Editor's Blog
Battle Angel Alita: Last Order, Volume 12
Graphic Novel (Manga)
VIZ Media LLC
$9.99
Avatar, James Cameron‘s first feature film since Titanic is a transhuman film, sort of a $300 million Pocahontas story told through the world‘s most powerful graphics card by one of the most acclaimed directors in Hollywood. Yet not all science fiction fans are fully satisfied. For several years, Cameron vacillated between Avatar and another project, a live-action treatment of Battle Angel Alita, a popular, critically-acclaimed, and very long-running manga by Yukito Kishiro. Avatar won out. During a panel at this year‘s Comic-Con in New York, one fan broached the subject with Cameron: (paraphrasing) “We‘re all happy about Avatar… but what about Battle Angel?!” Cameron replied, “It‘s not a great time to ask a woman if she wants to have other kids when she‘s crowning.”
Point taken. But what about Battle Angel? There‘s a good reason for a fan to raise the issue at such an indelicate a moment — it‘s one of the best works of science fiction ever made. The first volume of the first series, titled Gunnm or “Gun Dream” in Japanese, appeared in 1990. The latest volume of the second series, Gunnm: Last Order appeared in the U.S. this October. Over two decades, Kishiro has traced the journey of Gally, a radically synthetic cyborg, across a post-apocalyptic, 26th century Earth. The American translation, inexplicably, changed her name to Alita and, sadly, changed the poetic “Gun Dream” to the prosaic “Battle Angel.”
Gally‘s story mainly concerns the experience of a mind discovering itself. Nothing of her organic body remains but her brain. Salvaged from a trash heap by a cyber-doctor, Gally has amnesia, but begins to recover memories as she battles for her life in harsh circumstances. Kishiro‘s future consists of two cities: the Scrapyard, a sprawling slum populated by cyborgs and a few struggling baseline humans, and Zalem, a floating city of genetically engineered Adonises. The Scrapyard delivers food from its outlying farms to Zalem, while Zalem provides the building blocks of the scrapyard in the form of trash.
Gally was a Martian terrorist, you see, trained in Panzer Kunst, or “Tank Art,” a martial art developed for cyborgs. When she fights, her training comes to the fore, sometimes carrying memories along with it. For two decades, Battle Angel has chronicled Gally‘s recollections and evolutions as a series of action scenes. In 1995, Kishiro completed the first run of nine volumes, but he was unhappy with the way he‘d ended Gally‘s odyssey. Five years later, he essentially drew a line through the last half of the last volume and started fresh. This new series is Battle Angel: Last Order, currently at twelve volumes.
Her first big challenger, a boy Nova rendered into a cyborg worm, laughingly quotes Nietzsche, “the mind is just the body‘s toy!”
Gunnm 12 is set in outer space. For much of Gally‘s manga career, her adventures took place against the backdrop of the conflict between Zalem and the Scrapyard, between the exploiters and the exploited. Each city also embodies a type of transhuman life. Where the Scrapyarders mostly have organic brains in inorganic bodies, the citizens of Zalem have their brains replaced by computer chips. Yet, as Gally penetrates deeper into the history between the two places, she finds that they are bound together against a common enemy. A great tower sprouts from Zalem, leading to yet another city high in orbit, Jeru. Most of Last Order concerns the interplanetary politics of Jeru and the whims of its mysterious governing supercomputer, Melchizedek.
Of course, Gally explores these mysteries mainly by beating them to death. Indeed, the last eight volumes of the manga can be considered a single fight, with occasional interludes, which themselves consist mostly of more fighting. In 12, one of the central conflicts concerns the intersection of genetic engineering with Space Karate. It seems the Venusians have cloned and improved upon a “Space Karateka” to enter into the “Zenith of Things Tournament,” a Solar System-wide fighting contest. Gally hopes to win the Z.O.T.T. in order to secure the autonomy of the Scrapyard and Zalem from Jeru. But she also intends to help her friends and plumb the depths of her own humanity — or, as Kishiro puts it, to confront her karma.
And karma is at the heart of Battle Angel. The series‘ antagonist is Desty Nova, a mad scientist who wanders the world searching for people of strong will. When he finds them, he provides them with bodies that give them the strength to pursue their desires. Nova empowers people as an experiment — he wants to see what fulfilling desire does. Nearly all of Gally‘s major opponents received Nova‘s attentions. By overcoming them, Gally distinguishes herself in Nova‘s eyes as “karmically talented.” These days, Nova serves the interests of Jeru — or at least one version of him does. He has a tendency to die and be reborn (through nanotech) with alarming frequency, a fact he himself comments on.
Self-reflection is the hallmark of Gunnm 12, as it the hallmark of the series as a whole. And Kishiro reflects most intensely on the question of the transformed body. Very early on, after Gally catches herself in a bellicose mood, she muses that she “was surely a gun or something in a prior life.” Even earlier, her first big challenger, a boy Nova rendered into a cyborg worm, laughingly quotes Nietzsche, “the mind is just the body‘s toy!” Now, Gally possesses a body more powerful than any she has ever known — and her brain, the last bit of her original flesh, has been replaced with a chip. Yet, Nova interrogates her as he always has: what will she do with her strength? Fully a machine, how will she manifest her humanity?
It‘s easy to see why Battle Angel intrigues Cameron. He is a great portraitist of strong women. We can only hope that her fans‘ eagerness to see his conception of Gally won‘t abort his desire to conceive.
Ray Huling is a freelance journalist living in Boston. He is working on a book about shellfishing in Rhode Island.
6 Comments
My belief technology’s exponential growth has dampened my enthusiasm for most of the sci fi genre. Before I knew about the exponential growth I would be more open to most authors/directors vision of the future, especially if it was well written. I would find well thought out visions completely fascinating. Although I am not completely convinced that the singularity will happen, I think it’s highly probable. I am completely convinced that the pace of technological growth is accelerating rapidly if not exponentially. This makes most sci fi scenario’s unbelievable in my eyes and distracts me from fully engaging in the story. I will be going to see Avatar just for the visual spectacle alone, but I will not probably enjoy it as much if I didn’t know about exponential growth.
Have you ever woken up and realized that you had woken up in a different world than you had gone to sleep in?
It’s a serious question, one I’d really like you to think about for a moment.
The reason I ask, is because all of us have, only we didn’t realize it. And the majority of you still don’t. The reason is that the difference is so subtle, so small, that it passed without notice except for a very few.
In the year that I was born, Man landed on the moon, and it seemed the future would be a glorious adventure of man’s conquest of space. We would soon have a lunar colony, and preparations for the colonization of mars couldn’t be farther than the turn of the century… It was an exciting time to be alive.
Then political reality set in. The government couldn’t care less about people going to the moon. It only cared about the space program because it was a salve to the ego blow of the Russians getting a satellite in orbit. Once it had been done, the government lost interest in a technology that could potentially bring wealth beyond anything the planet had ever known, because the capital investment wouldn’t see that return for decades, all of which meant no one in power then would benefit.
So good bye to all the dreams of a future in space for all us wide eyed kids, hello Viet-Nam.
But what I didn’t realize then, was that the future hadn’t died. The politicians might have cut the future down, but they forgot to rip out the roots. For the longest time, no-one paid any attention as the future spread and grew new shoots, small little runners, so tiny compared to the giant the politicians had destroyed , but in massive numbers. Microelectronics, advances in medicine, bioengineering, massive integration, all the various fields that had come together to make the Space program viable took what they had learned, and expanded, never realizing that they were all still part of the same future thought gone forever, and through ten thousand little steps, a miracle occurred…
The world changed, but no one noticed.
I know I certainly didn’t at first. For the first twenty-five years of my life, I looked at a world where the only certainty seemed that we would die in nuclear fire. The Apocalypse and Armageddon lurked around every corner, and all it seemed one could hope for was that Christianity had it right and maybe the rapture would spare some of us from the ultimate holocaust.
I was such a good little Christian in those days. Like too many people, I looked for salvation from some outside force, trying to find a hope in a world where it seemed hope had died. But by my early twenties I had seen through the hypocrisies and brainwashing and political maneuverings of a church that sought nothing more than secular power and had no faith in its own teachings. Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Baker had proven to be such fine paragons of virtue that the trite morality disguising their political agendas had become a joke. It was a world where the future was meaningless, faith was meaningless, and fear was the only certainty. All of my bright dreams of childhood lay scattered in the dust of dreary reality. Science Fiction had become my escape, my sole solace in a world without a future.
It was at this time that I enrolled in the local vo-tech, in electronics repair. I figured I might as well make one of the few things I found enjoyable a paying job. Unfortunately, the first speech given by my teacher was how the art of electronics repair was no longer needed. It was cheaper to replace than to repair, and the diagnostics skills needed to troubleshoot at the board level was nearly useless these days. Pretty good pep talk, huh? But I had paid for the course, and had my curiosity, so I tried to learn anyway. I never did finish the course, much to my regret, but it was during this class that I woke up one morning and realized the world had undergone a fundamental shift of reality.
It started with a trip to my library, because my electronics course had just touched on the quantum nature of semi conductors, and how this property was a key to miniaturization. I had picked up a couple of books on miniaturization, and one of them was a book called NANO. It was nothing more than a biography of a man named K. Eric Drexler, but it introduced me to a concept that took my world, and shattered it forever.
Imagine an entire planet made of glass, getting hit by a meteorite, followed by an endless noise of falling glass…
I had been sleeping in a world were there was no hope, only a bleak pointless existence Nietzsche would have envied, and this one concept destroyed that world forever, and replaced it with one where there was a point of hope at the end of a long and dangerous road. Nothing else about the world had changed except the fact that my eyes were open, and could see that far off promise, but that made all the difference in the world.
There was a future again… thanks to nanotechnology.
But it was not a future like those written about by Heinlein, or Asimov, or even the various Japanese Anime I fell in love with like Battle Angel Alita, or Gundam. As much as I still love all of these stories, I can never again see them with the wide eyed wonder I did as a child. I simply can’t view that future as anything other than a product of a world which no longer exists. It’s never going to happen.
The same with almost every other Sci-fi book I read any more. From Star Trek, to Snow Crash, to Ghost in the Shell, they are all flawed visions of the future seen through the lens of that bleak past I once existed in. The world we are headed towards is as far beyond these visions as a Shakespearian Sonnet is from doggerel verse.
From the early days of learning about Nanotech to researching all the other advances leading to the Singularity, the more I learn, the more that these much loved stories pale against reality. Science Fiction has lost it’s magic. I still enjoy picking up new books, and have grown addicted to Anime and Manga, but they are no longer my first love, though I will never deny their influences in helping me shape my view of the future.
Reality has simply grown beyond them.
(to Lewis, I wrote this ages ago, but your post made me dig it up from the depths of my hard drive because we agreed so well XDDDDDD )
That’s also exactly what I feel. My biggest problem with sci-fi is the fact that even though it portrays most physics accurately (except exponential trends and the occasional gravity-defying floating rocks from Avatar), it completely ignores Darwin’s theory.
I simply cannot suspend my disbelief when I see aliens with the body plan of a fish adapted to Earth’s oceans as they were in the Paleozoic. Science fiction authors have no idea whatsoever about the distinction between parrochial traits (like the accident of having four limbs – spiders and insects do just fine with more) and general traits (like eyes and wings – evolved several times independently on Earth alone).
Valkyrie, I completely agree with you and thanks for posting, it brought up many great memories. As kid a growing up in the the “Tang” generation of space flight and discovery, I was extremely disappointed in our space program decline. I went through a rough period of personal hope that one day we would truly become space explorers. However, today I have the unbridled enthusiasm about technology and it’s potential impact upon space exploration and discovery (Just because I expect to live much longer).
P.S.
I watched Avatar today and I highly recommend it! Although the story is not very believable to a person who understands exponential growth of tech, it completely transports you to an alien world that is believable. This movie is the closest thing we have ever gotten to visiting another planet. It’s so vibrant and alive, I am still in awe 12 hours after watching it. The 3D was integrated flawlessly. Cameron did an amazing job and the story actually evoked a ton of emotion from me. If you have an IMAX 3D near you its a must see.
The future is more than beyond our dreams; it is beyond us.
If there is a central theme of all sci fi (at least that I’ve seen) it is that we will get to exist in a world full of possibilities. Nearly magical technology will empower us to do anything we can think of. But that’s the problem. The development of nearly magical technology will, by necessity, create things that can think better than we can. These things will push us aside and begin chasing their own dreams; dreams we won’t be able to share.
The future won’t be our playground. It will be a place that vaguely remembers us as an inferior precursor, just like we remember everything that came before us.
Perhaps we will manage to keep up, in a way, by augmenting our capabilities and leaving our core sense of self intact. But even this will so change the way we think that we will become something else. I can’t imagine how anything can become immortal and supremely powerful and still think the way it used to.
Well, having seen the movie Avatar, I’m pleased and may see it again in fact. But I agree, I’d like to see Cameron portray Galli in all her splendor and travail. I loved the anime Galli and still have my original VHS. She has a real pathos that contemporary humans can relate to, and her world will come to symbolize the condition of the vast majority of humans on Earth more as the years go by, and as the super-wealthy continue to secede from humanity (if you go by current trends.) It has a real old-fashioned cyberpunk feel to it that most folks will now recognize and identify with pretty easily. I sure hope he does it, and would love to contribute to the effort.
Not to mention that the open ending leaves plenty of room for sequels. TONS of room for game development off this story too, of course. I would pay to see this as a movie in English or with subtitles. I’m sure plenty of my Asian brothers and sisters feel the same way. You can probably have a solid blockbuster in the Occident [i]and[/i] Orient with this one.
frog_jr