All You Need Is Kill

By Hiroshi Sakurazaka,

Book cover of All You Need Is Kill

Book description

When the alien Gitai invade, Keiji Kiriya is just one of many raw recruits shoved into a suit of battle armour and sent out to kill. Keiji dies on the battlefield, only to find himself reborn each morning to fight and die again and again. On the 158th iteration though,…

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Why read it?

3 authors picked All You Need Is Kill as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book doesn't really need a reason to be recommended. I mean, c'mon, we've all seen The Edge of Tomorrow, and admittedly, I did not read the novel until after I saw the movie. Most Americans don't know much about, less yet come across, Japanese graphic novels unless they're already into that kind of stuff.

Regardless, reading the book after seeing the movie was a pleasant surprise. It's like reading Dreamcatcher by Stephen King after seeing the movie. The movies never do the books justice.

This book is a quintessential version of this type of narrative, following a new recruit, Keiji, as he relives the same battle against invading aliens known as Mimics, who also do their own hive-mind version of time looping.

I’ve always loved how time loop stories use repetition to progressively work through a situation, and following Keiji movement by movement, as he learns how to defeat the Mimics, I really felt like I knew what the experience of a time loop would be like. 

Translated from Japanese, this is the novel that inspired the blockbuster movie Edge of Tomorrow starring Tom Cruise. While fighting on the front lines during an alien invasion, Keiji Kiriya finds himself stuck in a time loop after his death. He finds that every time he “dies”, he comes back twenty-four hours earlier with all his memories intact. It follows the formula of a player “dying” and then respawning, retaining all the knowledge gained up to their death with a chance to use that knowledge to prevent it. Learning from your mistakes is vital in any video game, and for…

From Michael's list on books inspired by video games.

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