Science Fiction

My introduction to Robert Heinlein came during a class I took back at college on the literature of science fiction, the same class where I first read Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. The timing was perfect, since I was a Libertarian at the time and Heinlein is fairly well-known for his broadly Libertarian views, which feature prominently in his work. That ideological sympathy wasn’t enough to make me a fan of the novel selected for the class, Stranger in a Strange Land, though. The story had some interesting moments, enough that I am glad that I read it, but it features a hippie version of Libertarianism with free love and such, which even then I had little patience for.

Tadano Nobuaki’s 7 Billion Needles starts off right, with an extremely introverted girl walking by the sea and noticing what at first looks like a shooting star, but which then turns towards her and incinerates her.

Awesome.

She gets better, though, and also gets drafted into helping to hunt down an extraterrestrial menace which threatens all life on Earth.

Clearly, Tadano’s story, based on Hal Clement’s Needle, jumps right into the action. For good reason, too - the whole series is only four relatively short volumes, and Tadano keeps up a brisk pace throughout. On one hand, this means that there’s never a dull moment, no need to pad out the story to make it longer, nor any sense of rushing to finish too quickly. On the downside, there’s not a lot of depth here, and a couple fairly major changes in characters’ personalities come too abruptly (for those who’ve read it already, I’m thinking especially of the change in the relationship between Horizon and Maelstrom). Overall, though, the comic is as close to a perfect length for this story as one can reasonably expect.