Akira's cyberpunk connections aren't digital, they're visual. Computers, networks, and A.I.s don't come into play, but the design of the story world vibrates with cyberpunk imagery. It's a dark, urban maze populated by the disenfranchised poor and their high-tech oppressors. The pyramidal buildings of Neo-Tokyo in particular evoke Blade Runner's future Los Angeles.
Otomo also created an anime version of Akira, released in 1988. The film caught the attention of the Western world and is credited with starting the anime craze in America. Andy and Larry Wachowski, creators of The Matrix, are longtime manga and anime fans and cite Akira as one of their favorites.
Although “Akira” may sound cool and edgy to us, it's actually a common name in Japan. This ultimate horror, this world-destroyer, has a moniker rather like Fred or Dave.
Ghost in the Shell
The Ghost in the Shell franchise spans manga, film, television, and games. It begins with the eponymous graphic novel written and drawn by Masamune Shirow. Set in the mid-twenty-first century, Ghost depicts a world where “cyber” technology saturates daily life. Almost everyone has a cyberbrain that can store memories and act as a direct interface to the Internet—here called the Net. Hackers engage in direct mind-to-mind attacks to steal information, spy, even take over people's bodies. Expert hackers can turn invisible by hacking others’ vision. In this first novel it's sometimes difficult to tell if events are happening in the real world or in cyberspace—the artwork makes little distinction between the two and neither do the characters.
This book follows the adventures of Section 9, the covert operations section of the Japanese National Public Safety Commission. Section 9 specializes in investigating high-tech crimes and cyberterrorism. A typical mission for Section 9 might involve stopping a hacker from turning a dignitary's bodyguard into a puppet to be used to assassinate the dignitary.
The star of the book is Major Motoko Kusanagi, whose body is almost completely cybernetic. This brings up one of the main differences between the cyberpunk found in manga and anime, and typical William Gibson-inspired prose works: Japanese cyberpunk often features robots, cyborgs, and everything in between. It loves to explore blurred boundaries between human and machine. Many of the heroes of the works mentioned here are cyborgs or robots. You might say that robotics isn't a core cyberpunk topic, but remember that Blade Runner, a hallmark cyberpunk film, is all about artificial people.
In the case of Ghost in the Shell, the cybernetic modifications have a very “street” feel. The characters obsess over what they've got and what they want, rather like tattoo addicts. Most of the modifications are used to make people stronger, more menacing, or sexier. Major Kusanagi, for instance, is probably middle-aged (no one is sure) but her form is that of a young, Barbie-doll shaped woman. This makes for an erotically lush comic, but before you condemn it as crass titillation, ask yourself what you would choose if you could design your own body.
Ghost in the Shell, the movie
Ghost in the Shell was adapted to film in 1995 by director Mamoru Oshii. In the movie, Major Kusanagi pursues a computerized super-spy dubbed the Puppetmaster who creates a robot that claims to have a “ghost,” or soul. While the manga is energetic, cartoonish, and often whimsical (the word manga can translate to “whimsical pictures") this film is serious to the point of ponderousness, and often confusing. Highlights include some intense action/future combat and enormous cityscapes. The film mixes traditional 2-D animation with computer generated graphics—quite groundbreaking at the time. It was the first anime film to be released simultaneously in Japan and the United States.
Ghost in the Shell 2: Man—Machine Interface
The sequel manga to Ghost in the Shell. Published in the United States in 2002, it brings comics into the computer age. While the character design is recognizably Shirow's, almost all the backgrounds—rooms, cities, submarines and especially cyberspace—are computer-generated art. The story revolves around Motoko Aramaki, a character similar to and perhaps connected to Major Kusanagi. Aramaki is a security expert for Poseidon Industrial, a floating city. She has her own yacht, a submarine, and a harem of cyborg bodies stashed around the world, all ready to spring into battle. The manga mixes action with lengthy, abstract cyberspace sequences stuffed with technobabble.
Man—Machine Interface's characters operate in augmented reality as well as in virtual reality, and are usually surrounded by floating data windows that only they can see. Masa-mune also expands the reality of the manga by including side notes that explain elements of the story or even contradict his characters’ opinions and ideas. The result is as info-rich as cyberpunk's best data fantasies. This manga not only tells a cyberpunk story, it's a cyberpunk object. Challenging to read, but rewarding.
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
The Ghost in the Shell television series is much more accessible than the manga or anime films, and in my opinion is the most enjoyable of the bunch. Closely related to the first manga, Stand Alone Complex chronicles further adventures of Section 9 as they deal with everything from rogue warbots to wine thieves. The half-hour episodes come in two varieties: “Stand Alone,” or self-contained stories; and “Complex,” an overarching throughline about a super hacker known as The Laughing Man. This is thoughtful science fiction television about cops dealing with futuristic problems; it never pauses to explain to viewers how things work.
The strange thing about Stand Alone Complex, is that throughout, Major Kusanagi never wears any pants. Instead she sports a kind of armored thong. Everyone else wears pants—this isn't some No-Pants Land alternate universe. Only the major goes pants-free. I assume this apparel choice was dictated by high-level executives on the show to keep it interesting to the target demographic—teenage boys and me. The show's writers and artists, though, stage a small protest. In one episode the major attends an important briefing wearing a negligee. When her commander asks why, the major answers, “I have no choice."
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
The anime sequel has no connection to Man—Machine Interface, but is a sequel to the first movie. It was the first anime film to be nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival (it didn't win). Once again the question of the meaning of life for artificial beings is a central theme in this story of sex dolls that seem to have souls. The ones that do 1) go on a murderous rampage, and then 2) feel very bad about it and commit suicide. Where are these playmachines getting souls? The answer is disturbing.
Innocence is a gorgeous movie to look at, and animation fans shouldn't miss it. One five-minute sequence of a parade is said to have taken a year to complete. But like the Matrix sequels, Innocence doesn't build much on the first film of the series, and rolls out so much philosophy and religion you'll find it either deep or sophomoric. Still, it's a serious story, not fluff, and that's a rare thing in science fiction movies.
Serial Experiments Lain
Lain Iwakura isn't a typical cyberpunk hero. She's a shy eighth-grader who doesn't like to turn on her computer. But after receiving an email from a dead classmate, she starts to explore the online world, here called The Wired. Strange things happen. Lain sees ghosts, has hallucinations, and people report meeting a wild, extroverted double of hers. This is just the beginning of Lain's trip down the digital rabbit hole.
Her story is told in thirteen half-hour episodes by a pool of directors and animators, so the style shifts from episode to episode. The short series is trippy and elliptical, a favorite among those who enjoy a weird intellectual puzzle. Maybe it's just about a troubled teen. Maybe it's about the emergence of a whole new cosmology via computers.
Lain is a good example of how Japanese cyberpunk doesn't hesitate to mix the scientific with the spiritual and magical. But it's not fantasy. In these types of stories, science (or mad science) is often needed to gain access to lands of the dead, ghost worlds, or the collective unconscious.
Battle Angel Alita
Now here's a dystopian vision that will warm the
hearts of cynical futurists everywhere. In Battle Angel Alita, a manga series written and drawn by Yukito Kishiro, the gap between rich and poor is literal, as the wealthy live in the floating city Tiphares, while the dregs of society toil below in the Scrap Yard. Inhabitants of the Scrap Yard work in factories that supply goods for Tiphares. Inhabitants of Tiphares use up the goods and drop their trash back down onto the Scrap Yard, a slum literally built from Tiphares’ garbage. The whole system is designed to support and protect the Tiphareans with no regard for the Yardeans (seeing a trend?).
Almost everyone in the Scrap Yard is a cyborg, and the place looks like a techno-fetishist's dream. Anything you can imagine sticking into or onto a body—spikes, blades, armor, extra limbs—someone's got it. The Scrap Yard's tough guys are in an arms race to become the biggest, the strongest, the most dangerous. Street brawls and gladiatorial combat are popular pastimes.
The hero of the series, though, is a diminutive robot named Alita, found broken and battered on a junk heap by cyberneticist Daisuke Ido. Repaired, Alita has no memory of herself or her origins, so she sets out on a quest of self-discovery. One thing she soon learns is she has amazing combat skills, which come in handy when she assists Ido with his other job: bounty hunter.
The series is a frenetic blend of Rollerball, Tank Girl, and A.I., and it stands out from most manga for the quality and detail of the artwork. The action scenes highlight a difference between the visual languages of American and Japanese comics. American comics tend to show static images—if a character is in motion, we see her frozen, held in an instant of time captured like a photograph. Manga uses lines that sweep and blast across the page to indicate movement. In manga, a single panel can relate a long series of motions and actions.
Armitage III: Poly Matrix
One thing the Japanese clearly believe is that there can never be too many sexy, ass-kicking robot babes. Armitage III is a movie about a robot cop who lives on Mars and likes to wear short-shorts. She partners with a disgraced cop from Earth to investigate a series of murders. The victims, as it turns out, are more than they appear to be. Okay, they're robots.
What sets this film apart from others in the robot hottie genre is its exploration of prejudice against robots. Robots are taking people's jobs, and folks are getting angry, writing letters, and staging protests. In most manga and anime about robots, the society accepts and welcomes them. Perhaps this is because often the humans are becoming robots at the same time that the robots are becoming human, and the line between them is too fuzzy to make any clear distinction.
Armitage was one of the earliest anime films to feature voice acting by Hollywood stars in the American release, in this case Kiefer Sutherland and Elizabeth Berkley. Armitage is the name of Case's shadowy employer in Neuromancer, don't forget.
Cowboy Bebop
Lastly, let's remember that the punk in cyberpunk can refer to music as well as to body piercings. The Cowboy Bebop television series may not appear to be openly cyberpunk, but it throws its own spin on the genre. For starters, it's a postmodern cut-up of science fiction, westerns, jazz, and rock'n'roll fused together to create a fresh setting. Hero Spike could pass for Gibson's character Case on a shadow-ridden street corner. Spike is a hard-boiled, disaffected loner, a ronin with a dark past who refuses to admit he does good for any reason other than money. And then there's the music. Composed by Yoko Kanno, one of the most famous composers in Japan, Cowboy Bebop's soundtrack mixes rock, blues, funk, and jazz. The tracks drive the show, filling it with energy. Each episode is a concert, each scene a sharp-edged music video.
Set in 2071, the story revolves around the crew of the spaceship Bebop, who try to make their living as—wait for it—bounty hunters. Each of the crew has a complex past that comes to light over the course of the series against a backdrop of chases, fights, confrontations, and betrayals. The show was planned from the start for twenty-six episodes only, and ranks as some of the best science fiction television I've seen.
Cowboy Bebop's creator Shinichiro Watanabe also directed two segments of The Animatrix. This collection of animated short films set in the world of The Matrix serves newcomers as a good gateway drug to full-on anime.
So what lies ahead for cyberpunk? Just as there are sure to be more cyberpunk pastiches published in the West, more robot cops will flourish in Japan. Remember, though, that manga and anime are no longer exclusively Japanese forms, but are becoming worldwide styles. Perhaps as these styles migrate to the west, there will be a blending of old and new leading to hybrid forms. What would manga by Pat Cadigan look like? What would Rudy Rucker's anime be about?
*When is this sushi's birthday?
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Terms
What are these things, manga and anime? Manga originally meant Japanese comics, but has evolved to mean any comics and graphic novels that are either drawn in a manga style (big eyes, tiny mouths, crazy hair) or are about themes traditionally found in manga (big robots, big swords, crazy hair). Even Americans now write and draw manga. In Japan, manga is popular with all ages, and is published in weekly or monthly serial magazines that run anywhere from two hundred to over eight hundred pages. Science fiction makes up only a part of the mangasphere: there are manga stories about sports, firefighting, romance, the paranormal, and cooking. As a form of expression, manga is used not only in comics, but in instruction manuals and even on Wanted posters.
Anime means animation. Most Japanese anime starts as manga and then leaps to television or film. Unlike in America, Japanese animation is not limited to cartoons for kids. Anime is simply a style of filmmaking used to tell stories for many age groups and in all genres: drama, action, science fiction, even pornography. You may hear anime referred to as Japanimation. This term is decades out of date and, like “Negro,” both old-fashioned and insulting.
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Tooth Bikini Rocket Sister
One area where Japanese manga and anime differ from western fiction is in titles. Perhaps it's a byproduct of translation, but the titles range from distinctive to downright bizarre: New Getter Robo, Fullmetal Alchemist, Gungrave, Fruits Basket. This makes it difficult to tell what a series is about based on its title. What does a family of mystical shapechangers have to do with fruit and/or baskets? As it turns out, more than you would think.
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In 1995, Brooks Peck helped found Science Fiction Weekly, the first professional SF news and review web site. He is currently a curator at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle. Brooks's most recent story, “Climb, Said the Crow,” can be found in the anthology In the Shadow of Evil from DAW Books.
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Under the Graying Sea
by Jonathan Sherwood
Jonathan Sherwood is a science writer for the University of Rochester, in Rochester, New York. “Essentially,” he tells us, he tries “to expose the public to the work our scientists are doing, by highlighting cool aspects of their research and writing about the science in a way a non-scientist would understand.” The job gives him fodder for story ideas and is a great fact-checking resource. Jonathan has two small daughters, and he and his wife are renovating a house, so he writes nearly all his fiction on a Palm PDA when he has a spare moment. His first sale is dedicated to its inspiration: his four-year-old daughter, Eisabella, who loves telescopes and stargazing.
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Ignition.
Tessa's head snapped back into its cradle and her lips slid away from her teeth. The shock slapped the fog off the inside of her helmet and misted her face. Behind her, Loránd groaned as he pressed into his own seat.
And behind him, past two hundred pounding meters of metal and deuterium, the largest protospike engine in history opened its mouth and screamed at the stars.
Nothing went wrong. Not at first.
The holodisplay in the side of her faceplate started running the digits. Four gees. Five. The image of the interior of the cabin blurred under the
hammering vibration. Joints in her hips and spine cracked as they were pressed flat. The respirator, locked in her jaw, swelled, forcing oxygen down her throat to keep her lungs from collapsing. Her suit constricted. Her knuckles popped. She was sure she was probably yelling but her eardrums had been shut down. The helmet battered her temples. Eight gees. Nine.
The blur of the cabin turned to a haze as her eyes deformed under their own weight. The tiny lasers of the holodisplay lit automatically, drawing images directly onto her retina; the digits of the gee counter and the stark white curve of the moon. The crescent grew as they plunged from their high lunar orbit to hurtle past by less than four hundred meters as a brilliant streak of burning metal. Halfway around, pulling out of the slingshot, the mad rush would end. She watched the image in her eye. Watched the brilliant white crest glow brighter and whiter against the black emptiness. The black and white, and halfway around the moon, the unbearably sallow gray.
Carbon spokes, pinioned into her ribs, kept them from splitting. Microwaves impelled blood through capillaries. Her eyes rolled back white and she gagged as always as she gave up control to the respirator.
And still the protospike screamed.
Eleven. Twelve.
She knew that her parents, like half the world, would be watching—standing out on porches, pausing on the fields of late-night ball games and leaning out of moving cars to watch the brilliant glare of the protospike awaken like a new star in the sky and dive into the moon. It had happened every thirty days for the past eighty years as the crews built the stellar bridge. Every thirty days.
But still, everyone paused.
She'd been three when she first saw it. Once, when she used to sleep on her father's lap as the riding mower rattled up and down the smooth hills of their lawn, he stopped and pinched the gas tube until the engine sputtered to quiet. “Would you like a star?” he whispered into her hair. With the back of grass-stained fingernails he slid her hair behind an ear and gently nudged her awake. The sky was a cloudless, near-black blue, bright only where the sun had just dipped below the distant line of maples. The silver arc of the moon floated just above the dwindling violets and purples. Crickets were waking. A hiss rippled through the fields around the house.
Asimov's SF, February 2006 Page 3