Science Fiction Anime: 8 Picks and the Questions They Ask

Ghost in the Shell and Planetes came out eight years apart and look nothing alike. One is a 1995 film about a cyborg police officer who suspects she may be only a very good machine. The other is a 26-episode series about a rubbish collector in low orbit in 2075 who wants to save up for his own spaceship. Underneath, they are the same kind of science fiction: each takes one invented thing seriously and follows it into ordinary lives to see what it costs.

The hardware on the poster tells you the setting. The question underneath tells you whether you will still be thinking about it next week, and the eight picks here ask very different ones.

What are you, if your body is a machine?

The one to start with Ghost in the Shell

• One film
• 1995
• complete

A cyborg detective hunts a hacker who rewrites people's minds, and starts asking what is left of her own.

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Major Motoko Kusanagi’s body, down to the case around her brain, belongs to the government. She works for Section 9, a counter-terror unit in a crowded future port city, alongside Batou, a huge cyborg with artificial eyes, and Togusa, who is almost entirely human and has a family to go home to. The case is a hacker known as the Puppet Master, who breaks into people’s cyberbrains and leaves them living with memories that never happened.

The best scene is nearly wordless: Kusanagi diving alone in the harbour at night, dragged down by the weight of her own body, then telling Batou on the boat what she feels as she rises back up. Director Mamoru Oshii lets the plot stop for long stretches like that, and the result plays like a philosophical essay with gunfights. Content note: graphic gunfire and frequent nudity, framed as a body treated like hardware.

If the question is where you exist online Serial Experiments Lain

• 13 episodes
• complete
• open to interpretation

A withdrawn 14-year-old gets a message from a classmate who has just died, saying she has only left her body.

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Lain Iwakura barely speaks at school until an email arrives from Chisa, a classmate who has killed herself, saying she now lives in the Wired. Lain’s father is delighted to set her up with a better computer. The 1998 series is built from humming power lines, shadows splashed with red and long silences, and it anticipated a great deal about living online. It ends clearly enough to be complete and loosely enough that people still argue over it. Content note: a suicide in the first episode and constant dread.

Who cleans up after the future?

For the working-class future Planetes

• 26 episodes
• complete story

2075. A rookie joins the least glamorous crew in orbit: the one that collects space debris before it kills someone.

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Ai Tanabe arrives at Technora’s Debris Section full of ideals and finds a cramped office the rest of the company mocks as the Half Section. Her crewmates are Hachimaki, a collector saving up for a ship of his own, and Fee Carmichael, a captain who spends her breaks hunting for anywhere on the station she is still allowed to smoke. A loose bolt travelling at orbital speed can punch through a passenger shuttle, so the job matters, and the company treats it as an embarrassment anyway.

The first episodes play as a workplace comedy in pressure suits. Then the politics of who gets to use space, a terrorist movement and Hachimaki’s own ambition all sharpen, and the series reaches an ending that closes the story. Content note: terrorist violence and injuries in vacuum.

Is a good dictator better than a bad democracy?

For politics at galactic scale Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These

• 12 episodes
• first part of a longer remake

Two brilliant commanders on opposite sides of a very old war: one wants to rule the galaxy, the other wants to retire.

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Reinhard von Lohengramm is a young admiral of the Galactic Empire, ferociously gifted and driven by the wish to free his sister from the emperor who took her. Yang Wen-li commands for the Free Planets Alliance, wanted to be a historian, and would happily take a pension over a victory. The story sets them against each other across fleet battles planned like chess, and then asks the awkward question: if the autocrat is honest and able and the democracy is corrupt, which side should you want to win?

The original series is 110 episodes, released between 1988 and 1997, and it is the version most fans mean when they name the title. The 2018 remake, Die Neue These, has sleeker ship battles and is easier to begin: its first season is 12 episodes and covers only the opening of the war, with later parts continuing it. Content note: war on a scale of millions of deaths.

What is childhood like in augmented reality?

For a summer adventure with a sting Den-noh Coil

• 26 episodes
• complete original story

Kids in a city wired for augmented reality chase digital pets, glitches and urban legends through their glasses.

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Yuko Okonogi, nicknamed Yasako, moves to Daikoku City, where every child wears internet-connected glasses that lay a second city over the real one. Her virtual dog Densuke can be petted, lost and chased by the city’s lumbering data-deleting maintenance programs. Then a second Yuko joins her class, a cold, capable girl called Isako who knows far more about the glasses than any adult would like.

Mitsuo Iso made this in 2007, as smartphones were only arriving, and the rules of its layered world are carefully thought through: hacks cast like spells, abandoned old spaces where the data has decayed, and playground rumours that turn out to be half technical fact. It starts as a summer adventure and deepens into a story about grief and memory. Content note: grief, and children in genuine danger.

What would you break to undo one mistake?

For time travel that sends a bill Steins;Gate

• 24 episodes
• complete
• Steins;Gate 0 is an alternate sequel

A self-styled mad scientist in Akihabara discovers that his modified microwave can send text messages into the past.

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Rintaro Okabe calls himself Hououin Kyouma, wears a lab coat everywhere, and runs a Future Gadget Laboratory above a television repair shop with his friends Daru and Mayuri. When their Phone Microwave (name subject to change) turns out to send texts backwards in time, the teenage neuroscientist Kurisu Makise joins them, and every small edit to the past sends a bill forward. The first third is a slow, jokey hangout, which is how you come to care. Content note: violent deaths, and a subplot about one character’s gender that has aged badly.

Who counts as a person in a war?

For the war question 86 EIGHTY-SIX

• 11 episodes, then Part 2 for 12
• closes a major arc
• the novels continue

A republic tells its citizens the war is fought by drones. The drones have pilots, and the pilots have no rights.

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The Republic of San Magnolia boasts of a war with no human casualties. Its Juggernaut drones are in fact piloted by the Eighty-Six, a minority stripped of citizenship and confined outside the walls, whom the Republic counts as less than human. Major Vladilena Milizé, called Lena, is a Handler: she directs a squadron of them from a desk in the capital, hearing their voices through a neural link while their faces stay unseen.

Episodes cut between Lena’s spotless capital and the mud where Shinei Nouzen, the captain the others call Undertaker, carries the names of every squadmate who has died. The first 11 episodes stay mostly with the Republic’s lie. Part 2 moves beyond it across 12 more and finishes the arc. Content note: combat deaths, racial persecution, and teenagers sent to die.

What happened out there?

For a mystery about the world itself Heavenly Delusion

• 13 episodes
• story continues in the manga

Fifteen years after a catastrophe, two travellers cross a ruined Japan looking for somewhere called Heaven.

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Kiruko is a sharp, gun-carrying escort and Maru is the teenage boy she travels with, who can kill the man-eating monsters that roam the ruins with a touch. Meanwhile, in a walled school full of gardens, a girl called Tokio lives among children who have been told the outside is hell. How those two stories fit together is the show’s real question, and Production I.G answers it slowly and with great confidence. Thirteen episodes, and the story continues in the manga. Content note: graphic violence, sexual violence, and sexual content involving teenagers.

The questions side by side

If time loops were the question that stuck, Summer Time Rendering in our mystery guide runs one as a puzzle. Planetes also sits in the Cowboy Bebop guide, and the anime with endings list collects stories that finish. To find neighbours for the working-class pick, open the Finder with Planetes selected.