Legend of the Galactic Heroes

The audio narration by Tim Gerard Reynolds really made this worthwhile for me. There was a lot of info-dumps of the military hierarchy saturating this whole story but i understand that's fairly necessary. The action was exciting and the battles were the gems of this story. I'll look forward to watching the anime for the comparison.

Man.

I grew up as the occasional anime viewer. I was a dork, but not a superdork, basically. About two years ago now a friend of mine recommended this series to me. Not only did he recommend it, but he insisted on me watching it. So I did. I'm not sure that even he knew the profound impact that it would have on me.

Fast forward to now and the novels that the series was based off of are finally being translated into English and released to the public. When I found that out I purchased this and devoured it as quickly as I could. I've been immersed in contemporary science fiction for the past two years now and I've mostly found myself in the land of malaise more than being excited about what's out there. Reading this was just a reminder of what great science fiction can really do to a reader.

While I'm already intimately aware of the story, characters and lore of LoGH, reading the novel was a treat. The narrative style and point of views featured throughout the novel added depth and interest to one of the deepest, most interesting series that I can think of. Since this was a translation it's difficult to really hyper-analyze the prose itself, although it was punchy and kept the tone that fans will recognize from the show. That means that the narrator keeps a rather dry, historical perspective on events, but when it shifts to the point of view of the characters everything felt weighty and substantive.

The way that this series handles a rather objective view or humanity, society, governmental systems and the whole concept of “good” or “bad” is really without peer. Yes, it's a series about war, but it shows both sides and endears the reader/viewer to characters on both sides of the story, instead of looking to say who is bad and good. The whole thing works because of just how strong these characters are, too.

This isn't an overly-complicated piece of literature when it comes to language or science, which tends to be what trends heavily for science fiction these days, but the story and the characters are just so marvelously done that it's impossible not to recommend this book. If somehow you haven't seen the series (which doesn't seem like a stretch), I implore you to check out this book.

While this book was published this year, it was originally published in Japan decades ago, and it shows. I still enjoyed the book, but it suffers from some pacing problems. It definitely avoids the “rah-rah military over sheeple civilians” problem some mil-SF runs into, though the best works of Japanese mil-sf tends not to have that problem.