Pluto

"Pluto is Naoki Urasawa’s grown-up level rewrite of the grimmest story arc of Astro Boy . For those who aren’t familiar with Astro Boy (or just know the Americanized TV versions), it’s an incredibly important and powerful work within SF history. Osamu Tezuka wrote it in the immediate aftermath of World War Two . There was severe censorship in Japan , both by the Japanese government and by the American occupation government, which meant you couldn’t talk about the war that had just happened. It was not until the late 1980s that the main Japanese newspaper was even allowed to have the physical character necessary to type ‘ atom bomb ’. So you had a whole generation of kids who had watched their world blow up and burn down, and needed an apparatus to understand why and how this happened – and a world that wouldn’t talk about it. Except that the government wasn’t very serious about censoring what looked like a silly kids’ cartoon… So Astro Boy is about the robot civil rights movement and anti-robot prejudice, and travelling the world to meet with civil rights activist organizations and learning how to organize, and petitioning to get citizenship; and battling a dictator called Hitlini, who is trying to purge all of the robots from his country; and dealing with the implication of the world superpowers having very large bombs that cause mushroom-shaped clouds. All of it is done as a children’s cartoon, but it’s incredibly serious and graphic. A lot of it is about race and 20th-century politics, and is very anti-war, very pacifist, very much arguing that racism is what caused all this. There’s also an important element of it being a first contact story. When you’re writing a story about artificial intelligence being invented, you are fundamentally writing a first contact story between humanity and this other form of intelligent life. Tezuka wrote more than 700 series, believe it or not, in which first contact and war and genocide are the uniting themes. He was devoutly interested in Buddhism , and trying to find a way to rehabilitate the Buddhist thesis that all life is sacred in the wake of seeing humanity commit the atrocities that it committed in World War Two: how can you call sacred something that did what we did? So in Astro Boy , we have a first contact situation between humans and robots. Atom – who became Astro in the Americanization – is the first robot to be designed with human-like emotion. So he is the ambassador between humans and robots, trying to help them understand each other. The other robots are intelligences, and they think and they act and they are self-aware, but they don’t mourn and they don’t hate and they don’t love. For example, one of the first scenes in Pluto – the more recent manga by Naoki Urasawa, who’s very much been recognized as the successor to Tezuka – introduces us to a morgue where we see some human parents whose child has been murdered, mourning their child. Some robot parents whose robot child has been killed in a hate crime are standing silently, watching both the body and the loud expression of the human parents, thinking about the question: how does one express this when emotion is alien to one’s nature? Astro Boy is about that, and the Pluto arc specifically is about the inability of robots to understand how humans are capable of willing destruction for the sake of destruction. They look at the many things that humans make whose sole purpose is destruction, and try to understand that, as aliens; try to understand this human characteristic that just doesn’t compute for a rational synthetic organism. It’s a really powerful story. The original story arc was written in the 60s for ten-year-olds; but it had such serious ideas in it that by revisiting it and expanding it, and giving us in-depth and mature examinations of all the characters, Naoki Urasawa has created one of the most powerful first contact stories and robot stories that I’ve ever seen. I’m someone who reads a lot of manga and watches a lot of anime , and will be the first to say there’s no particular need to get into this media. If you have enough other media in your life, you can be content. There’s a high learning curve. But Pluto is on the shortlist: this is a really serious addition to science fiction’s examinations of the question of first contact, and the question of robots and what kinds of stories we can tell with them. If someone is a serious lover of science fiction and only reads two or three comic books ever, one of them should be Pluto ."