Thoughts on Beatless by Satoshi Hase

（All speculations in this pieces might just be your truly thinking out loud their more pattern recognitional thinking.）

This Roaring Twenties we currently live in is a reminder that no matter how scientific science fiction can be, it still is fantasies like its less scientifically minded cousins within the term “speculative fiction”. Even though laws had been made and amidated regarding artificial machine intelligence, the wastelands within Terminator movies still seem like greener pasture compared to bleak and, more importantly I might add, boring reality. Compared to the five decades after Singularity future of Beatless, we might as be living in hell even though the book does not pose its speculated future as utopian.

The hired hand between a defense attorney and a yes man

Satoshi Hase can be considered as an old friend to yours truly. I started the endeavor of blogging about books here with MGS 3 novelization by Mr. Hase. He was the second Japanese writer employed by Konami to write Metal Gear books, and Hideo Kojima had the least to say about his work while the other 2 Japanese writers gained a lot from the so-called video game auteur.

Project Itoh is the pen name of one Satoshi Ito, blogger, graphic artist and novelist who past at the tender age of 34 in 2009 because of cancer. Mr. Ito wrote the novelization of MGS 4 and claimed himself to be a “Hideo Kojima fundamentalist” long before that. Kojima did acknowledge him, one can read all about it in Creative Gene. If Driving Off the Map is about uncovering a magician’s tricks, Ito’s pieces are more about defending Kojima’s works while many of his Japanese peers are in the “MGS is just like some anime. The fuck so special about that?” camp.

Hitori Nojima is the pen name of one Kenji Yano, who worked as an editor of Newtype when Beatless was serialized on that magazine. Before Konami showed Kojima the door, Mr. Yano had banged out novelization of 4 MGS games branded “A Hideo Kojima Game”, Peace Walker, 1, 2 and Phantom Pain, in Japanese. Mr. Yano works at the new Kojima Production now, probably typing out flavorless fictional emails for the Death Stranding sequel as the time of writing. So, if you got problems with Death Stranding’s scripts, you ought to think about this yes man more than Kojima himself.

Mr. Hase is more of a novelist than those 2 men combined yet the late Ito managed to better him twice at the prestige Seiun Awards, once in life or another time after death. Hase’s first hard science fiction novel A Story for You was beaten by Ito’s second novel Harmony in 2010. 3 years after Ito’s passing, Beatless was beaten by Empire of Corpses, a novel started by Ito and finished by someone else. But I have my suspicions that Hase has his secret fans within the indie dev scene.

Take Eliza for example. This so-not-a-dating-sim visual novel is about dealing with one tragedy in Seattle’s tech scene. The science fiction world Hase created and owns wholesale since A Story for You is set in late 21^st century Seattle where sad stories happen in and around the near future tech scene. Even the title Eliza, referencing to this piece of shrink app in the VN can be seen as taken from Beatless: Eliza is the name of “mother” for all 5 sides in the battle royale.

Male gazey but that male gazey

Beatless, started as Project Lacia, was something masterminded by Newtype magazine, Katokawa Shoten’s “state-owned” wing when it comes to anime coverage. An illustrator pen named Red Juice was hired to draw 5 pretty girls as figurine blueprints after they done doing character design for animated series Guilty Crown in 2012. In order to sell those designs better, novelist Satoshi Hase was hired to write a story about said pretty girls. According to the paperback author’s afterword of Beatless, Hase was given carte blanche other than incorporating the 5 designs in. So Hase wrote a hard science fiction novel about a battle royale fought for the future of humanity among 5 different machine intelligences.

The year is 2105, and five decades had passed since the Singularity. Androids known as Humanoid Interface Element, HIE or Interface for short, are common. An Interface manufacturer called Meme Frame had an accident and five advanced protypes of Interface broke out. I introduced two already and here are the rest.

From left to right we got Kouka, Saturnes and Methode.

Kouka is the one designed especially for combat. To paraphrase Maeve in Westworld’s third season finale on HBO, this one is also built with an affection for lost causes. As the first causality of the five, she pretty much perishes fighting for one lost cause.

Saturnes, and later Mariage after a tea brand, is one with a 3D printer dubbed Gold Weaver. She is the winner of battle royale by War Game rule: the only way to win is not to play. She does not engage in active combat other than defending said 3D printer and the girl who currently owns her.

Methode is literally a fire breather and pretty much the antagonist of this story. Voiced by Sora Amamiya in the animated adaption oppose to Lacia played by Nao Toyama. Ms. Amamiya and Ms. Toyama seemed to start a collaboration where they play antagonists to each other for the last five years.

While we like to tell people not to judge books by their covers, one can safely assume, from various covers of Beatless and how it comes together, that the book is jam packed with male gazes.

To start with, yours truly feels reluctant to call Lacia the protagonist, since the book is written mostly through the point of view of Aruto Endo, who “happens” to be her owner. Mr. Endo is a 17 years old boy who comes cross Lacia, and went over the moon for the gorgeous robot. Can you really fault the teenager for looking at his er, new hot “desktop case” a few more times?

Besides, there are worse cases like Altered Carbon out there, while this book keeps its “Juvenile/Young Adult” line firmly. While Interfaces are used as sex bots in the world of Beatless, Lacia tells young Endo several times that they can only do it after the boy’s 18^th birthday.

A bricky page turner

Since Altered Carbon by Richard K Morgan has been dragged through the mud up there, it’s time to roast the author himself a bit. Yours truly read AC shortly after finishing Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons, and all those “praises” about how action-packed the Morgan book is became head scratchers. I mean, Simmons can keep his readers on the edge of their seats for 20 and more pages on one single action scene, while Morgan’s action barely lasts beyond one short paragraph of merely three lines.

Beatless is more in the school of Simmons, and I do not just mean how final chapters of the Japanese novel share similarities with Fall of Hyperion and Rise of Endymion. The book was originally serialized over the course of 13 months on Newtype, each installment has its own hook when it comes to action and locations. Collected as a thousand pages long epic, the vivid description would be more than enough to keep one reading on.

The Nolan loops

“Which Nolan?” is my question to anyone who might ask me about my thoughts on Nolan pieces. I mean there are at least 2 Nolans active in Hollywood right now, big Chris in movies and young Jonathan mainly in television. In terms of entanglement between one J Nolan and Beatless, things are certainly very interesting.

The fourth chapter of the book is called Automatic World, where Lacia and Endo infiltrate a high-rise by wearing very elaborately explained stealth camouflage. Said camouflage is originally Lacia’s weapon against high-tech foes since it turned non-organic devices both invisible and blind. So, when worn as camouflage, Lacia uses the visualizing sonar to see.

Consider how much Person of Interest and that new Westworld on HBO have in common with Beatless, if the sonar thing at the end of Dark Knight was indeed thought up by J Nolan, it’s going to be quite poetic.

Take 2020’s Westworld Season 3 the New World for example. The way Caleb and Dolores meeting in a dark ally is uncannily similar to Aruto Endo meeting Lacia for the first time. The sentiment that Dolores is the only real thing in Caleb’s life had me laughing out loud in those early lockdown days.

Reality might never catch up but its peer already did

With Deepfake and more recently ChatGPT, maybe it is truly a blessing that when reality decides to give us the robopoclypase, it turns out to be a dumber farce than anyone can speculate. Still, nice to look at hardware is missing. Killer bots in do not look cool in a merchandising sense, and over-the-counter pleasure models like Beatless’ Interfaces might never see the light of day for way too many good reasons.

However, “5 years ahead of the curve at best” in Hase’s afterword for the paperback was cut down about only one year after the book’s initial 2012 outing. One did not have to write machine intelligences readers suppose to root for by having a dumb boy falling head over heels for them. One can write as said machine intelligence in first-person narration.

Hugo awards had been given out to this newer approach, like Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie and Martha Wells’ Muderbot Dairies. Especially the latter, when people ask why Muderbot’s disguise as human look not so good, they reply that they don’t have to be pretty as sexbots or Pleasure Models. Of course the works of those 2 older writes are set in the far future when space travel is common, but I’m sure hard sci-fi with near future setting has such counterparts as well.

Wasted potential

Yours truly came across this book like they came cross many books: there is an audio-visual adaption out there. Just as Westworld’s second season winding down in summer 2018, the paperback promoting Beatless’ less than ideal animated adaption appeared on the bookshelf of a Japanese language bookstore yours truly visited regularly. It was an instant purchase. I am dedicating the last portion here for the animated adaption.

The series director they had is the right choice. Seiji Mizushima had directed Mobile Suite Gundam Double-O, the gundam show going back to the series’ “lifting things from Arthur C Clarke” root and looks slicky near future. Clarke references (Lacia’s weapon is called Black Monolith and that dumb boy Aruto says “This just might be the end of childhood for us humans” for calling out loud!) and near future slickness are what Beatless’ strength lies. But funding and such had kept the show from becoming a potential classic.

So, I guess I am still recommending people to read this book. Especially those with more leftist laying. Boy, you all are going to hate this book’s guts, but criticizing this book’s brand of liberalism is something you all going to be gladly dong.