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Boston, Christopher, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi, eds. Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 269 pp. Softcover. ISBN 978-0-8166-4974-7. $20.00.
The University of Minnesota Press has recently published several excellent studies of Japanese media, including Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History (2007) by Scott Nygren and the Mechademia series (inaugurated in 2006) edited by Frenchy Lunning. Joining them is Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime, a superlative volume of eleven collected essays (nine of which are reproduced or expanded versions of previously published essays) along with an introduction and an afterword that together attempt to connect the print tradition of science fiction in Japan to its anime counterpart. The book is divided into two unequal parts, the first consisting of five essays concentrating on prose science fiction and the second - which is fifty percent larger than the first - consisting of six essays devoted to science fiction animation. Surprisingly, reprinted images from cited texts (print or visual) are used sparingly throughout the book, but the quality of the descriptions is so evocative in the majority of the essays - whether it's a discussion of Abe Kobo's novel Inter Ice Age 4 (1959) or the television show Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995-96) - that the sparing use of images isn't a major deficiency. Many of the contributors, including Azuma Hiroki, Livia Monnet, and Susan J. Napier, have written before on various aspects of Japanese culture, and all but two of the contributors are practicing academicians, resulting in a scholarly text that would work better with upperdivision undergraduates. Each essay includes highly detailed endnotes that are themselves a treasure trove of research.
Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams' approach of looking at print texts beginning in the 1930s provides much useful insight on how both indigenous and imported science fiction literature came to influence everything from Japan's national and political identity to its visual media (including film and video games) to the export of these cultural artifacts. The editors begin with a tantalizing introduction foregrounding how pervasive Japanese science fiction has become due to its ability to find continuous distribution through each new iteration of communication...