PlanetES: Book 1
by Makoto Yukimura inhabits that rarest of niches in comics, the so-called “hard” science fiction niche, which is to say that real-world scientific discourse provides the foundation for Yukimura’s extrapolative storytelling. As such, the book will remind you more of a Gregory Benford or Frederick Pohl novel than Sailor Moon, or even Star Wars. Key moments hinge on such obscure concepts as “Kessler’s Syndrome,” say, or the effects of the moon’s gravity on sunspot radiation flare-ups. That doesn’t mean that you’ll find only dry edutainment here, though. It’s true that our protagonists, Yuri, Fee, and Hachimaki, young astronauts assigned the most tedious job in space — trolling for, picking up, and recycling the bits of wreckage and deliberate litter that have, by the middle of next century, accumulated in Earth orbit, thanks to the over-commercialization of near outer space — see very little pulse-pounding action. But neither does anybody else. It’s just not that kind of a future. Instead, our heroes fight their way through such real and human challenges as osteoporosis (caused by living in zero gravity for extended periods of time), boredom, nicotine addiction, the emotional damage caused by recently-deceased and/or otherwise problematic family members, and the frustrations of unmet career potential.
In other words, PlanetES is utterly gripping.
Yuri’s story arc, in particular, represents one of the most mature, nuanced, and subtle portrayals of bereavement that I’ve seen in any comic, of any genre.
There is some small amount of the old slam-bang razzle-dazzle, too. The female member of the team, Fee, headlines the book’s sole action/adventure storyline, semi-accidentally saving the world from an eco-terrorist plot — but only because she needed a good place to relax and smoke a cigarette.
But the real story here is Hachimaki’s outsized ambition, which everyone (including Hachimaki) agrees will only lead him to disappointment and self-destruction someday. We don’t get as far along in the development of his story arc as we do the others, but that’s perfectly appropriate for the hero of this kind of limited but serialized work, whose arc has to stretch across the entire set of books, and come to a resolution in the final volume.
The artwork is realistic (for manga), attractive, and effective. I am prone to get confused reading manga, occasionally losing the through-line on this or that sequence of images on some arbitrary page or another, probably just because I’m not used to the right-to-left reading pattern, but that didn’t happen even once, reading Planetes. Occasionally — like when Hachimaki walks out onto an “ocean” on the moon with a strange girl he just met — the art can be downright astounding in its quiet power. You can appreciate, in these moments, the blank silence that, statistically speaking, anyway, comprises the entire universe. Everything we care about, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, is so rare, so unique, and so tiny, in the face of the light-years and light-years and light-years of emptiness around us, that we really don’t even count.
And that’s beautiful. So is this book.
Highly recommended.
(The image in this post, a detail from PlanetES Book 1, is copyright (c) 2007 Makoto Yukimura. The English text contained within said image is copyright (c) 2007 TokyoPop)
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
