Reviews

Planetes is hailed as a hard sci-fi classic, with an amazing and well-realized world. The popular perception is that it is a thinking person's manga, that it is lifelike and [insert hyperbole here]. I am impressed by how well the world of Planetes is constructed by someone without a background in it. Unfortunately, the contextualizing socioeconomics, politics, discussions of orbital regimes, etc. are all just window dressing. This manga is not about those things. This manga is about the main cast. They aren't very interesting or extremely compelling to follow. I would not refer to them as static, but I would also not call them particularly inspiring models of growth. I'm not reading this manga for them, and they don't help draw me in with their core personality traits, but I certainly have to see the world as they do - and they are kind of clueless? This is where things start kind of falling apart.

Planetes really takes the plowshares approach to visualizing the future: a bunch of low-tech grunts doing jobs. A combination of them as the vantage point and how the author doesn't have a strong conception of the world beyond what's on the surface and perhaps a layer deeper cause it to kind of spiral if you are really intrigued by the topics and start learning about it. This may be a big nitpick since I come at this with about a decade of work as an aerospace engineer on the subject matter of the manga, space debris/trash, but I don't like to grade on a curve. Planetes unfortunately isn't visually impressive enough (although it is pretty and appropriately presents JAXA utilitarian styles when it doesn't get too far into sci-fi for its own good) and doesn't provide enough depth to the real draw for many to garner a strong recommendation from me. It's novel, but if you want hard sci-fi which provides you real value and insights then 2070s space janitors is not the way to go.