[bala · home]
[okadenamatī · reviews]
[mesaramatiziye · other writings]
[tedbezī · languages]
language: Japanese (English tr. Matt Treyvaud)
country: Japan
year: 1987
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: Legend of the Galactic Heroes, #10
dates read: 11.1.26-14.1.26
with Sunset, translated by Matt Treyvaud, I have at last finished Tanaka Yoshiki’s Legend of the Galactic Heroes series. that’s ten whole books! I haven’t finished a (new-to-me) series with more than I think four in…a very long time.
as its title suggests, this book is about the end of an era. what makes the series as a whole so good, though, is encapsulated in the book’s final line:
The legend ends, and history begins…
it would have been very easy — but not, I think, satisfying — for the series to end with one side or the other, Reinhard’s empire or the last holdouts of republicanism, winning, the triumph of the Great Man at the helm. it would also have been easy — and more satisfying, if suspect — to have such an ending that affirms that there is still work to be done but also that things will basically be better from here on out. in either case, it would have been easy to have an ending that resolves.
Sunset does neither. it ends, instead, with grief: with its characters (on both sides) still reeling from their losses, with the deaths of millions — soldiers and civilians — in the years that have occupied the series’s attention, with the republicans bitterly aware that the hard-fought foothold they have won will be difficult (perhaps impossible) to sustain, with the empire poised before an uncertain future. it ends, precisely, with history: the wars it has narrated may make for entertaining stories, legends, but the work of world-historical (or galactic-historical) change proceeds not on the scale of Galactic Heroes but rather on the scale of the basically ordinary people who commit themselves to the transformation of social relations every day. the Galactic Heroes may have broken ground, but they haven’t yet laid the first foundation stone.
the future history framing here stands out even more than it did in Upheaval, because, on the one hand, Tanaka makes it very clear from very early on what various characters’ fates will be, but, on the other hand, this doesn’t detract from the novel’s tension at all. the sense of inevitability that runs through the novel is balanced by the focus on contingency, the reminder that things could have been different; that things can always be different in the future, in the history we make.
there’s not a lot more I can say without spoiling things more than I already have. if you have any taste for military sci-fi it is absolutely worth powering through the awful translations of books 4-6 to read the whole series.
moods: adventurous, emotional, hopeful, inspiring, reflective, sad