Planetes volume 1


By Makoto Yukimura, translated and adapted by Yuki Nakamura & Ann Wenger (TokyoPop)
ISBN: 978-1-59182-262-2

The hard, gritty mystery and imagination of space travel, so much a component of immediate post-World War II industrial society, once again captivated a legion of level-headed imagineers at the end of the 20th century when relative newcomer Makoto Yukimura rekindled interest in near-space exploration in all its harsh and grimy glory with this inspiring “nuts-and-bolts” manga series which explored the probable rather than the possible…

Yukimura (born in Yokohamain 1976, just as the once-ambitious American space program was languishing in cash-strapped doldrums and five long years before the first space shuttle launch) began his professional life as an assistant to veteran creator Shin Morimura before launching his independent career with the Planetes.

Working exclusively for Kodansha, his award-winning premier Seinen series ran in Weekly Morning magazine from January 1999-January 2004 and was later collected as four tankōbon volumes. The serial easily made the jump to a popular anime series and Yukimura – after producing Sayōnara ga Chikai node for Evening magazine – has since 2005 abandoned the future for the past and concentrated his creative energies on the monolithic historical epic Vinland Saga – serialized in Weekly Shōnen Magazine and Afternoon – and filling 11 bloodcurdling volumes to date…

The premise of Planetes is devilishly simply and powerfully engaging. Humanity is a questing species but cannot escape its base origins. In 2074 space travel and exploitation is practically commonplace but as we’ve conquered the void between Earth and the asteroid belt and prepare to exploit the outer planets, the once-pristine void around us has become clotted with our obsolete tech and casually discarded rubbish.

Even the most minute piece of junk or debris falling through hard vacuum is a high-speed, potentially deadly missile, and to keep risk to a minimum hardy teams of rugged individualists have to literally sweep the heavens free of our discarded crap.

‘A Stardust Sky’ begins with the death of a passenger on a commercial low-orbit space liner before jumping six years forward to introduce a trio of these celestial dustbin-men scooping up Mankind’s negligent cast-offs and unconsidered detritus.

Hachirota Hoshino is the newest member of the team, a kid who craves becoming a real astronaut and famous explorer like his dad and even dreams of one day owing his own prestige spaceship. However excitable “Hachimaki” is quickly becoming disenchanted with the dreary, dull and disgusting daily life of drudgery aboard DS-12 – a sanitation/cargo ship fondly dubbed Toybox but little better than the discards he and his two comrades daily scoop up or destroy…

These days there’s something wrong with the sombre, stoic Russian, Yuri Mihairokov.

The big man is increasingly distracted, blanking out, staring vacantly into the Wild Black Yonder as the cleaners orbit the Earth at 8 kilometres per second. Events come to head when a shard of micro-debris holes their ramshackle vessel and an old timer reveals the Russian’s tragic secret.

Long ago Yuri and his wife were on that shuttle and when it was holed she died. Heartbroken, her husband – one of the few survivors – returned to space to clear the deadly trash that took his wife, but he never forgot her.

Later, whilst drifting in the void the solitary astronaut sees a glitter, and her keepsake compass just floats into his hand, brought back to him by the winds of space. Beguiled, Yuri falls into Earth’s Gravity Well and only Hachimaki’s most frantic efforts save his comrade from a fiery death.

Safely back in free orbit, the Russian opens his gauntleted fist. On the compass are scratched his wife’s final thoughts as death took her – “please save Yuri”…

The poignant, bittersweet and deeply spiritual initial episode is followed by ‘A Girl from Beyond the Earth’ wherein young Hoshino slowly and impatiently recovers from a broken leg in the hospital of the moon colony Archimedes Crater City.

These tales are laced with the most up-to-date space science available to author Yukimura, and the recent discovery that extended time spent in low or zero-gravity radically weakens bones and muscles was the lynchpin of this moving brush with another youngster bound irrevocably to the void.

When a doctor suggests returning to full-gravity Earth to recuperate the easy way, Hachi is in two minds and sorely tempted. His commander and fellow debris-destroyer Fee Carmichael and an old 20-year veteran pour scorn on the quitter’s option. All real astronauts know that once back on the home world few ever return to space.

The lad is still tempted though until he strikes up a friendship with a thin, wasted young woman. Nono has been on Luna for twelve years and dreams of blue skies and open seas but will never see them. After aged Mr. Roland chooses to spend the rest of his life among the stars, Hachimaki learns Nono’s incredible sad secret and at last abandons all thoughts of forsaking the stars…

The focus stays on nicotine-fiend Fee Carmichael as she struggles to enjoy a well-deserved vice in ‘A Cigarette under Starlight’ in Orientale Basin Underground City a few months later. With breathing-oxygen at a premium, smokers must juggle their addiction for the weed with their dedication to life in space and poor Fee has been Jonesing for a drag for far too long. Now though, even whilst on shore-leave at a station big enough and sufficiently civilised to house a designated smoking area, the Toybox’s chief is still unable to indulge her vice.

An ideological terrorist group called the Space Defense Fighters want to keep the void pristine and free of Mankind’s polluting influence and have been detonating bombs in outposts all over the moon. Their latest outrages targeted the base’s vending machines and smoking rooms so the authorities have sealed them all in the name of public safety.

Driven near to distraction, Fee snaps and lights up in the public toilets, forgetting that smoke detection devices and fire countermeasures are automatic, incredibly sensitive and painfully effective…

Humiliated, sodden but undeterred, she takes off for another city and a solitary snout (for all you non-Brits that’s a particularly derogatory term for having a smoke) and finds the only guy more in need of a drag than her. Of course setting bombs is nervous work and a quick ciggy always calms his nerves…

The frustration is too much and Fee returns to her job but the SDF’s explosive campaign doesn’t end. Their latest scheme is the creation of deadly Kessler Syndrome wave (a blast or impact which changes the trajectories of free-floating orbital scrap and debris, making even more debris/shrapnel and aiming it like a hard rain of lethal micro-missiles)…

With a commandeered satellite directed inexorably at a space station, the terrorists intend to detonate their captured vehicle and shred the habitat – which coincidentally carries the last smokes in space – shooting it out of the sky and creating a lethal chain reaction making high-orbit space forever un-navigable…

Unsure of her own motives Fee uses the DS-12 to suicidally shove the stolen projectile away from the station and into Earth’s atmosphere…

In ‘Scenery for a Rocket’, as Fee recuperates in Florida, Hachimaki brings Yuri to visit Japan and falls back into a violent and historic sibling rivalry with baby brother Kyutaro, a rocketry prodigy even more determined to conquer space than his surly fanatical brother or their absentee astronaut father Goro…

Happily the Russian’s calming influence begins to repair fences between the warring Hoshino boys, but not before a series of explosive confrontations lead to Yuri finally passing on his beloved wife’s compass…

This first passionately philosophical and sentimentally suspenseful chronicle concludes with ‘Ignition’ as Fee, Yuri and Hachimaki reunite in time for the junior junkman to suffer an almost career-ending psychological injury. Although utterly unharmed by a rogue solar flare, the lad was completely isolated in the void for so long that he developed post-traumatic “Deep-Space Disorder”.

If he could not shake off the debilitating hallucinatory condition his life in space was over. Nothing the experts of the Astronaut Training Center did seemed to work, but fortunately Yuri knew just what prodding could awaken the wide-eyed, Wild Black Wonder in his feisty little comrade…

Tense, sensitive and moodily inspirational, these tales readily reinvigorate and reinvent the magical allure of the cold heavens for newer generations and this authentic, hard-edged and wittily rational saga is a treat no hard-headed dreamer with head firmly in the clouds can afford to miss…

This book – which also includes prose biographies of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert H. Goddard, Herman Julius Oberth & Werhner von Braun in ‘A Brief History of Modern Rocket Science’ – are printed in the traditional Japanese right to left, back to front format.
© 2001 Makoto Yukimura. All rights reserved. English text © 2003 TOKYOPOP Inc.