Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

My favorite C.S. Lewis book is The Great Divorce , in which a group of people in Hell get an opportunity to visit Heaven. In the end, all but one of them choose to go back. Each one has something they need to let go of in order to enter heaven - some kind of pride or greed or hatred - and they can't bring themselves to do it. More recently, in this week's episode of the anime series Kino's Journey , Kino's fellow traveler Shizu boards a city-sized ship, where the population lives under the oppressive rule of the Tower Clan. Seeing that the ship is breaking down and falling apart, he and Kino overthrow the Tower Clan and bring the people to the safety of dry land - only to discover that they prefer the ship and don't believe his story that it's going to sink. I halfway expected the people to start shouting "Fake news! Fake news!" Just because people's lives are bad, that doesn't mean they'll automatically leap at the chance fo...

"The world is not beautiful. Therefore, it is." So says the gender-nonconforming title character of Kino's Journey , by far the most challenging anime show of the year. "The world is not beautiful: And that, in a way, lends it a sort of beauty." Kino shows us that world by traveling through it on Hermes, a talking "motorrad" (German for "motorcyle" - there's no other German in the story, so I have no idea why everyone calls Hermes that). It's mostly a lush, green, peaceful-looking place, but it's dotted by mostly walled city-states whose citizens can do the most awful things. Kino's visits last three days and two nights, all the time needed, supposedly, to find out the country's character. (And now I'll do the obligatory aside about pronoun usage. Kino was born a girl named Sakura - more on that in a moment - but now presents as male and is often taken to be male. On the anime discussion board I frequent,...