What makes good science fiction?

This is a question that I have been asking a lot as I watch Train To The End Of The World, streaming now on Crunchyroll.

In the near future, a young woman, Yoka, is scooped up by a famous Japanese sculpture of an owl and deposited in the middle of a huge gathering. She is clearly unwilling to be the center of so much attention, but is forced to click a giant “7G” button that will enable something something. As she hits the button, reality is scrambled and nothing on Earth is ever the same again.

In a small, provincial town west of Tokyo, Yoka’s friends are now living among wild animals who used to be the adults of the town. Shizuru, the leader of Yoka’s friends, is obsessed with finding Yoka, as they had parted on bad terms. With the help of a transformed railway employee, she enables a single train car to try to try and find her friend. With too little preparation, Shizuru and her friends Reimi, Akira and Nadekko are heading to Ikebukuro, 30 train stops away from their town and into some of the best science fiction I have encountered in anime.

In my opinion, dystopias are far too easy. We, in 2024, can understand exactly how we got to Blade Runner, Mad Max, Akira, or even Silent Mobius. But in Train To Nowhere, the dystopia makes no apparent sense. Some things work, some do not. People are changed from town to town in unpredictable ways. The unpredictability is, for me, one of the key features of this series. This isn’t just about getting somewhere attacked by persistent gangs or capitalists or even demons. There *may* be gangs, but why and how they formed will be more interesting than just hoarding gasoline or water. 

Secondly, I have decided as I watched, good science fiction ought to make me feel slightly uncomfortable. And not just “oh gosh, will /some pointless violence that probably feels very rape-y or just be rape/ happen to our female protagonists?” (Again, I think of that female character in one of The Saint novels who asked out loud, exhausted, bored and annoyed at the threats being made at her, “Why does it always have to be rape?”) No, good science fiction makes you uncomfortable because even if you understand what might happen, you may not understand what the consequences are.  In Train To Nowhere, the girls’ movement through subsequent towns may have repercussions we cannot imagine. What might happen when they arrive in Ikebukuro – what has become of Yoka? Neither we, nor her friends know or can guess.

And then, there is what readers of Okazu will undoubtedly see as either Yuri or Yuri-adjacent. Shizuru’s friendship with Yoka was close and the loss of her friend weighs heavily upon her. That loss compels her to learn how to drive a train through an unimaginably bent reality. That’s certainly a level of intimacy that I find compelling.

There is a manga adaptation of the anime that is currently on Kadokawa’s Comic Walker in Japanese (which is down, as I write this, so check back later.) It really surprises me that this an original anime first and is not adapted from a novel or LN. This is exactly the kind of science fiction I would have imagined came out of the SF genre in Japan.

Ratings:

Art – 8, especially when it comes to the newly configured landscapes
Characters – 8 A good ensemble, but I relate best to Akira, the person least likely to walk into the creepy bath
Story – 9 The episodes favor visual impact over narrative coherence, but its still very decent
Service – Mild, and ignorable
Yuri – As I see it, 6

Overall – 8

We haven’t had the time the characters have had to learn to accept this new reality – and many of the viewers are indeed responding as if they have been thrown into it. “WTF am I watching?” was a common response to Episode 1. As for me, my response was that Train To Nowhere is good science fiction, and whatever happens, I’ll be watching.