YUKIKAZE (36 page)

The fire control radar possesses a wide range of modes, including long-range search and detection, long-range measurement, single target tracking, multiple target tracking, short- and medium-range search and detection, ground attack, short- and medium-range single target tracking, pilotinitiated radar lock-on, and rapid lock-on.

The Super Sylph is equipped with a 20mm Vulcan nose cannon. With its high-velocity ammunition and firing control mechanisms, it can be used even at supersonic speeds.

The Super Sylph can be loaded out with air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles as well as precision guided explosive ordnance. Its main air-to-air missile armaments are the AAM-III, -IV, and -V (short-, medium-, and long-range missiles, respectively). They can function as passive or active homing missiles, or they can be guided from the aircraft. The internal AI systems will self-select guidance mode as well as optimal detonation timing. HAAM (high-velocity air-to-air missiles) armaments were later implemented to increase missile flight velocity.

4. MISCELLANEOUS

The Super Sylph can also carry a variety of mission-specific tactical data collection pods, such as a TARPS (tactical aerial reconnaissance pod system). The TARPS has electronic intelligence data collection capabilities and mounts a variety of cameras but possesses no AI system of its own. If the plane’s central computer judges the data collected by the TARPS to be especially vital, it will be added to its data file.

The Super Sylph possesses an advanced wireless digital data link function, allowing the plane’s central computer to maintain direct, secure communications with the base tactical control computers via the tactical data line.

Details of engine performance, avionics instrumentation, and exact airframe dimensions have not been publicly released on Earth. The figures below represent estimated performance in Earth-standard gravity.

From “Appendix – Mainline Fighter Craft of the FAF” in
The Invader
, by Lynn Jackson.

ABOUT
YUKIKAZE

THE BOOK YOU hold is a new edition of
Yukikaze
. I was fortunate enough to be granted the opportunity to revise the original edition and went through it thoroughly, but in the end I did not make any pronounced changes. I revisited some of the wording but was careful not to modify any section too much. The fundamental composition of the book itself remains completely unchanged.

Twenty years have passed since
Yukikaze
was first published in February of 1984. Rereading the original edition, I realized that the significance of this passage of time was actually much greater than I had first thought. The book definitely felt like something I wrote, but I found myself wanting to know more background detail than what had been provided, to get more under the surface of things. In short, the issues I was interested in writing about back then and what I’m interested in now have changed. If I were to try writing the book all over again today, I imagine it would end up with quite a different tone. It would almost be like rewriting another author’s work.

The creation process of the original edition of the book was informed by my interests, worldview, sensitivities, and mindset at the time. While making the revisions, I believed that it was important, both for the fans of the old edition as well as for the readers picking up the book for the first time, to maintain that original flavor. I considered what had changed in the real world since the old edition first came out, and also what hadn’t changed. Doing so forced me to think about the book on a personal level. I was able to make corrections and revisions according to my current mindset but hopefully without violating the subtle impressions a reader may have formed from the old edition.

I decided that if I wanted to create something that reflected my current interests, it would be better for me to write a new book than to try rewriting an old one. That was what drove me to write the sequel volume,
Good Luck, Yukikaze
. The parts of this book that were changed include some small amendments intended to link it better with the new story. Setting aside the issue of whether or not I should have done so, the intent was to make the book more consistent with future sequels. With that aim, I gratefully offer up this new, “improved” edition to all the fans of
Yukikaze
.

Ch
ō
hei Kambayashi
Matsumoto
March 2002

HUMAN/INHUMAN

THROUGHOUT
YUKIKAZE
THE terms “human” and “humanlike” are set in opposition to “inhuman” and “mechanical.” First and foremost, the book’s theme is the question of what it means to be human. We are shown again and again how the enigmatic invading aliens known as the JAM are completely unlike humans, how communication with them is impossible, how there is no chance of mutual understanding. Through examining this portrait of the thoroughly inhuman JAM, we are able to discern the reverse image of what it is to be human: if to be inhuman is to have no logical method of communication, then to be human is to possess the gift of communication.

The inhuman nature of the members of the SAF charged with intelligence gathering is also stressed in the story. The main character, Rei Fukai, is assigned to the SAF, and it is through him that the question of what it means to be human is asked again and again. One could make the argument that Rei, too, is an inhuman being. However, although his character is that of a cold man, a loner, I don’t believe that these traits consign him to the realm of inhumanity. The trust he places in his beloved plane, Yukikaze, is highly idiosyncratic, a very “human” trait. On this point, taking the character of Rei into account, I’d like to examine the story’s main theme of what it is to be human.

The book opens with an excerpt from
The Invader
, the book by Lynn Jackson on the subject of the JAM War that was published five years before the timeline of the main story. Opening the novel with an excerpt from a fictional “non-fiction” history is effective in establishing an air of verisimilitude. Within the excerpt, Jackson talks about the soldiers of the SAF.

The pilots of the SAF evidently take a certain satisfaction in this requirement, and individuals with ‘special’ personalities outside the range of normal human standards are selected for this duty. These men put more faith in their machines than in other people and can fly their planes with perfect skill. In a way, they are yet one more combat computer, but organic in nature, loaded aboard the Sylphids to carry out a heartless duty.

She goes on to describe the pilots as “machines that are, through some accident of fate, in human form.”

So what are these “normal human standards” Lynn Jackson is talking about? With this phrase, she’s referring not to the set of traits common to most humans but rather to the broader concept of “humanity.” Typically this term is used to indicate the capacity to experience emotions, with the ability to love being the crucial element. Conversely “inhumanity,” although it bears the connotations of cruelty or sadism, essentially denotes the inability to experience emotion or sympathy.

According to one line of thought, what makes us human is our capacity for empathy. What this means is, if I see things and feel things a certain way, I can make the cognitive analogy that others also see and feel things a certain way. The theory is that the development of the empathic capacity marked a major step in the evolutionary process of the human brain. In other words, we can say that what makes us human is our ability to understand the sorrow another person feels by drawing on our own experiences.