![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inverarityA dystopian screed from an award-winning Japanese SF author
Haikasoru/VIZ Media, 2007, 272 pages
Keikaku "Project" Itoh was an award-winning Japanese science fiction author who was probably best known for writing one of the Metal Gear Solid novels. He died from cancer at the young age of 35. Genocidal Organ was his debut novel, which he supposedly wrote in ten days.
Genocidal Organ takes place in an alternate history very much like our own, except that post-9/11, the "security state" ramped up its surveillance even more than it did in the real world, and technology accelerated a little faster, so that by the present day, soldiers benefit from nanobots, wireheading, and advanced psychotherapeutic techniques that remove all moral hesitancy or pain reactions while they're in the field. They have chameleon-skin bodysuits, and are dropped into war zones at supersonic speed in capsules that are encased in the flesh of vat-grown dolphins and whales. This supposedly provides cloaking and other benefits, though it's never really explained why dolphins and whales. It's a bizarre bit of technology that was perhaps meant as a commentary on Japan's inhumane slaughter of cetaceans, or maybe it was just meant to make the Western powers who use this technology that much more horrid.
In this world, a terrorist nuke destroyed Sarajevo, and the response from the nuclear powers was not: "Holy shit, we need to curb this right now!" Instead, it was ".... hmm, that actually wasn't so bad. I mean, the rest of Europe is still basically fine...."
With nuclear weapons back on the table, the world quickly goes to a more hellish handbasket. India and Pakistan nuke each other back to the pre-nuclear age, but they still have enough guns to be killing each other, and this barely slows the Western powers down.
As you might expect from the title, Genocidal Organ is a very grim and cynical novel.
Captain Clavis Shepherd is an American intelligence officer. More precisely, he is a Special Forces assassin, sent to kill people to make the world a better place. All of his missions involve targeting bad guys responsible for assorted genocides and atrocities, of which there are no shortages. Somehow, none of this killing actually reduces the number of genocides and atrocities. In fact, all over the world, even in formerly stable and peaceful countries, civil wars and genocides are erupting with abruptness and seemingly from nowhere.
Captain Shepherd engages a lot of these sorts of deep thoughts as he drives to his next engagement, and I sensed we were hearing the voice of the author here. Much of the book almost reads as a satirical anti-American screed. The protagonist is a self-aware but morally unreflective American enforcing the Pax Americana, and as things get worse and worse, he spends lots of time wondering why and reflecting on all the bad shit he's seen, but without questioning his place in it.
Eventually we learn that another American, named John Paul, is always seen in the area in the days before another civil war erupts. He appears to be a mesmerizing Wormtongue, capturing the ear of national leaders, respected elders, people who would never lead their people down the path of violence... until suddenly college professors are butchering their former students and entire countries are fielding armies of child soldiers, whom Captain Shepherd and his crew dutifully mow down on their quest to stop John Paul and make the world safe for democracy and Domino's Pizza.
Japanese science fiction is definitely a different flavor. In fact I detected shades of similarity with other Japanese literature I have read, even of the non-fantastical variety. Japanese writers appear to pay much more attention to minute details of scenery, sensations, emotional reactions, and interior monologues. So it is that even in a dystopian novel about a Special Forces assassin who spends much of the book stacking up bodies like cordwood, you often find yourself inside his head, navel-gazing about his purpose in life and why things are the way they are, even though he never actually exerts any agency of his own until the end. Which perhaps is the point.
I found this book interesting for its perspective and its relentlessly cynical, grimdark politics. But while somewhat thought-provoking, it really didn't have all that much to say. The "grammar of genocide" is an interesting concept (the protagonist even name-checks the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), but mostly this book felt rushed and frenetic, bloody and cynical, with a bitter and entirely appropriate ending. Perhaps some of the fault lies in the translation, but I liked it but didn't love it.
My complete list of book reviews.
Haikasoru/VIZ Media, 2007, 272 pages
The war on terror exploded, literally, the day Sarajevo was destroyed by a homemade nuclear device. The leading democracies transformed into total surveillance states, and the developing world has drowned under a wave of genocides. The mysterious American John Paul seems to be behind the collapse of the world system, and it’s up to intelligence agent Clavis Shepherd to track John Paul across the wreckage of civilizations and to find the true heart of darkness—a genocidal organ.
So, there was this little girl’s head shoved face first into the tire tracks in the mud.
It looked almost like a scene from Alice in Wonderland—it was as though the girl were trying to enter the magical kingdom through the deep furrows in the mud left by truck tires. Only I don’t remember the back of Alice’s head being shot clean open or the contents of Alice’s skull glistening under the sky like a crimson flower in full bloom.
Keikaku "Project" Itoh was an award-winning Japanese science fiction author who was probably best known for writing one of the Metal Gear Solid novels. He died from cancer at the young age of 35. Genocidal Organ was his debut novel, which he supposedly wrote in ten days.
Genocidal Organ takes place in an alternate history very much like our own, except that post-9/11, the "security state" ramped up its surveillance even more than it did in the real world, and technology accelerated a little faster, so that by the present day, soldiers benefit from nanobots, wireheading, and advanced psychotherapeutic techniques that remove all moral hesitancy or pain reactions while they're in the field. They have chameleon-skin bodysuits, and are dropped into war zones at supersonic speed in capsules that are encased in the flesh of vat-grown dolphins and whales. This supposedly provides cloaking and other benefits, though it's never really explained why dolphins and whales. It's a bizarre bit of technology that was perhaps meant as a commentary on Japan's inhumane slaughter of cetaceans, or maybe it was just meant to make the Western powers who use this technology that much more horrid.
In this world, a terrorist nuke destroyed Sarajevo, and the response from the nuclear powers was not: "Holy shit, we need to curb this right now!" Instead, it was ".... hmm, that actually wasn't so bad. I mean, the rest of Europe is still basically fine...."
With nuclear weapons back on the table, the world quickly goes to a more hellish handbasket. India and Pakistan nuke each other back to the pre-nuclear age, but they still have enough guns to be killing each other, and this barely slows the Western powers down.
As you might expect from the title, Genocidal Organ is a very grim and cynical novel.
Captain Clavis Shepherd is an American intelligence officer. More precisely, he is a Special Forces assassin, sent to kill people to make the world a better place. All of his missions involve targeting bad guys responsible for assorted genocides and atrocities, of which there are no shortages. Somehow, none of this killing actually reduces the number of genocides and atrocities. In fact, all over the world, even in formerly stable and peaceful countries, civil wars and genocides are erupting with abruptness and seemingly from nowhere.
That’s why, as I sat there in the truck driving toward our target, I had no way of telling you which of the forces in this country were right and which were mistaken. I was just another dumb ’Murkin, worldview molded and bent into shape by a diet of CNN and talk shows. Everything I knew about the world I learned from a monitor in my home while I ate my Domino’s Pizza. All I knew was that in the last millennium there had been lots of wars, lots of terrorist attacks, lots of different ideological conflicts, and that these all happened for lots of different reasons. People had different motives, and the nature of warfare was constantly changing and developing.
The only thing that remained constant was the pizza.
It had existed before I was born and would probably still be doing a brisk trade when I died, whenever that would be. In a world where Domino’s was my only constant, it was hard to grasp the full mutability of all the variables of the world.
This, I suppose, was Washington’s new White Man’s Burden—to be born in America, land of the unchanging pizza chain and shopping mall, and to send people like me out into the big bad outside world to go and kill Mr. Johnny Foreigner for this-and-that reason. Whatever. I wouldn’t like to be in the position of making those sorts of decisions. Give me the Empire of the Rising Pizza Dough any day of the week.
Give me my life.
And why not? Just like Williams, I had relinquished the unwelcome responsibility of having to decide things for myself. No buck stops with me. It gets passed up the chain to … who knows?
Captain Shepherd engages a lot of these sorts of deep thoughts as he drives to his next engagement, and I sensed we were hearing the voice of the author here. Much of the book almost reads as a satirical anti-American screed. The protagonist is a self-aware but morally unreflective American enforcing the Pax Americana, and as things get worse and worse, he spends lots of time wondering why and reflecting on all the bad shit he's seen, but without questioning his place in it.
Eventually we learn that another American, named John Paul, is always seen in the area in the days before another civil war erupts. He appears to be a mesmerizing Wormtongue, capturing the ear of national leaders, respected elders, people who would never lead their people down the path of violence... until suddenly college professors are butchering their former students and entire countries are fielding armies of child soldiers, whom Captain Shepherd and his crew dutifully mow down on their quest to stop John Paul and make the world safe for democracy and Domino's Pizza.
Japanese science fiction is definitely a different flavor. In fact I detected shades of similarity with other Japanese literature I have read, even of the non-fantastical variety. Japanese writers appear to pay much more attention to minute details of scenery, sensations, emotional reactions, and interior monologues. So it is that even in a dystopian novel about a Special Forces assassin who spends much of the book stacking up bodies like cordwood, you often find yourself inside his head, navel-gazing about his purpose in life and why things are the way they are, even though he never actually exerts any agency of his own until the end. Which perhaps is the point.
I found this book interesting for its perspective and its relentlessly cynical, grimdark politics. But while somewhat thought-provoking, it really didn't have all that much to say. The "grammar of genocide" is an interesting concept (the protagonist even name-checks the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), but mostly this book felt rushed and frenetic, bloody and cynical, with a bitter and entirely appropriate ending. Perhaps some of the fault lies in the translation, but I liked it but didn't love it.
My complete list of book reviews.
