Takemiya Keiko - To Terra, vol. 01-03 (Eng. trans.)

[oyceter]

Far in the future, humanity has trashed the earth and been forced to move to other planets. But in regret, they have dedicated themselves to restoring Terra by setting up a system in which children are raised by foster parents then put through a computer-aided "awakening" that takes away the first fourteen years of their memories and transforms them into citizens worthy of living on Terra again. The new adults are then shipped to Terra, where they act in socially desirable ways, which somehow prevents humanity from destroying the environment again.

Also! Thanks to the computer system that basically organizes all of human society, psychic kids called the Mu have started being born. They have psychic powers but are physically frail, and humans want to eradicate them. Jomy Marcus Shin starts life as a normal foster child on Ataraxia, but when he approaches his fourteenth birthday, he discovers that he's Mu.

And off we go on a huge story line that spans years and years and concerns the fate of a planet!

I wish I had enjoyed this more than I actually did; I've been dying to read more works by the 24 Year Group. The art didn't bother me, but I found myself a little bored by the storyline. It also didn't help that I had an impossible time keeping track of all the jumps in time and where all the characters were at various points, but I am not sure if that is because the series was confusing or just because I have a difficult time tracking these things.

All in all, the plot may have been interesting, but I simply didn't care enough about any of the characters to get emotionally involved. Also, it would have been nice if there had been more women.

Comments

[the_rck]

I couldn't finish this series. I slogged through the first two volumes and part of the third. Then I looked at the ending and shrugged. I think it was supposed to be grandly epic and tragic with a lot of man against machines and most humans as passive and unable to make a difference.

I read it right after reading the manga-ka's Andromeda Stories. I didn't like that, either, so I'm not sure why I picked To Terra up except that it was at the library and easy. Andromeda Stories annoyed me enough that I didn't bother trying to avoid spoilers when I was complaining about it in my book logging.

My impression of To Terra was that it could have been a lot better if it had been written by someone interested in the same aspects of stories as I am. I always felt like I was at a weird angle to the story and characters.

[oyceter]

Yeah, I couldn't quite figure out if I just didn't like the art or wasn't used to the conventions or what. Or just that I tend not to be as into SF in general.

[the_rck]

Having read another series by the same manga-ka, I'm pretty sure that, for me, it was not sharing interests. She's interested in what happens when people try to be machines or give control of their lives to machines and how some people resist that. I think she also likes grand, tragic endings caused by people making the wrong decisions. The characters don't really get to be deeper than their plot imperatives. That is, there's a direction the story is going, and the characters remain puppets of the plot. Any character could be stuck into the same spot without changing the story.

The other series, Andromeda Stories, has more female characters, but they're mostly passive or make only brief appearances. It's also a series that's only three volumes long and really ought to have been twenty in order to have character development and characters that readers could empathize and/or sympathize with.