Starship & the Haiku

This may be one of the more obscure books that I've ever read, and it, more than anything, validates my insistence on shopping at used bookstore. It's by no means a masterpiece, but Sucharitkul's vision of post-apocalyptic Japan is more alive and original than most mass-produced heroic fantasies and repackaged techno-thrillers. If you can't understand how Darwin's Radio won the Nebula, this novel is for you.I admit that you'll have trouble seeing this novel as the book that rekindled my faith in science fiction if you only read these next two paragraphs. The characters are mostly one-dimensional: Takahashi is the ultimate Dark Lord Foulness character, and his fate at the end is a cheat. I had to keep reminding myself that Josh Nakamura was thirty years old; he would have been a more interesting fifteen-year-old. The only interesting character, Akiro Ishida, only appears for half the book.The plot itself leaves much to be desired; plot holes abound, and, as I said before, the villain's final fate, and the lessons learned, were incredibly unsatisfying. Not only that, but the characters think in exclamation points, and sometimes the revelations can be too obvious. So you'll have to trust me when I say that, despite the numerous flaws in narrative, Suchartikul's vision is so compelling that I'd recommend it anyway.I always got the sense that he was busting at the seams with ideas about the tension between art and life, about beauty, about courage and honor and ecology and a dozen other things, and if he wasn't subtle enough, that's because this is a labor of love. His triumph is in a tour of a suicide colony; the mixture of the grotesque and the serene, culminating in an cruel mockery of artistry, is simply astounding, and absolves a good many literary sins on its own accord.I understand that not everyone will be willing to ignore the book's flaws as I was, so take this for a limited recommendation (or possibly damning with faint praise). It was unique, and I derived enjoyment out of it; if you're looking for something other than the near-identical novels clogging up the Science Fiction section, you may like it too.