Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway's Flash

by Yoshiyuki Tomino, Haruhiko Mikimoto (illustrator)

written in JAPANESE

Paperback

Published February 1, 1989

About the author

富野 由悠季 in Japanese, best known for creating the "Gundam" franchise.

Reviews

[rylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun distraction in the form of 'mecha with more on its mind'. It is very apparent that Tomino was given more freedom than he's allowed for the screen here, as the text deftly swims between politically-oriented dialogues, character-centric monologues, and the giant robot suit action we all come here for. These three elements all come together quite beautifully in a sprawling, pulpy tale of resistance against an increasingly corrupt Earth Federation.

I think my only major caveat about 'Hathaway's Flash' is that it is also very apparent that you're supposed to be reading all 3 books in one sitting. As things stand now, this first part ends quite abruptly (much like the film adaptation does), which can be frustrating. If they ever officially translate and distribute these books in the West, I hope they just collect the books into one big one.

[LightIssues · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's funny that even when writing a book that you'd assume would be much less hindered by commercial desires and related studio mandates Tomino still includes a bunch of action scenes lol. Well, I won't lie, it'd be hard to write about a revolutionary group without including such stuff and that long moment of Hathaway and Gigi on the ground while a mobile suit battle rages in the city is pretty stellar. This certainly reads to me as something intimately connected to the reader's personal imagination, in that it's almost more a proof-of-concept that makes one excited what it all might feel like as a movie, or maybe I'm just overreacting based on Tomino's primary occupation, my obsession with cinema, and the...literary inadequacies of this. Relying as I did on a fan translation, it's hard to know just how much the style here is actually reflective of the original Japanese, but it certainly does read weird and clunky a lot of the time (or, again, like a lot of unprofessional fan translations). It's certainly a Tomino book, however, filled with weird, intricate characters speaking stylized, weird dialogue and in almost immediate connections with each other, stuck within the interplay of their intimate psychological troubles and broader political-philosophical troubles; this indeed is much more explicit than his previous Gundam animes on the state of the world, Mafty's reasons for existence, his views on the characters themselves...I would not be surprised if precisely this possibility of intense political/world/character elaboration and giving his Takes on what is going on here is part of what appealed, compared to the limitations of anime--both commercial and intrinsic to the form.

Of most interest here is probably this as a sequel to the Char Rebellion, even if it's a sequel to another novel take on CCA rather than CCA proper (and, can I say, having Hathaway kill Quess is...a much lesser and less fitting tragedy than what happened in the movie), probably quite conclusively proving that any take on it as a battle between democratic hope and revolutionary violence is false, and that Tomino has always been too pessimistic to believe in the creation of any better world via the Federation (or, say, the old order). The moment where Hathaway talks about being in contact with the souls of humanity and later coming upon an interpretation of Char's goals that he found sympathetic...chilling! Once again the tides of history keep on keeping on, if anything's changed then only for the worse, the earlier turns of history have stultified into what seems like an eternal victory for the status quo, even Mafty's success troubled by the arrival of an actually competent, unscrupulous leader and the questions of whether the mysterious "Quack Salver" behind it all truly is benevolent after all, and Hathaway himself is forced to act as a liaison between his pragmatism and idealism, his commitment and personal troubles, his girlfriend and his "neo-Quess" Gigi and enemy Kenneth, his role as another cog and his belief in it all...Add his personal troubles to the political bent, the fascinating creation that is Gigi Andalucia (a captivating young woman with a probably quite dark and traumatizing past who's personality seems to be a fully ungraspable mixture of the sincerely girlish, the cleverly manipulative, the darkly obsessive, and whatnot--really not somebody I "get", and therefore probably as interesting for the more intelligent as for the more simple, interested to see where the Quess parallelisms go), the perverse and intricate psychosexual bents she gives the entire material, the more tangible focus on a quotidian ground existence as a human person and a resistance leader, the hilariously explicit mythological references (appropriate atp for Gundam, and indeed this too features all sorts of internal and series-wide rhymes--is the central relationship here another take on the Char-Lalah-Amuro triangle?), the ability of Tomino to indicate clear visual and emotional pictures--yeah, this is, for all its clunkiness and existence as more of an introduction, a pretty good and interesting work. Like pulp if pulp was more dryly mythic in its political, psychological, philosophical examinations.

[Liam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first novel I have fully read from Yoshiyuki Tomino, and so I am introduced to his odd writing style, where the narrator seems to editorialise about their opinions on the characters, which is genuinely pretty funny most of the time. I read the english translation provided by Zeonic, so I don't feel comfortable commenting on the use of language etc. but I can say that many parts of the story were very interesting and well-written without needing to criticise word choice or anything like that.
The setting and surrounding universe of Gundam was well established, and I don't think that much prior knowledge is necessary. I appreciated that the story was centralised within Davao, as I think that a strong grasp of the backdrop of a scene is important for providing good imagery.
Characters stood out, and the main actors made themselves known quickly, and had drastically different personalities, that made conversations tense at times and always very interesting. A fun read and unique for its slower pace that no anime could get away with.

[Lain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tomino's sharp, mechanical and ever so political prose works so well with how briskly Tomino can move a plot across time. Time is never spent too long during some political assertation or Mecha description, but just enough is spent to really get the gist of Tomino's incredible world and his perspective on dense topics. Good shit.

[Seiji Ren · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing start of the trilogy that makes me wonder why it took so long to get an adaptation when it's such an amazing story and especially a crucial point in Universal Century universe

[Eric "try to read more than two books this year" Unterkofler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tomino cooks yet again