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This book was a potential book for the #SFFBookClub poll for a while, but I ended up reading anyway because it looked intriguing.

As a reader, it seems like a novella is a hard length to hit; it's hard to have the space for both pacing and sufficient worldbuilding, and it's also hard to have enough runway for the resolution to resonate and feel satisfying. The short of it is that I feel like this novella nailed it for me.

The worldbuilding here is brutal. The book kicks off with idyllic introduction of Raquel working for the Global Institute for the Scientific and Humanistic Study of Pocket Worlds. Pocket worlds are small offshoots of reality, much smaller than our own universe--maybe the size of a meadow or a room or a bag even--and they can run at different time rates to our own universe.

After the protagonist Raquel falls into a fast time pocket world and comes back forty years later (while only a few moments have passed relatively for herself), the world has changed for the worst. Her institute is no longer doing scientific studies, her daughter has died, and capitalism has moved in to colonize the new spaces of these pocket worlds. The implications for labor when corporations have access to nearly infinite time and space goes exactly where you think it might; people signing up for a decade of work to then come back before breakfast, extra dumping grounds for garbage, or even locking rioters into these worlds. These are just a couple examples, but woof this book captures the capitalist extraction of time and space from a new technology.

Raquel is an archeologist of pocket worlds, and believes the Quisqueyan Taino people might have escaped into a pocket world to avoid genocide and is looking for clues to their past. She is the descendant of the Taino but also of conquistadors, and in some ways is at the intersection of both. What really works for me in this book is how her personal history and struggle parallels the larger story about colonialism and capitalism--she has her own insatiable wants for knowledge and family, especially around grief about her archeological work and her lost daughter.

Well, I was wondering if this would be a quick read because manga or slow because of the heaviness of the material. Quick won out, though it certainly is very heavy material.

It's two stories interwoven: Mizuki's personal memoir (this volume is from early childhood - young adulthood), and the history of Japan. He's a great storyteller, and the art is beautifully done. At times he editorialises explicitly, and at times intentionally lays off passing judgement. In the middle of the book this was confusing, but by the end I felt like I could understand the editorial choices he was making. It comes across as a very compassionate way to tell stories that in the end he is clearly horrified by--both the politics and some of his behaviour as a kid.

The personal memoir + history book work better together than I'd have expected in this volume. My reservations were about the combo of hindsight and childhood stories specifically (as opposed to vol 2 which will clearly be that much more personal), but the childhood stuff ends up illustrating the social atmosphere in interesting ways. My one complaint is that the timeline jumps around in ways that make sense for the personal story, but at times make the history hard to follow. Probably if I had been less clueless about Japanese history before reading this it would have been less distracting.

I'm very glad I read this, both for the enjoyment and to start filling a big hole in my knowledge. I'm looking forward to getting hold of vol 2.