Palfrey's life

Just a very small post to briefly praise Planet ES, an exceptionally cool piece of anime I've been watching these last few days. Basic premise is that the characters are debris collectors in space, going out and grabbing the crap that's floating around so that it doesn't hit spaceships. It's just an extension on from current times. No aliens, no FTL drives, nothing. It still takes ages to get from one place to another, space is still expensive. Now, there are three really cool things about this particular anime

• It's about the people, about their lives, and less about the technology. I like hard SF, I like future techie stuff, but this is good as well


• (And here's the reason I love it) it's the first series that I've seen to properly deal with zero g - y'know the "room is spinning" feeling when you're drunk? Well, if you're trying to navigate in zero g while drunk, this is probably actually true (as happens to one of the characters Tanabe in the 9th ep, which I've just watched). There's also some well done fight scenes - basically just a generic brawl, but with some of the people using the lack of gravity to their advantage. Someone has *thought* about all this, which is very cool


• Some of the older characters are dying of things like cancer and leukemia - as would happen if you're spending a long time in space, away from the earth's magnetic field that stops a lot of the hard rads from hitting us. Without adequate shielding (as would happen in the early years of long term space existence), this is going to cause these sorts of diseases a lot more often that would happen on Earth

Basically, it's well thought out, well drawn space anime, which is a good thing. Well, g'night ppl. Sleep beckons...