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Planetes
プラネテス
2003 · TV series · 25 min episodes · 1 season
AnimationScience FictionFantasy
In the year 2075, mankind has reached a point where journeying between Earth, the moon and the space stations is part of daily life. However, the progression of technology in space has also resulted in the problem of the space debris, which can cause excessive and even catastrophic damage to spacecrafts and equipment.
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14 comments on Hacker News
(My first thought when reading the title is Three Body Problem, but of course you already read it) Some manga / anime recs:
- Planetes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes) is a hard scifi manga with anime adaptation about daily life of astronauts cleaning up space debris. It feels pretty grounded, you can feel how its like living in Earth orbit and Moon
- Space Brothers / Uchuu Kyodai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Brothers_(manga)) tells the story of a Japanese worker getting kicked out from his company and then he applied to JAXA, following his younger brother's footstep
Not manga/anime/books, but there's a Korean scifi movie at Netflix called Space Sweepers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Sweepers), similar to Planetes. What I found interesting is that they have people speaking different language, and you can hear their universal translator translating their conversation to their own languages. Different than western scifi where everyone speaks English
I guess I'll take this time to shill for the mid-'00s TV show Planetes, which is basically about exactly this; cleaning up orbital debris in order to maintain safe space travel.
Its actually called Planetes, which means "wanderers", and was the term the ancient Greeks used for the "wandering stars", i.e. other planets. I cannot recommend it highly enough! It starts out pretty slapstick, but if you're looking for something more thoughtful, just stick it out until after the ninja episode. I promise it's worth it.
Oh, Planetes got a movie?
I also enjoyed Ergo Proxy, Texhnolyze and Planetes. Ghost in the Shell is still the only movie I revisit every now and then (out of all movies ever). They are all slow, I want to take the time to watch them again some day.
Very different but I also enjoyed Naruto as I grew up myself. It's long (but you can skip all fillers) but sometimes very deep. I enjoyed Kenshin but never finished it.
As mentioned below Samurai Champloo is also nice and Steins Gate (nice, strange atmosphere) and Death Note: very psychological: He thinks that I think that he thinks and I'm smarter so... Love that. And One Punch Man, puts a smile on my face.
If you want weird: FLCL. What was that about?
> It's a deep, rich world with complex characters, all with Herculean responsibilities and human weaknesses.*
Planetes was recommended in the recent HN thread about space junk, and I ended up watching the whole series over the course of 4 days. It's similar to Evangelion, in that the first few episodes are goofy and awkward (except they're in their early 20s instead of teens). But by the end of the show I was blown away.
It's effectively an adult coming-of-age story, set against a sad, beautiful near-future world in which everyone is just trying to live their lives and get by. The space debris stuff is fun and maybe metaphorical, but from a plot perpsective it's almost parenthetical. I'm too young and immature to have words for the journey it took me on, but (much like Evangelion) it was exactly what I needed at the time in my life when I first saw it.
Survive through the "ninja" episode (you'll know which one I mean when you see it), and you will be rewarded.
Edit: apparently the anime and manga diverge significantly because the show was finished first. I intend to read the latter after I've had a chance to cool off from the former!
> Attack on Titan got too weird, too quickly
It picks up and starts to tie together. I almost didn't watch the second season, but a friend convinced me to and I don't regret it at all. Apparently the show and manga track closely together in plot, so you don't need to read if you've already watched, or vice versa (unless you want to read the last 20-ish chapters if you don't want to wait for the last season of the show to come out).
Don't expect profundity like Evangelion, although the plot is clearly inspired by Evangelion in some ways. But do expect high drama, long threads of intrigue, and whopper plot twists. It's one of the most exciting TV shows I've ever seen.
> I was too old for Dragonball
Too old to take it seriously, maybe! But it's still good fun, just like Space Ghost and Looney Tunes. If I ever have kids, I plan to watch it with them (although IIRC there were some racist and sexist moments that would best be elided).
> Western-focused, Japanese-animated options
I also have to recommend Avatar: The Last Airbender! Its target audience and Western origin belies its depth.
+1 Planetes is amazing. It is not available on streaming service in the US though. If someone has $100k lying around, they should aquire US distribution rights. Could probably make it back easily if it gets a million views an episode on YouTube.
In Planetes an old anime series of hard scifi which I loved there is an episode of exactly that, the protagonists need to recover a "space burial" coffin launched into deep space which accidentally after decades does a flyby of low earth orbit
So yeah, maybe, look forward to billionaires launching their dead bodies into space, after all that tesla car is still somewhere out there floating about heh
Trekkie here (more or less). I like The Orville better than Discovery. Discovery is down-right disappointing and stupid. Picard is better than Discovery, but still didn't live up to my expectations.
You're probably right about Battlestar Galactica and The Expanse being the best hard sci-fi.
It's hard to beat the episodes/stories in the earlier Star Trek shows. The Twilight Zone was able to pull off a faithful modern reboot, why can't Star Trek?
(Someone else mentioned Planetes further down in the comments. That is also good hard sci-fi.)
For lovers of anime and hard sci-fi, Planetes is a very good series exploring the issue: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816398/
There aren't enough solid science movies to make a proper recommendation, unless you want to see a documentary.
Anime however, are plenty -
Rocket Girls, Moonlight Mile, the Ghost In The Shell series of films and episodes, Planetes have good science themes that will make you think.
I like anime vs north american television because often it's a succinct 26 episode series. It's going to have a conclusion. It feels like reading a book at times.
There are many anime that go on forever. Dragon Ball Z, etc. The ones truly worth watching are the science fiction ones. Planetes, Nadesico, Ghost in the Shell, some of the early Gundams, and Evangelion. Each of those paint a very coherent picture of the world. Very unlike american television where a series is milked out over years and often fails to deliver.
"Robot" is an awfully broad category; none of my suggestions involve the giant, piloted, super-powered robots. Monster is very good, but at 72 episodes, is unusually long for a mature series. You may want to look at Tokyo Godfathers or Planetes first, to see if your interests match mine.
"xxxHolic" is a weird Japan-glish word; you can read it as "____-aholic". I've not seen the series and can't recommend either way, but from the Wikipedia article it looks like something you'd not enjoy.
Online recommendation engines seem to break when dealing with Japan-related topics; I don't know why, but it could be that some people will watch anything if it's 1) animated 2) from Japan, so the engines build false associations between wildly different works. This happens in music also -- I once listened to an orchestral re-imagining of some soundtrack by the Tokyo Philharmonic, and now Last.FM won't stop recommending awful j-pop.
The problem with forums about anime or manga is that they self-select for people who have been rejected from every other community. A solid science-fiction or horror story can find discussion in the appropriate forums, but nobody normal is interested in some high-school student's harem of magical girls.
Here are some manga / anime recommendations. Some have not been licensed for distribution in the US, or have been only partially released here, so you will need to hunt a bit for fansubs. I watch only the animated adaptations, as they're easier to hide, but feel free to order the original manga versions if you don't feel ashamed about reading comic books. Not all are adaptations -- the movies, and a few television series, are original animations.
- Monster < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_%28manga%29 >
- Planetes < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes >
- Mushishi < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushishi >
- Mononoke < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononoke_%28TV_series%29 >
- Tokyo Godfathers < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Godfathers >
If you're willing to relax your standards a bit, there are many outstanding series aimed at younger viewers.
- Denno Coil < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Coil >
- Yokohama Shopping Trip < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokohama_Kaidashi_Kik%C5%8D >
- Kino's Journey < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kino%27s_Journey >
- Cromartie High School < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromartie_High_School >
- My Neighbor Totoro < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Neighbor_Totoro > , or almost anything else by Studio Ghibli < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ghibli >
- The Girl Who Leapt Through Time < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Leapt_Through_Time >
- Yotsuba&! < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotsuba&! >