Posted on 10/28/2002 5:26:27 PM PST by sourcery
-No, that's alpine forest, not desert sand.
Whoosh . . . Boom!
-Lieutenant, nevermind.
Tell me about it. I spent two-and-a-half years painting the same deuce-and-a-half over and over and over again. By the time I finished my tour, that truck must've had a ton of paint on it.
I love nanotech and I'll betcha someday we'll see nanotech spacesuits not much more bulky than a pair of coveralls.
Rust Never Sleeps.....
Thermoptic camo anyone?
Shirow Masamune's concept of Thermoptic Camoulflage I found refreshingly novel. I don't believe it involved nanotechnology, but rather involved Shirow's conception of a man portable device that would use heat to trick eye, thus distorting light waves and giving the illusion of transparency.
As a storyteller, Shirow uses this and other methods to pull off unbelievable stunts. Thermoptic camouflage is never actually explained in GItS (unlike the exegesis on Robotics and AI that Shirow stuffs in his endnotes), you just assume that something like it is possible. "Magical bullsh*t" sometimes aids a good cause.
Major Kusanagi makes her escape from a sanctioned assassination in the opening sequence of Ghost In the Shell
Much of GItS was, in all probability, inspired by Philip K. Dick's Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep? and William Gibson's own Neuromancer series as well as his later novel involving nanotechnology theft, Idoru
That's an educated guess on my part, recalling the manga itself. Apparently, Shirow expands on his universe of the 2040's in the successor manga to GItS, Ghost In the Shell 2: Manmachine Interface, in which I expect him to explore the concepts developed in GItS in even greater depth.
Motoko Aramaki, the protagonist of GItS 2: MMI, eight years after the disappearance of the original Major Kusanagi.
Needless to say, Shirow does things with PhotoShop in MMI that he simply could not do in the early nineties, when GItS I was published in Shonen Jump (iirc). Still, MMI looks like its going to be one superb manga, from Japan's greatest manga artist. Out in stores from Dark Horse in November.
Oh yeah, do not miss the Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series coming to Cartoon Network in November. Apparently it takes place in a different timeline in which the Major never encounters the Puppet Master program.
The Japanese do that. They'll take a perfectly good timeline and decide to do something different. Anno did that with Evangelion just to show the entire population of the Home Islands how depressed he was.
The updated Motoko and her sidekick, Batou, with a Tachikoma, from GItS 2: Stand Alone Complex.
Be Seeing You,
Chris
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