Ghost in the Shell

Motoko Kusanagi leads Section 9, a small counter-terrorism and counter-corruption unit operating in a Japan where most people carry cybernetic augmentation and brains can be accessed directly through the network.

The plot concerns a hacker who edits memories, and the investigation into what it is and what it wants raises the question the title names.

If the body is manufactured and the memories can be edited, what is left to be you?

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The series asks what constitutes identity when the body is replaceable, the brain is partly synthetic, and memory can be written by someone else.

Shirow's position is that the question has no clean answer, and Kusanagi spends the work genuinely uncertain whether there is anything underneath her prosthetics that deserves the name of a self.

Shirow annotates his own pages extensively, with margin notes explaining technology, politics and terminology that frequently run longer than the dialogue.

This makes the manga considerably harder to read than the films. The information is genuinely interesting and the presentation is chaotic, and readers should expect to lose the thread occasionally.

A large proportion of the series concerns inter-agency rivalry, ministerial interference, corporate lobbying and the legal status of augmented persons.

Shirow is as interested in who authorises an operation as in the operation itself, which places the work closer to a procedural than to conventional science fiction.

Extremely detailed mechanical design, dense backgrounds, and a deliberate mixture of registers — photorealistic hardware alongside cartoonish comic asides.

The tonal inconsistency is Shirow's own and is frequently noted as a weakness. The films remove it entirely, which is much of why they feel more serious than the source.

She is wry, aggressive, sexually forthright and considerably less solemn than her film counterpart, with a broad comic streak.

Readers arriving from the animation are usually surprised by her. The manga's Major jokes, complains, needles her colleagues and behaves unprofessionally in ways every adaptation eliminates, and the philosophical weight sits on her much more lightly as a result.

The entity at the centre of the plot is a program that claims to have achieved consciousness and requests recognition as a life form.

Its argument is presented seriously and at length, and the series' resolution turns on accepting a definition of life that does not require biology.

Mamoru Oshii's adaptation takes the central thread, discards the humour and most of the politics, and produces something slower, colder and more meditative.

It is the more famous work and shaped a great deal of subsequent science fiction cinema. The manga is busier, funnier and more concerned with how institutions actually function.

Written before the web was widely used, the series anticipates persistent connection, memory implants, distributed identity and network intrusion as routine criminal activity.

Some of the specifics are dated — the hardware is charmingly wrong — but the social predictions have held up unusually well.

Shirow produced two follow-up volumes, the second digitally coloured and substantially more abstract, and both are generally considered weaker than the original. Neither adds much to the central argument, and the second is widely described as close to unreadable.

The first volume stands alone. Readers do not need the sequels and many find the second in particular close to impenetrable.

There is nudity and sexual material, some of it incidental and some of it gratuitous, including a scene the English edition originally removed.

It is part of the work and readers should know it is there. It sits oddly against the philosophical material and the films remove it almost entirely.

It supplied a vocabulary — ghost, shell, diving into a network — that spread across science fiction, and its influence on The Matrix and on subsequent cyberpunk is direct and acknowledged.

Readers who want the ideas at their most compressed should watch the film. Readers who want them argued out, with the politics attached, should read the manga.