A two-stars review from me. The only reason it didn’t get three is that I’m an opinionated bastard, and that the book art is anime-themed.

Then again, I’m an ass-hole like that. I don’t have a thing against anime, it’s just not my favourite thing in the world when it comes to literature.

Call me shallow.

Moving on, the book itself was nice. I really enjoyed the action bits, which constitute most of it if you discount the “Oh, I’m too weak. I must grow stronger,” touchy-feely anime shit.

The premise is cool: unrelenting starfish from hell fucking with humanity’s shit all day long, and getting better at it by the second. Then the protagonist kills an Alpha, drowns in its sandy blood and suddenly, every time he is killed he awakes in the past. What’s really happening is that the nanobots in the Alpha’s blood are sending tachyon pulses to the past, communicating what would happen hours from now, creating the illusion of death and a cycle, but wait a moment, I got this.

So the nanobots enter his bloodstream for the first time, and then he dies. They send a message. Great, but what’s there to receive it the first time around?

How in hell do you send the signal to something that isn’t there to begin with?

In the first cycle he shouldn’t wake up at all. The tachyon pulse is sent and there’s nothing there to act upon it. He should have died, or at best got stuck in a millisecond loop where death was inevitable.

Moreover, they’re adapted to starfish anatomy. How do you detect death as a nanobot to begin with? And assuming that you could detect the death of a starfish, how in hell does that translate to detecting death in mammals? And assuming it does, how does a nanobot check if a multi-celled organism is dead when it can barely interact with cells? Cells which — incidentally — die all the time. I won’t even go into how the nervous system and brain cells work, but if you’ve studied biology in high school, you already got it.

Okay, so there’s handwavium involved. I’ll let it fly, but then there’s the Full Metal Bitch.

The American all out bad-ass girl, the deadly soldier from the nether sent to represent death incarnate, who’s also got a soft side with complementary touchy-feely appendages. Wait, what?

Yes, after she coldly killed him for a battery pack at the beginning of the book — a part I enjoyed immensely by the way, — she goes on to cuddle with him later on, then lets him kill her to save the world, and then he says “I love you” as she dies in his arms. That part was what killed the book for me. I was simply in awe at the cliché. I couldn’t believe it. An entertaining book turned to shit in front of my eyes.

Her being the server, or whatever shit justification that led to this point, was not enough. I just hated myself for reading this and Hiroshi Sakurazaka for writing it afterwards.

 

 

Title: All You Need Is Kill
Author: Hiroshi Sakurazaka
Genre: Science Fiction, Military
Publisher: Haikasoru/VIZ Media
Release Date: September 5, 2011
Pages: 230

When the alien Mimics invade, Keiji Kiriya is just one of many recruits shoved into a suit of battle armor called a Jacket and sent out to kill. Keiji dies on the battlefield, only to be reborn each morning to fight and die again and again. On his 158th iteration, he gets a message from a mysterious ally — the female soldier known as the Full Metal Bitch. Is she the key to Keiji's escape or his final death?

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