Housuke Nojiri

This has some interesting perspectives on the first contact theme, but as a novel I found it awkward and unbalanced. Most of the book is astronomy-heavy hard sci-fi acted out by characters whose internal and external dialogue are primarily awkward infodumps that are supposed to illustrate their genius-level expertise but just come out sounding like an unbearable freshman philosophy. Also, I found the character development of the lead, Aki, to be inconsistent at best. For example, her show more internal monologue veers from insistence on objective scientific analysis of all possibilities to the bewildering belief that her assumptions about a situation must be correct because her "intuition" has always guided her correctly previously. Perhaps something was lost in translation from the original, but like other reviewers, I don't get the hype about this. show less

Reading like "Rendezvous with Rama" filtered through "Blind Sight" by Peter Watts, the emphasis here is on the science and the concepts. This means that while Nojiri has succeeded in keeping to Greg Benford's dictum to "make it weird," the level of characterization feels very old school and I don't mean that in a good way. The exception would be in the character of Aki Shiraishi, and her drive to understand an extra-solar migration (even as it threatens human existence) is well rendered; show more though perhaps that is simply a function of me filling in the blanks from having watched a hundred or so anime series. I'm reluctant to say much more, as even though this novel (really a fix-up) is rather dry, it does evidence a lot of hard thought and so is worth reading on that basis. show less

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 show more 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. show less

Since every kilo you send to orbit is astronomically expensive, the astronauts of the future are the lightest fully functional human beings -- Japanese schoolgirls.

"Rocket Girls" strikes an odd balance between perving out about its protagonists and fleshing out their characters and motivations. They have agency, but they spend a lot of time being leered at as they wear skintight spacesuits.

The treatment of the Solomon Islander natives is bizarrely racist. They are naive, magical, ignorant, show more happy, one-dimensional. And naturally a Japanese man is their polygamous cult leader.

The higher-ups in the book behave in very unethical ways without obvious repercussions. Kidnapping and similar non-consensual approaches to recruitment are routine in the organization depicted.

The book is a neat bit of fluff, but not of the same calibre as Issui Ogawa's Next Continent at all. show less