All You Need is Kill

Hiroshi Sakurazaka
Completed 7/31/2021, Reviewed 7/31/2021
4 stars

This book wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, but I recognize this is a really well thought-out, well-constructed novel.  It’s military SF, which is not always my favorite subgenre.  I read it because it was the August selection for my book club.  It’s a very creative application of the “Groundhog Day” trope.  It was nominated for a Japanese SF award, converted into a manga, and adapted into the movie “Edge of Tomorrow”.  

There is a war on the Earth against a bizarre alien technology called Mimics that looks like bloated frogs and seems hell bent on destroying all humans.  Keiji is a recent recruit.  He goes into a battle and gets killed.  He wakes up to find himself alive and reliving yesterday.  He thinks he’s had a déjà vu dream, but then he dies in battle and wakes up yesterday again.  Soon he realizes he is in some kind of time loop.  On his 158th iteration, he interacts with Rita, known as Full Metal Bitch, and suddenly he finds that with her, he may be able to break out of the loop.  

The best thing about this book is that Keiji is a very ordinary guy called to extraordinary things, that is, help save the world from the Mimics.  At first, he’s horrified by the loop, but then realizes he can use the loop to train himself to become good at fighting the Mimics.  His character is well-developed as he immerses himself in this task.  Rita is also well-developed.  She was also very ordinary before getting her nickname.  My only problem is that we learn about her through a big info dump in the middle of the book.  The book begins in first-person narration by Keiji, then jumps to third person info dump on Rita, then goes back to first person Keiji.  It’s a little jarring, but it was effective.  

I was pleasantly surprised by the prose.  Considering this became a manga, I wasn’t too sure what to expect from the writing, but I enjoyed it.  It had just the right amount of good description, action, and snappy dialogue.  Even the info dump on Rita was very well written.  The world building was terrific, though this included another third person info dump, this time on the origin of the aliens.  I kind of felt that maybe it wasn’t necessary.  The way the book was written, it seemed like we shouldn’t have known that much about the aliens, because the humans didn’t know that much about the aliens.  It was like the perspective was jumping around between omniscient and non-omniscient, making it feel rather incongruous. 

This is a very short book, around 175 pages.  Like a novella, if I go into too much detail, it spoils all the interesting revelations.  So I’ll end here saying that I give this book four stars out of five.  Even though it wasn’t the type of book I normally read, it’s extremely well-done, and I’d recommend it if military SF is your bag.  It actually makes me want to see how they adapted it into a movie, even though it stars Tom Cruise.  Not an actor I particularly like.