Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Live. Die. Repeat.
One of these lines is in the 2004 Japanese military science fiction novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. The other line gives away some of the surprise of what the novel–soon to become a major motion picture–is about. The movie, renamed the far less interesting title Edge of Tomorrow, stars Tom Cruise as a foot soldier (Kaiji Kiriya in the novel, Lt. Col. Bill Cage in the movie)and Emily Blunt as powerhouse super soldier Rita Vrataski in a future battle with an alien incursion that takes place on Earth not too far from now. Based on the brief previews we’ve seen, the film appears to be different enough from the novel so that reading the novel will not entirely give away the movie, and it’s full of enough classic sci-fi riffs that you may want to read it first as a separate experience.
Sakuraska’s novel will likely conjure elements from some of the best of classic science fiction. It’s a great look at day-to-day military encounters, with real world elements from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War
As the movie’s tagline reveals, the now iconic Groundhog Day time-loop plays a part in the story. Searching for what role the time-loop plays is the real quest Sakurazaka takes us through. Each new year seems to bring a new take on that sci-fi device, and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Cause and Effect” best illustrates the physics “causality loop” if you’re not familiar with it and we discussed several other examples here at borg.com back in 2011. If you’re stuck repeating the events of a single period of time, can you ever hope to break free from it? What do you do in the meantime? The time-loop element is pervasive even in the future world of the novel—Keiji loosely recounts once watching Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore’s time-loop comedy 50 First Dates, which finds Barrymore’s character with amnesia every morning so she must start each day all over again.
