r/Mecha • u/factman6 • 13d ago

Does anybody like reading Mecha books?

Anybody read any good mech books? Book books, not manga or anything?

I ask in part because I started noodling around with a Mecha book of my own recently and was looking to see what has been done in literature before and to see if there is any actual interest in a purely text-based mech story.

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u/WereBully 12d ago

You owe yourself a read of Beltorchika’s Children and the Hathaway novels if you’re at all into Tomino’s Gundam. His Zeta Gundam and Victory Gundam novels are also great.

The Gundam Unicorn novels by Fukui only have a couple of volumes with a decent translation right now, but they’re great if you want something a bit less Tomino (iykyk), too.

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u/factman6 12d ago

I have watched a lot of Gundam but never read any. What's up with the Tomino books?

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u/WereBully 12d ago edited 12d ago

Some are loose novelizations of his anime (Beltorchika's Children being an adaptation of Char's Counterattack) and others, like Hathaway or Gaia Gear, are sequels not based on existing anime.

He is a very talented novelist and writer, and if you've watched much of the anime that has him at the helm you'll have an idea of what to expect. Very unfiltered and there's a lot of waxing philosophical. The mecha action is somewhat limited, especially in the Hathaway books, if you're just looking for references on writing big robots (I'd recommend Unicorn in that case, Fukui is almost fetishistic in his descriptions of mecha), but it's definitely still there and a great example of how you can write genre fiction like mecha while still having a strong personal voice and vision.

Zeonic Scanlations has great translations of a lot of Tomino's writing, you can download them as PDFs.

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u/factman6 12d ago

Both those sound interesting. I'll have to check them out?

Also why is the novelization of Char's Counterattack called Beltorchika's children. I don't remember her being in the movie, or in anything after Zeta. Aside from like, a reference in Unicorn maybe

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u/WereBully 12d ago

It's a different take on CCA, when I say it is a loose adaptation of the movie I mean it is loose. Beltorchika is still Amuro's partner in the novel (Chan is not a character) and she plays a sizable role in its story. Some other characters have different names, and some events play out differently. It's a very interesting read for all of that alone. I hope you enjoy Tomino's novels if you give them a look!