All You Need Is Kill [Paperback]

In the film Groundhog Day, Bill Murray repeatedly wakes up and re-lives the same 24hrs over and over again. Each time the cycle repeats, he learns another valuable lesson about his life. All You Need is Kil by Hiroshi Sakurakzaka has a similar premise but instead of being set in Punxsutawney it is set on the muddy battlefields of Japan in the midst of a future war.

Alien creatures called Mimics have landed and are attempting to invade Earth. Slowly they are attacking each country trying to discover where humanities weak points lie. Keiji Kiriya is a fresh faced solider who is starting to panic at the thought of his first impending battle. He has never experienced war. He has no idea of what to expect or how to react. His worst fears are confirmed and shortly after the battle begins he is killed only to re-awake back in the army base where he is forced to relive the build up to his death once more. Keiji quickly comes to realise he is trapped in time and no matter how he tries to escape destiny he will always end up on the battlefield.

We also get to see the battle from the perspective of an American female soldier called Rita Vrataski, known by all around her as the Full Metal Bitch. Rita is the quintessential warrior. She and her colleagues are battle hardened veterans and seem to be the polar opposite of Keiji and his friends. As Keiji relives the battle over and over again, trying to discover a way forward, Rita becomes the only fixed constant in his world.

Where this novel excels is by taking a concept that many readers will already be familiar with, in this case time travel, and adding an interesting new wrinkle. Instead of going forward or back in time great distances, the main protagonist is trapped in the same time period, forced to continue reliving the same moments indefinitely.

I was really pleased when I heard that All You Need is Kill has had the movie rights optioned. Though the story takes place in a small geographical area it reads as epic in scale, certainly something that would translate as a real spectacle on the movie screen. My initial excitement for a movie was somewhat dampened however, when I then read that the character of Keiji is going to be 'Americanized'. This is a great shame as some of the central concepts of the novel will be lost due to changes in nationality. There is an old samurai principle that is mentioned in the novel, `Kiri-oboeru' which means to strike down your enemy and learn. This sort of detail will become irrelevant if the character is no longer Japanese.

Another concern, while trying to avoid spoilers, is that the book ends on a bittersweet note. I do hope this isn't changed for the film adaption. I would much rather see a faithful adaption on screen than a schmaltzy saccharin sweet Hollywood happy ending.

The novel isn't terribly long, only around two hundred pages, so it's a quick read. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys their science fiction full of action but with in-depth characterization.

Presumably not by chance, Hiroshi Sakurazaka's novel follows similar themes to Issui Ogawa's The Lord of the Sands of Time, also published among the first wave of Japanese sci-fi novels under Viz's new Haikasoru fiction imprint, but in reality the two books are very different in approach. Again the theme is one of using time-travel in order to combat the overwhelming invasion force that threatens to wipe out the entire planet. In the case of All You Need Is Kill, the time-travel is however on a smaller, more personal scale, but the outcome could equally be of global importance.

Here, one fresh Japanese recruit in the United Defence Force, Keiji Kiriya, is caught-up in a Groundhog Day style loop, seemingly doomed to fight and repeatedly die in a major battle with the Mimics that, like a computer game, is continually reset until he can build up the necessary fighting experience and find a way - if there is a way - to overcome the merciless onslaught of the strange mechanical amphibian creatures that threaten to destroy life on the entire planet. That experience might be found in Rita Vrataski, a young American UDF soldier of formidable killing power known as the Full Metal Bitch, but the Mimics are also learning new moves with every battle.

Much more dynamic and with harder-hitting writing than the Ogawa novel, Sakurazaka takes conventional genre and gaming elements and puts a fresh and entertaining spin on them, keeping the repetition of the loops to a minimum, finding new ways of moving the plot forward and keeping the viewer interested in finding the answer to this strange phenomenon. A good translation also makes the book highly readable and entertaining.

This was a mildly interesting read, but not anything great and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. It's not a long novel but does have some interesting storylines. I only bought this book because I worked as an extra in the movie adaptation.