Author: Junichi Fujisaku | Page Count: 212 Pages
“We still don’t know what their purpose is but I sense they have an aim of some kind, something different from that of the Laughing Man phenomenon.”
The first in a trilogy of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex tie-in novels. A group of revolutionaries calling themselves the Good Morning Terrorists are hacking cyberbrains and forcing the hapless victim to carry out acts of terrorism against the State. Major Motoko Kusanagi and her team of experts in Public Security Section 9 intervene to find the perpetrators.
Junichi Fujisaku had previously penned a number of episodes of the TV series, so was a good choice to carry the series into a different medium. However, despite giving a list of characters on page one with a brief description of their role, the text offers little in the way of characterisation, so it helps if you’re already familiar with the series. (If you're not, you're missing out.) Readers new to the franchise may well be left scratching themselves.
Fujisaku gets overly technical when describing hardware, so unless you’re a weapons tech junkie it can get tedious to read. The prose was very rigid and clinical, but is translated from Japanese, so I'm unsure if that was due to the translation or simply Junichi Fujisaku’s style. Strip away all the tech-talk and make allowances for the translation and the main story is interesting. If it was filmed it would easily fit the twenty-five minutes template of the show, so can be thought of as a standalone episode without the visuals.
If you want another GitS: SAC adventure and like me are impatient for Kenji Kamiyama to make a third season then it’s worth a read.
2½ sexy cyberbrain augmentations out of 5
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