All You Need is Kill

The thing for me about military sci-fi that is a large part of why I don't read/watch a lot of it is that I feel like a lazy asshole sitting around consuming it when all the characters are busting their asses all the time. This was a big problem for me when I was watching Battlestar Galactica; I used to try and see how long I could hold certain karate stances during episodes or I'd just feel bad about myself. I ran into a similar problem when I began reading Hiroshi Sakurazaka'sAll You Need is Kill on the bus, which is why I read most of it in two sessions on an exercise bike at the gym. Results: book is pretty good, also my legs hurt.

All You Need is Kill takes place in a future where alien robots filled with nanobots, called Mimics, are trying to xenoform the earth to a weird toxic wasteland, and are thus in a perpetual war with humans, who liked the earth the way it was. The best weapon the humans have are these big Iron-Man-suit kind of systems called Jackets. The book is told from the point of view of Keiji Kiriya, a fresh recruit to the Japanese wing of what has become essentially an international army. After dying horribly in his first battle, Keiji gets stuck in a time loop, reliving the 30 hours before his death over and over again. He has no idea why, and the only person who might know or be able to help him get out of it is an American Special Ops soldier named Rita Vrataski, colloquially known as the Full Metal Bitch.

This book has its "of course it is" moments but overall it's a fun, fast-paced read. The English translation gives it a gruff, straightforward, military style. It's short, and split into four long chapters that are further split into numbered scenes that keep track of the time loops. It's got gritty grimdark war-is-hell kind of stuff all over the place, not in a way that I found particularly moving but enough that it didn't seem to be taking war lightly. It's got a very cinematic quality that's definitely begging to be made into a graphic novel or a movie; I'm not sure if Edge of Tomorrow is actually that movie, since apparently they whitewashed the characters and moved it to Europe, which I'm guessing means they also wiped the role of Japanese technology in modern civilization. Bad job, Hollywood.

I hope I will be able to formulate more and better thoughts on this before (and, most likely, during) the book club meeting for this on Thursday, but I didn't want to put off writing a review until then even though it would probably have more to say.

Originally posted at http://bloodygranuaile.livejournal.com/47779.html.