Flight, Tanaka Yoshiki

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language: Japanese (English tr. Tyran Grillo)
country: Japan
year: 1985
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: Legend of the Galactic Heroes, #6
dates read: 25.8.24-3.9.24

I’ve made it. I’ve finished Tanaka Yoshiki’s Flight, and so at long last I’m free of Tyran Grillo’s Legend of the Galactic Heroes translations — it’s back to Daniel Huddleston for book 7 and then on to Matt Treyvaud for books 8-10.

in terms of translation quality, this was definitely an infuriating step back from Mobilization. once again it felt as if every sentence in the novel had been translated in isolation from the rest of the book (let alone the series), and the result was sentences and, indeed, whole paragraphs that made no sense. often this was in such a way that you could figure out what the sentence was supposed to say, but this made reading of the book something of a chore.

which is a shame, because we’re finally moving out of the prelude and into the Big Historical Events that the narration has been alluding to since Dawn. where Reinhard’s empire looked invincible at the end of Mobilization, now it’s clear that there are cracks; my beloved Yang Wen-li, meanwhile, is being strong-armed by people around him into a position of political leadership (and armed rebellion) that he does not want, one which I suspect will put his principles to a dramatic test. while I have been willing to endure Grillo’s translations for Yang’s sake, I’m excited to see what the climax of the series will look like in a more readable translation. thank god.

the gender politics of this one are a bit tedious, but no more so than in previous books, and it seems like we’re adding another Strong Woman to the cast (clearly being set up as a love interest for Julian), so that’s something, at least.

I think it would be productive, if one knew more about Japanese politics than I do, to read these books against Japan’s internal politics during the 1980s — certainly I have to assume Tanaka’s strident opposition to nationalism, militarism, and religion is at least partly a response to Japanese rearmament and the Nakasone premiership, though veiled under both science fiction and the framing of being “inspired by 19th-century European wars”. (strikingly absent, thinking about it from this angle, is any serious consideration of colonialism; there are no aliens, so Tanaka presents human expansion into space as a taking of terra nullius.)

onwards and upwards.

moods: dark, reflective


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