[bala · home]
[okadenamatī · reviews]
[mesaramatiziye · other writings]
[tedbezī · languages]
language: Japanese (English tr. Daniel Huddleston)
country: Japan
year: 1986
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: Legend of the Galactic Heroes, #7
dates read: 18.1.25-23.1.25
Tanaka Yoshiki’s Tempest, volume book of his Legend of the Galactic Heroes series, is one of my favorite installments to date. the return of Daniel Huddleston as translator is a welcome change from Tyran Grillo’s work on the previous three books: Huddleston’s translation still falters from time to time, but it is competent, internally consistent, and overall engaging.
we are finally, now, entering the home stretch: Tempest sees a triumphant Reinhard consolidate his empire’s control over the territory of the Free Planets Alliance while Yang Wen-li is left scrambling with a tiny, ragtag force and a single remaining “free” planet. they are balanced precariously on a knife’s edge, and it seems clear that at this point everything — instead of just most things — is going to go off the rails in the final three books.
perhaps more than any previous book, Tempest leans hard into the conceit that this is a future history, integrating at times quite extended passages from other historians (and commenting on the credibility of their stances and arguments). this and the plot itself — the final conquest of the FPA by the empire — enables Tanaka to offer his most spirited defense yet of the principles of democracy and democratic governance, even as he and his characters are keenly aware of the failures of the FPA’s liberal democratic structure. the novel is also, in this vein, keenly aware of the contradiction between its focus on military characters and its emphasis on the importance of democracy — one of its central concerns is Yang’s struggle not to let those around him make him into the leader of the democratic revolution. once again no-one is doing it like him.
on the Imperial side, it’s becoming ever more difficult to ignore Reinhard’s conspicuous (and plot-relevant) lack of interest in women in contrast to a) his relationship with Kircheis and b) his obvious infatuation with his teenage “chamberlain”. this and whatever the fuck is going on with von Reuentahl vis-à-vis Reinhard (and Mittermeier, for that matter) do give me some pause insofar as there’s a certain saveur à homophobia about them. we’ll see where the rest of the series goes on this front.
unfortunately, the introduction of a new female character (the sixteen-year-old daughter of one of Yang’s subordinates, clearly being set up as a love interest for Julian, Yang’s teenaged-still-I-think former ward) has done little to balance out the series’s treatment of women so far. I’ll grant that it’s refreshing that Karin is a rank-and-file soldier who wants to be allowed to go kill people with an axe; the other major female characters are Yang’s wife, who technically has a rank but seems to hold it mainly for her administrative abilities and who functions basically as his secretary, and Reinhard’s chief-of-staff, who does at least get to have moments of interiority. the only other women who show up are an Evil Seductress and a Housewife. I do think the series is quite good in spite of its bad gender politics, but it does have bad gender politics. not, for the most part, egregiously sexist — except for some uncomfortable stuff about Karin’s age — but fundamentally just 1980s gender attitudes transposed into the space future.
the space war writing remains excellent. the distant third person narration works really well here: I appreciate Tanaka’s focus on fleets as a unit, rather than trying to focus on individual ships or individual characters. admirals’ names are used synecdochically for the ships under their command, and the result is a brisk, vivid narration that makes space tactics accessible. the FPA forces’ final stand in this book is a particularly good example of this, I think.
while a lot of things happen in this book, I was also struck by how much time Tanaka allows for characters to breathe between action sequences (whether political or military). there’s an extended sequence of Yang’s forces grieving — and trying to recover emotionally — after the final destruction of the FPA’s military and the death of its commander. notwithstanding the gender politics and the ups and downs of translations, I remain extremely impressed with the series as a whole, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how it ends. we’ll see how Matt Treyvaud does with the last three books!
moods: inspiring, tense