Planetes, Planets Pluh-screw it.
So I finally got to see the anime Planetes this weekend. It's the anime of essentially the only manga series that I have ever read completely through. The anime seemed to follow the manga more closely than most adaptations do.
The manga is a pretty cool story set about 50 years from now about this guy Hatchimaki, an E.V.A.(extra-vehicular activity) specialist who works as a debris collector in near Earth orbit. Now this debris can be anything from old satellites, or empty fuel canisters, to simple nuts and bolts. Have you ever seen when the space shuttle opens the outer cargo bay doors? Ineviatebly you can almost always see something floating up around the bay and out into space. An extra washer or nut that was accidently dropped while they were prepping the shuttle.
Now you may think, No big deal, right? Most of the time they're not, they fall into the atmosphere and burn up. But when they stay in orbit they can pose a significant problem. Do you know what a single washer traveling at orbital velocity (17,000+mph) can do to a space shuttle or satellite traveling at the same speed going the other way? The words hot knife and butter come to mind. So fifty years in the future, when humanity has colonized the moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt, there's a lot of debris in orbit, and someone has to clean it out. This is where the story picks up as the reader joins the crew of debris collector DS-12, "Toy Box" as it's crew calls it.
Now I gotta warn you right off the bat that there are a few of stereotypical Japanese characters in this book, such as Tannabe, the new girl on the ship. She's overly optimistic and has this compulsion to make everyone live up to her expectations, and yells at them until they do. I don't know why this type of character is so prevalent in Japanese anime, but I really wish they weren't. Are there really girls like this in Japan? Even though I find it hard to believe, there must be, why else would they be such a fixture of Japanese fiction? Anywho, this is one those books that I was talking about earlier this year, science fiction, not science fantasy. You can find the book series here at the store, and it's actually featured on my Best Books endcap this week.
-d
The manga is a pretty cool story set about 50 years from now about this guy Hatchimaki, an E.V.A.(extra-vehicular activity) specialist who works as a debris collector in near Earth orbit. Now this debris can be anything from old satellites, or empty fuel canisters, to simple nuts and bolts. Have you ever seen when the space shuttle opens the outer cargo bay doors? Ineviatebly you can almost always see something floating up around the bay and out into space. An extra washer or nut that was accidently dropped while they were prepping the shuttle.
Now you may think, No big deal, right? Most of the time they're not, they fall into the atmosphere and burn up. But when they stay in orbit they can pose a significant problem. Do you know what a single washer traveling at orbital velocity (17,000+mph) can do to a space shuttle or satellite traveling at the same speed going the other way? The words hot knife and butter come to mind. So fifty years in the future, when humanity has colonized the moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt, there's a lot of debris in orbit, and someone has to clean it out. This is where the story picks up as the reader joins the crew of debris collector DS-12, "Toy Box" as it's crew calls it.
Now I gotta warn you right off the bat that there are a few of stereotypical Japanese characters in this book, such as Tannabe, the new girl on the ship. She's overly optimistic and has this compulsion to make everyone live up to her expectations, and yells at them until they do. I don't know why this type of character is so prevalent in Japanese anime, but I really wish they weren't. Are there really girls like this in Japan? Even though I find it hard to believe, there must be, why else would they be such a fixture of Japanese fiction? Anywho, this is one those books that I was talking about earlier this year, science fiction, not science fantasy. You can find the book series here at the store, and it's actually featured on my Best Books endcap this week.
-d
posted by Star Clipper at Tuesday, March 14, 2006
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