敵は海賊・海賊版―DEHUMANIZE

SF space opera with a humorous bent

(Review date: January 2011)

Recently I've started looking for new books to read from the list of past winners of the Best Japanese Novel category of the Seiun Award for science fiction. Like the English-language Hugo award, the Seiun is voted for annually by fans; so the backlist is a good way for me to find new authors with a pretty low chance of picking complete turkeys.

Teki wa Kaizoku won in 1984; it has since spawned a number of sequels (one of which won again in 1998). The cover says it's "hard SF space opera"; I'd agree with the latter but not the former. It's not joke-a-minute, but there's a definite humour to it and it certainly doesn't take itself seriously.

At the start of the book the princess of the planet Firaaru has gone missing, and her servant the lady Sharufafin Sharu is trying to find her. In desperation, she has entered a pirate bar in a pirate city on Mars, to meet the space pirate Youmei who she believes is the only person who can help her.

Hot on Youmei's tail are the two best detectives in the police Piracy Division, Lateru and Apuro. Lateru's family were all killed by pirates and so he is single-minded about hunting down pirates. Apuro is an alien who looks like a large cat and whose main interests in life are killing pirates, eating, and insulting Lateru. Neither is particularly concerned about collateral damage; the division has a bad reputation with civilians and a large and highly automated complaints department...

The hunt for the missing princess quickly develops into a romp through an alternate universe involving multiple versions of all the main characters (causing much confusion when they meet each other).

I enjoyed the banter between the two detectives; in general sections involving them and Apuro in particular are usually played for laughs. This did mean that it was slightly jarring when they were first introduced following the long initial section about Youmei which was in a serious style. The plot was also generally fun to read, especially when the various copies of the characters meet up. The handful of space battle scenes I found quite dull, since they largely consisted of the characters ordering their spaceships around with technobabble like this:

「スタンバイＰＰＳＳ、モード06/フォーマット010。艦外動力支援のよる一次動力発生手順を確認しろ」

but fortunately they weren't very long.

I would say the difficulty level was about average for a novel: not notably difficult but not noticably easy either. I did skip lightly over some of the worst bits of technobabble; if you're the "look up every word you don't know" type you'll probably gain some obscure vocabulary there.

Overall, I enjoyed this book, although it took me a little while to get into. I don't think I'll bother to pick up the later books in the series, though.