Usurper of the Sun is a solid, but unspectacular, novel of first contact. I’d say it’s good reading but won’t win any awards, but I’d be wrong. It won Japan’s Seiun Award, so maybe my perception is a bit off.
Aki Shiraishi is a high school student in the astronomy club when she points the club’s telescope toward Mercury and the sun. But instead of a normal, rapidly moving across the face of the sun Mercury, she sees what appears to be a tower three times the height of the planet stretching up from its surface. And thus begins her lifelong relationship with the Builders, an alien race that is proposed to be the creators of the nanotechnology based structures being created out of Mercury’s substance. The tower is actually a stream of material being fed to a thin ring around the sun designed to absorb massive amounts of solar radiation, but which also blocks sunlight from Earth.
The main strength of the book is its science grounding. This is hard science fiction, reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke, if Arthur C. Clarke’s characters were Japanese and female. (Maybe Clarke did write such a book…) Space travel to Mercury takes months. Faster than light space travel is not possible. Aki takes years to become an expert in astronomy. Obviously, the presence of extra-terrestrial intelligence isn’t exactly heavily based in science. It doesn’t detract too much though.
Science fiction I read often has characters who can do no wrong. If a character messes up, they do something wrong but learn from it for the future. Usurper of the Sun has a couple of plot branches that just don’t pan out whatsoever. Or they succeed but are wholly irrelevant to everything that comes afterward. Just like real life. Some company comes out with breakthrough technology that no one cares about, stuff like that. There’s some of that going on here, and it makes everything seem all that much more realistic.
However, there’s a lot of drawbacks to the book. Like Arthur C. Clarke, Nojiri’s characters are stiff and wooden. The only one with any depth whatsoever is Aki, but even her character doesn’t have any hidden depths. Nojiri exposes all of her motivations in successive infodumps. In fact, the whole book could be characterized as one long speculative infodump with a little dialog thrown in. What’s more, some of the plot pieces are so clichéd I just had to groan. For instance, an Illuminati-like cabal of the world’s most powerful men meet to discuss the direction of the world’s policy… in a darkened room where no one can see anyone else for no discernible reason.
In addition, the pacing leaves a lot to be desired. The last 70 pages or so are great in moving the story along. The 80 pages leading up to that are snoozeville. The same thing with part 1. There’s an initial rush of discovery, and a speedy exploration of the ring that blocks the sun at the end. But the middle is filled with philosophical discourse that no one wants to hear at a cocktail party.
If this had been written 40 or 50 years ago when this style of science fiction writing was predominant, Nojiri’s work would be considered a classic. What we’ve come to expect from science fiction has changed quite a bit, so it feels quite dated. Not in technology, just in style. The technology described is still interesting, even a decade after its original publication as short stories in Japan.
A few other blogged reviews:
Title: Usurper of the Sun
Author: Housuke Nojiri (野尻 抱介)
Translator: John Wunderley
Cover creator: Katsuya Terada (artist) (寺田克也)
Imprint / publisher: Haikasoru
Format: Paperback
Length: 276 p.
Publication date: October 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-4215-2771-0
