Housuke Nojiri

Rocket Girls is a Japanese young adult science fiction novel that had a second life as an anime TV series. It pays some homage to the American and Russian space programs, though some of the plotting and details require considerable suspension of disbelief. Here’s the setup: Japanese teenager Yukari travels to the Solomon Islands looking for her father who abandoned the family years before. She finds him hiding out as a village chief, but she and her half-sister are shanghaied by a Japanese company that needs a healthy person weighing under 48 kilograms to test their space capsule and their underpowered unreliable rocket. Humor is over the top and it reads like the anime it eventually became. 3.5 stars.… (more)

As science fiction, Usurper of the Sun is a good novel. As literature or as an enjoyable novel you really connect with, not-so-much. I had a hard time liking Aki or Raul in this story. For Mark being the motivation behind Aki's drive and humanity, even that was done too methodically to care about.

In any given day, human beings run through a range of emotions from joy to anger. Even as scientists and engineers, logic doesn't usurp ego or emotional investments. While I enjoyed the story and the plot devices of nanotechnology, artificial vs alien intelligence, xenobiology, and social consciousness, the gadgetry got in the way of the humanity.… (more)

As science fiction, Usurper of the Sun is a good novel. As literature or as an enjoyable novel you really connect with, not-so-much. I had a hard time liking Aki or Raul in this story. For Mark being the motivation behind Aki's drive and humanity, even that was done too methodically to care about.

In any given day, human beings run through a range of emotions from joy to anger. Even as scientists and engineers, logic doesn't usurp ego or emotional investments. While I enjoyed the story and the plot devices of nanotechnology, artificial vs alien intelligence, xenobiology, and social consciousness, the gadgetry got in the way of the humanity.… (more)

Great hard science-fiction ideas--but not enough character development. The first 20% of the book could be skimmed--the blurb says it all and the emotional import of the character development of Shiraishi is practically nonexistent; however, treatment of her character development does get a little better as the story progresses.

Aside: The three parts were originally short stories published in S-F Magazine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-F_Magazine, which, in turn, is published by Hayakawa Shobo (by which many Seiun award-winners for Best Foreign Novel are published).

Although a shallow romance, distant POV, and summary instead of scenes make for a rough read, Maxwell's Demon, nanomachines, and non-FTL drive deliver a convincing hard-SF first-contact story.… (more)