So what’s the future really going to be like? If you ask me, it’s going to be exactly what we have right now—and, at the same time, nothing like what we have right now. When Roger Ebert reviewed Blade Runner, he pointed out that the 1980s were nothing like the 1980s as we’d imagined them: no flying cars and no world government, but there’s still rock ‘n roll on the radio. That’s one of the things I’ve liked about the Ghost in the Shell mythology: it’s set in the year 2030, but life goes on for many people as it always has: people still work at jobs, drive cars, save for their retirements, and commit crimes.

That was how it came across in the TV series, and that’s also how it comes across in a highly entertaining series of light novels written from the series mythology and now presented in English. The first of that batch, The Lost Memory, was a fun read (I used it to keep from dropping dead of boredom during a stint of jury duty last year), and ifMemory read like an extended episode of the TV series, that was no accident: Junichi Fujisaku’s novel was apparently derived from one of a set of stories that had originally been intended for the show but got left by the wayside, and Fujisaku himself was on the show’s production team. I haven’t yet read the second novel, Revenge of the Cold Machines, but if it’s anything like White Maze, the third release, it’s probably as self-contained as the other two and thus not crucial to understanding what goes on inMaze. And probably every bit as much fun as Maze, too.