“Full Metal Apache [is a] brilliant, paradigm-smashing study by Japan’s hippest literary critic and cultural commentator.” —Larry McCaffery, from the foreword
“Full Metal Apache is a genuinely exciting and powerful text, incredibly rich in both material and ideas. Takayuki Tatsumi’s overall theme is the complex and dense dynamic between Japan and America (and often the West in general), and he investigates this dynamic in ways and with material far fresher and more critically invigorating than a standard analysis of ‘influences’ would be.”—Susan J. Napier, author of Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation
“Full Metal Apache is a marvelous literary mediation of postoriental aesthetics and the transactions of cybercultures. Takayuki Tatsumi cites synchronicity over mimesis, a mighty tease of cultures, and his inspired critique of the chimeric emperor, gaijin fabulations, scrap thieves, ghost stories, and metafiction is extraordinary and masterly.”—Gerald Vizenor, University of California, Berkeley
“I have always thought that Takayuki Tatsumi had (and still has) the most interesting lines into whatever it is that I’ve been doing with fiction, culture, and technology. He showed up before 99 percent of American academics had ever heard of me and seemed immediately to know what I was talking about—often before I did myself.”—William Gibson, author of Pattern Recognition
“This book deserves attention. . . . Full Metal Apache is recommended for science fiction readers who’re willing to look at our genre from a different angle.”
~Joe Sanders, New York Review of Science Fiction
“Tatsumi is a never-less-than-intelligent reader, and a writer who conveys his enthusiasms and the ideas they spark in him with nervy brilliance.”
~Roz Kaveney, TLS
“Tatsumi’s book is a brilliant contribution to the field of pop culture, containing chapters on not only all the usual suspects (Shinya Tsukamoto, J. G. Ballard, William Gibson) but also on the potential of literary theory in a global context, on the relationship between history and aesthetics and on the link between geography and artistic production.”
~Polina Mackay, Journal of American Studies
“There is no doubting Tatsumi’s intimacy with his subject matter as he juggles the orient, the occident, creative masochism, avant-pop, cyberpunk, and Mikadophilia. His ability to keep all these ideas and texts in motion and interacting with one another is impressive and helps illuminate a Japanese cultural marketplace that deserves greater exposure to Western scholars.”
~Graham Murphy, Science Fiction Studies
