many more pride-filled, over-the-top guys; a few raging crusaders; a few moderates stuck in between all the rest) and none are close to being three-dimensional, within the confines of this story their limitations don’t get in the way.

The animation is fairly standard anime – no CGI in this one, probably a bit early for that – nothing spectacular but otherwise fine.

Minor nits:

1) One of the American motives here is revealed to be the ‘recolonization of Japan’ – WTF?  Is that really a concern after all these years (or even in 1995, or ‘ever’)?  Despite the Americans in this anime obviously being the bad guys, that’s really reaching, guys.

2) The American president has a little ‘rage session’ of his own in the bathroom near the end – and he brags to himself that despite the outcome of the sub chase and confrontation(s), the USA still has enough nukes to destroy Japan many times over.  Again – even transposing the recent departed war-mongering, civil-rights-trampling, corrupt Bush Administration into his shoes – I cannot believe Bush (or the even more despicable Cheney) would ever say (or even think) such a thing to even themselves!  This is just too much…

It’s interesting that even the Japanese players here (Prime Minister, Captain of the Sea Bat/Yamoto, other rival JSDF sub captain, and at least one of the high-level administration bureaucrats – all have competing visions as to what to do with this sub – naturally the guy *driving it* prevails with what happens, but it definitely adds to the story and keeps the viewer guessing.

One reason I was interested in watching this once I came across it in a random search – was that I used to play the Amiga computer game Silent Service – based on sub wars in the South Pacific during WWII.  The feel of this movie is very similar – although the players are reversed – and cool!

The only other downside is that they never made the rest of the manga into more anime footage, so I guess I’ll have to hunt it down to find out what happens later to the characters.  Still, this story is complete and stands alone quite well.  Check it out!  I found it at Scarecrow but I’m sure it’s elsewhere….

candybowl

AMEN!

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Recently read the nonfiction book The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll. Not sure where I actually found the book, but it’s definitely an interesting read, despite dating from 1989. The book details Mr Stoll’s experiences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he signed on as an astronomer, but worked also at a Unix systems administrator in the IT department. One day in managing his systems he noticed some anomalies, and over a short period of time, identified what he believed to be a hacker in his system. From there the trail simply kept getting more complex and weirder by the month. Despite the age of the book I won’t spoil it for you – if you are a nerdy type (or like a long, drawn out mystery) – this is it. And it’s hard to believe in some parts of the book that this is an actual true story, given what happens to Cliff’s quest and interactions with his boss, the government, and others who become involved.

Other things about the book I found interesting include all the computer talk – reading this book is like taking a trip down memory lane, although much of what he’s working on here predates my use of computers too, really. The Mac had barely appeared at this stage (we were using them for Biology lab graphs and statistical testing during my college experience at this time) and as noted in the book, the other predominant system was the Digital VAX (our computer lab had them too) – PC’s were even newer than the Mac at this point. The level of detail and monitoring he had to engage in to track the hacker kind of boggles my mind – but it’s pretty interesting nonetheless.

It’s also neat to read a bit of the NoCal lifestyle he was living at the time (he lived near Berkeley, didn’t have a car, rode his bike everywhere, lived with his girlfriend and another woman, and generally had a ‘free range’ lifestyle probably considered stereotypically Californian, especially when looking back. Rough. 🙂 But it sounds like despite the nauseating end of the Reagan years at the time, it was a fun time to live near and work at Berkeley.

Cliff’s interaction with govt. agencies in numerous cases I suspect is a dramatic difference than it would be today, and that’s sad. While I suspect many of them have the same ‘do right by the American people’ sense of justice they did back then – many others sadly do NOT, that’s patently obvious, even if 9-11 hadn’t dramatically accelerated the process while doubling down on privacy invasions and creating a long-term police state mentality from which we have yet to recover. Very, very sad and alarming.

But finally – Cliff himself is interesting. His mental struggles with what was going on, why or why not it was important to continue, and his long-term quest to figure things out through multiple creative means are engaging and often amusing to follow. And he persists in many cases on simple naivete and curiosity – while maintaining a healthy skepticism and sense of right and wrong. But he keeps a dogged focus on his objective and a positive attitude despite many obstacles, and that’s probably why we’re reading about the story instead of having suffered some dramatic consequence instead.

Piqued your interest? Check out the book!

candybowl

literally LOL…..

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Well, as the saying goes, all good things (must?) come to an end. And so it is with the ‘Clone’ series of books. I have now read each book in the series at least twice, a couple of the early ones probably three times. (earlier posts on this series are here and here.) Just finished the second reading of the final book: The Clone Redemption, which came out in late Oct. of this year (had been waiting several months for it eagerly). How did it come out? Let’s discuss. I will try to talk about this book in light of past plots and also try not to give things away, but can’t guarantee anything :).

So first and foremost, i was glad to see the Japanese Fleet and SEALs get their due. While this is probably the bleakest book of the entire series for many reasons, the SEALs and Japanese fate was met with strength, dignity and a couple interesting twists (e.g. the encounter with the shipboard Yakuza contingent) that served to bring more humanity to these mysterious characters. In earlier books we had only really seen Master Chief Illych for any significant time, so this gave us a chance to see at least a couple more in a bit more detail, which was nice. And it was also interesting to see the inner workings of the Japanese command staff and its fleet more than before.

The Unified Authority, true to form over the past few books, defies belief in its ability to sink ever ‘lower’, both morally and in the various battles where they show up. While we don’t see anymore of the previous fleet commander(s) that bedeviled Harris (and occasionally Freeman) in the past, their own ‘evil’ boss, Tobias Andropov, head of the planetary Linear Committee, makes his own presence felt by implication several times and then directly at least once.

The scientists Breeze and Sweetwater provide an ultimately bittersweet but necessary ‘conscience’ to the story in some ways, and while they may have ended up being subtle manipulations of the U.A. against Harris and the clones, they help him enormously in spite of this, and that’s definitely a good thing.

Which brings us to Harris and Freeman. I think the former does even more maturing as a person in this book, especially given its increasingly bleak morality play as the plot continues to the end – but he’s still got a ways to go (the interlude(s) with Ava G. and the continued soul-searching around saving natural-borns that otherwise would prefer him and the other clones dead are proof of that) and he knows it. Freeman actually becomes much more of a ‘human’ in this book vs. the past books. Like before, we largely see him through Harris’ eyes and perspective, so aside from his actions and (still very few) words, he’s still very much an enigma, but he lets down his guard (and in some ways, semmingly his will to continue living at all) at points in this story, and it’s a bit weird to consider.

So some quibbles. I liked this book, and very much enjoyed the entire series, but would have liked a bit more of:

1) Avatari back story. We see what happens here (mostly) but if there was a story component even MORE of an enigma than Freeman, it’s the Avatari. Maybe just providing more text from the Morgan Atkins Bible at some point earlier would have been sufficient, I don’t know – but it would surely have been interesting to learn.

2) Did the ‘sleeves’ on the various human colonies persist post-Avatari? If there are other future books, that might be interesting to explore.

3) As noted to the author in an earlier discussion on the SadSamsPalace blog last year – what about that secret Mogat base in DC discussed several books ago? It never comes up here for obvious reasons – but maybe there are more Avatari clues there?

4) Finally – when will Harris have his ‘say’ in front of Congress, the Linear Committee and others who ultimately betrayed humanity via banishing the clones and taking control of the U.A. the way they did – when will the truth come out? I guess this is future book material too?

What might be an interesting next step here – instead of say, another book series or simply another sequel – might be to take an ‘art’ or ‘major events’ timeline approach. I’m thinking here of past Chris Foss-illustrated books like the old Spacecraft, 2000-2100 A.D.: Terran Trade Authority Handbook. Those books were largely a vehicle for putting out an art book – AFAIK, they made up the stories to explain the paintings therein – for the most part it works, although in the later Great Space Battles they get a bit too far afield (the painting of a giant ‘space cereberus’ is simply too silly to take seriously).

But with a pre-written and far more cohesive narrative like the Clone books, this approach could be pretty cool – the author could go back in time across the entire series and fill in/retell details he had to leave out first time around (due to space, editing, deadlines, etc.) – and – you get the chance to enlist some artists to ‘visualize’ some of these events too? Certainly the ‘destruction of the Doctrinaire’ would be a great one, as maybe the first encounter of Morgan Atkins’ science team with the Avatari? I could see a smiling portrait of Sweetwater, Breeze and Freeman presenting to the U.A. command ‘rabble’ during the battle gaps while fighting the Avatari on Terraneau, etc.

Another example of such an ‘external’ book to tell related stories and details would be the (also originally from the 70s) Starfleet Technical Manual describing the Star Trek universe. In any event, there are a lot of possibilities.

To sum up, I liked the series very much, there were a few things I quibbled with here and there, and of course hated waiting months between books (not much you can do about that one – when you write them all at once you can definitely end up with a horrible third story and beyond – ask The Matrix :)). Quality demands time, despite our lack of patience as readers.

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Altogether too rare, but definitely fascinating. As linked by Boing Boing….I will have to read this through a couple more times to truly get the gist but again, fascinating…..

The Paris Review – William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211

I especially like the Blade Runner comment….

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too funny!

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So I got around to starting the Sprawl Trilogy from William Gibson again. I’m pretty sure it was at least 10-20 years ago when I last read them – and I was likely 10 years late then (I can remember people in high school talking about the books but I was still reading very old-school sci fi at the time, Heinlein, Clarke, some PKD, etc.)

What’s interesting in reading Neuromancer again is of course seeing where the predictions went (yes, no or TBD) as well as how well it holds up generally. On the one hand, there are some things in there that sort of came true – the rise of the Internet and computer networks being completely pervasive in our society is certainly true, even if the execution is less Lawnmower Man and more Amazon.com (sadly). But the widespread use of body modification is still far from as frequent as described here, The Sprawl is still yet to happen (although I’m sure there are plenty of pockets already formed) and the world isn’t run surreptitiously by AI’s – yet. Nor are there ‘orbital nations’ either run by fringe ethnic groups or covert/eccentric large family corporations (again – yet). Certainly between these books, movies like TRON and shows like Max Headroom – there were a number of entertaining, predictive thinkers back then. And to some degree, there’s still fear out there of AI’s taking over (see The Matrix series, The Teriminator series – there are others) – but at present the bigger risk seems to be from our own species, a la Orwell. It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out for better or worse in the coming years.

For me, however – back to the second book, Count Zero. Stay tuned!

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