[eden cycle] Inspiration: Gall Force and when the SF kicked in

"Cosmic Child", ending credits theme to the anime Gall Force 2: Destruction, by Takako Shirai & Crazy Boys.

( translation below the cut )

During the winter of 1993, having just graduated college and living in a shoebox apartment on Beacon Street in Boston, I was pretty much on my own and at the very start of figuring out what the hell I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I wasn't in the best frame of mind (having lost connection with quite a few friends and not having many in town), and had nothing to show for my four years at Emerson, aside from aborted stories and screenplays.

One of the things I did to pass the time was rent out videos from Tower Records--specifically anime, something I'd been interested in but never followed up on. I pretty much schooled myself on various movies and shows that I'd heard of but never seen (or saw only briefly), such as Urusei Yatsura, Ranma 1/2, Akira, and so on. One of the titles that caught my eye was Gall Force: Eternal Story, It's not a big-name anime (although the character design is by Kenichi Sonoda, who worked on many 80s animes such as Bubblegum Crisis), but I'd like to think of it as the little anime series that could.

Long story short, it's humans (called "Solnoids" here, and all female) vs their mortal alien enemy (the liqueous "Paranoids", playing the male, natch) in a seemingly never-ending fight for dominance. What the lead characters don't know, at least not right away, is that a secret meeting between the two races have created a project that would finally unite them in peace. The twist is that this story focuses more on a group of Solnoid cadets attempting to keep this forced unity from happening; and finally, once they realize the outcome could save them all, protecting this new "offspring" on a pre-human Earth. This storyline stretched from this movie to two OAVs to an additional three story arcs taking place over the course of many centuries. I was intrigued by its worldbuilding, and its unique take on a space opera/Alien/Creation Myth story.

I bring this up because this was the series that pretty much opened my eyes to science fiction, and changed an overworked Infamous War Novel into a completely new and fresh story called Vigil. Admittedly, this version of the story didn't go too far, but it was the seed that would end up becoming the created world of the entire Eden Cycle universe. In particular, it was this song that inspired me to start toying with the idea of aliens being related to us humans in a very distant way, what that meant to those here on Earth, who would be for it and who would be against it. That idea never made it to Vigil, with that story focusing instead on the titular underground hacker group I'd created--basically the original characters of the IWN dropped into a science fiction plot. Nonetheless, I finally picked up that alien-relation idea in the next version, True Faith...and you know the story from there. That was it--a tired, overworked, trunk novel I'd toyed with since the mid 80s, given a new life and a new universe all because of one anime series, specifically one of its ending theme songs.