SF Seminar Blog

We held a meeting to discuss the programs of the next SF Seminar.

Some programs are fixed so far, I’d like to show their abstracts.

One is interview with Ryousuke Takahashi, an anime director of Nihon Sunrise. His representing works are robot anime such as Votoms, Dougram, Galient, and Layzner. His great works are full of SF, use smart SF-like settings, and influence many SF fans in Japan (or the world?).
Another is about a magazine, called `Kisou Tengai’ (written as 奇想天外, its meaning is strange, bizarre, unbelievable, fantastic, out-of-the-world, or so on). Kisou Tengai is old magazine starting in 1974, but ended the same year. The second Kisou Tengai restarted 1976 and ended at 1981. Kisou Tengai is something strange, and alternative magazine about SF for us. For the next SF Seminar, we’ll invite Tadaho Sone, the chief editor of Kisou Tengai, and he’ll talk about the magazine.

Also, we have other plans for programs. Don’t miss it.

Many my friends of SF recommend reading this book. It’s great entertainment, although it is published as juvenile novel.

After a kind of armageddon, destructions at the earth’s crust and chaotic climates are common in the world, and the cities should not be fixed at a point. The cities have caterpiller and move by themselves.

1000 years passed. Cities `eat’ each other, grow, and die. People seek tools and technologies before armageddon, called oldtech, to reconstruct the civilization.

This setting is so nice to me. BTW, I think `eating each other’ as a kind of metaphor, but cities can eat other cities by their own jaw and fangs. IMHO, this style is SF.

The story is just an ordinary juvenile, but Reeve write it well. The hero is a trainee in (moving) London, and meets a girl assassin who wants to kill his master, and then falls from London by his master. Who is the assassin, and why? What happens in London?

This book also includes a nice description arousing imaginations about huge cities moving with crawler, free traders transiting between cities by airships, fixed cities hiding castles on Himarayan higher peeks.

My friends, and I, feels like Studio Ghibli anime. Visual reminder is similar, and so entertains us.

“Mortal Engines” is the first part of a sequel. In Japan, the remains are not translated yet, I’m waiting them.

(One of) the year’s best SF in Japan.

This book consists of two stories. One is dystopia, in which humans are dominated by robots. Population goes down all over the world, the remaining humans attack the robots’ facilities and rob foods.

The storyteller is a human boy. He are abducted by a female robot, named Ai. He fears about the brainwashing by robot, but Ai’s hope is “just a talk”, fictions. She tells various stories to him…

That stories are originally written by the author, Hiroshi Yamamoto, and published in many magazines. So, there are no relationship among them. Ai’s stories to the storyteller are just a fiction in the world.

In addition to that each stories are nice, the whole novel has some misteries. What is the truth of the history? Why robots dominate humans? Or, Is it true? Why Ai tells various stories?

The greatest story in this book is “the day Shion came”, a story about caring android. Shion is the android’s name. Shion can think, reason, and behave autonomously, and care old people at a nursely home. The story describes robots, and the surrounding people’s reactions. Especially, the change of surrounding humans are written nicely. Robot is not alternative of nurse. Human accidentaly treat Shion as a human, which is a mistake. But Shion is not just a tool of nurse. The relationship between humankind and robots is very sensitive, and Yamamoto can write it.

BTW, I’d like to comment the book title. Original title is “Ai no monogatari” (アイの物語) . The word `monogatari’ means story. `no’ is one of preposition of Japanese, mostly can be translated into `of’. In this title, the stories are told by the robot. Therefore, the title means “stories by Ai”.

However, one of the stories are about the robot Ai herself. That is just “Ai’s story”.

Moreover, Ai, written as 愛, means “love” in Japan. In this case, the word `no’ denotes the theme of the story. In fact, the theme of this book is love from autonomous robots (artificial intelligence) to humankind. This book is stories about love.

And also, Ai will denotes AI=Artificial Intelligence. This book includes stories about robots, AIs.

The book title has many many meanings. Translation drops these meanings.