Horbinski launches us into this history of manga with the image of a boy dashing through the streets of Kumamoto, desperate to get his hands on a monthly magazine.
In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars saw publication in The All-Story (under the title Under the Moons of Mars). It introduced the American reading public to John Carter: a swashbuckler extraordinaire whisked away to Mars to court beautiful women, to bounce about the red planet with gravity-defying leaps, and to swing a sword. Burroughs’s pulp sensibilities drip from the opening pages and launch the reader quickly and expertly into what has become one of the most influential action-adventure power fantasies, injecting his narrative with heaped helpings of wistful longing for a world in which physical prowess reigns supreme—and he packaged it all within a boundless imagination that, even today, feels exciting to read.
Tchaikovsky might be back on familiar ground, but he is doing something more than giving his growing range of fans something that they have had already.
Murderbot has no interest in saving you. It has a job to tolerate and approximately zero patience for human interaction. What it does have is an encyclopedic knowledge of soap operas and the ability to keep an entire survey team alive while pretending it’s all deeply inconvenient.
“So, I’m awkward with actual humans. It’s not paranoia about my hacked governor module, and it’s not them; it’s me. I know I’m a horrifying murderbot, and they know it, and it makes both of us nervous, which makes me even more nervous.” (p. 20)
That voice—anxious, sardonic—won Martha Wells a Hugo and a Nebula when All Systems Red arrived in 2017.
