The Lord of the Sands of Time - Issui Ogawa

One of the first wave of Japanese sci-fi novels under Viz’s new Haikasoru fiction imprint, Issui Ogawa’s novel The Lord of the Sands of Time is classic material of the kind you would expect to find in their manga range, with its exciting blend of action, tradition, and romance that takes on an epic scale not only across millennia, but also cuts across time-lines.

In the Land of Wa, ancient Japan in 248AD, Lady Miyo, the shaman queen of the land, encounters Messenger O, a cyborg sent back in time from Triton in 2598 to meet the threat of an alien invasion which as entered the timestream in an effort to wipe out the whole of humanity at their most vulnerable points in history. The novel follows the attempts to defeat and understand the nature of the attacks through a number of time periods, each seeing an evolution in the nature of the enemies capabilities, but it raises other questions with regard to the splitting of time-lines, the intervention not only potentially having a profound impact on the future of humanity (if humanity even has a future), but condemning those who travel back to never being able to return to where they came from.

The writing here is a bit lean and terse - not quite as dynamic as Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s similarly themed All You Need is Kill (the other title introducing Viz’s Haikasoru imprint) but Ogawa handles the complexity of the time paradoxes well, not only on the grand scale of things, but in the personal lives of those caught up in the conflict.

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