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-Z- (z@gundam.com)
Mon, 20 Nov 2000 10:31:41 -0800
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-gundam@1u.aeug.org [mailto:owner-gundam@1u.aeug.org]On
> Behalf Of garrick lee
> Sent: Monday, November 20, 2000 04:06
> To: gundam@aeug.org
> Subject: Re: [gundam] Gundam Novels Online (Was: Role of Warships in UC)
>
> well, i liked the robotech books as a whole other
> thing from the robotech series.
That they were, which accounts for their continued popularity and the
continuation of the series through the unproduced Robotech Sentinel saga to the
completely original final novel, End Of The Circle.
> but i think the million dollar question is how did you
> find the del rey first gundam books, z? how are the
> books, authoring and storywise?
I found them to be incredibly stilted and not at all what most Americans expect
from a novel, SF or otherwise. I attribute this to a combination of Tomino's
writing style, cultural differences between Japanese and American literary
tradition, and Schodt's insistence on literal translation. In a way, Schodt was
too faithful to the original and would've served his American audience much
better with a more figurative intepretation.
What I've seen of For The Barrel, for example, would've gone over much better --
take the essence rather than the literal word of what is said in the original
novels and cast that in terms that are meaningful to the intended audience, in
this case English-speaking North Americans.
The biggest problem I had with the Tomino novels is that the characters are
never really fleshed out or given any depth. Everyone speaks with the same
voice, such that dialogues seem more like soliloquies. The characters have
experiences and develop over time, but I never came to care for them in the way
that I did for them in the anime. All of their words and actions were there,
but their "expressions" never came through.
In the end, the Gundam novels failed because they never really crossed the
language barrier. I'm reminded on the novelizations of motion pictures or RPG
games that I've read. On the one hand, you get the book that's a script or
game-play recast in narrative -- that's how the Gundam novels read. On the
other hand, you gets books like just about anything Alan Dean Foster has ever
done, from Alien to the Star Trek Logs (novelizations of the animated TV
series), or the "McKinney" Robotech novels, that use the source material as a
springboard for a genuine narrative story, with additional scenes and dialogue
that supply a context or background only hinted at in the film production or
game sequence. The Gundam novels don't really explain or explore the Gundam
world the way the Robotech novels did.
That being said, there's a lot of interesting material in the novels that
appears nowhere else and it's worthwhile to anyone who wants to get a handle on
what Tomino was trying to say to find them and read them. Just don't expect to
be caught up in the story.
> seeing as how they're in limbo, as far as printing is
> concerned, are they worth hunting down to read?
As noted above, I believe that they are. I just wish that there'd been three
people involved in the English versions: Tomino for the original text, Schodt
for the literal translation, and someone else with a knowledge and love of the
series to produce an American interpretation on par with what "Jack McKinney"
did for Robotech.
-Z-
-
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