In the distant future humans have branched out from earth, discovering other planets inhabited by people who are a lot like them. Unfortunately, not everyone is friendly, and aliens known as Bugs have begun picking off human populated planets one by one. Alan Corinth is a low-ranking officer on board a galactic naval space vessel that is attacked by Bugs; because he was deep in the bowels of the ship at the time of the attack, he is the only survivor. The ship's AI prioritizes his continued survival by putting him into an escape pod and sending him to the planet below. Fortunately, it's one where he can breathe. But why has he suddenly entered a world of swords and sorcery?

Captain Corinth is translated by Laura Egan.

In the distant future humans have branched out from earth, discovering other planets inhabited by people who are a lot like them. Unfortunately, not everyone is friendly, and aliens known as Bugs have begun picking off human populated planets one by one. Alan Corinth is a low-ranking officer on board a galactic naval space vessel that is attacked by Bugs; because he was deep in the bowels of the ship at the time of the attack, he is the only survivor. The ship's AI prioritizes his continued survival by putting him into an escape pod and sending him to the planet below. Fortunately, it's one where he can breathe. But why has he suddenly entered a world of swords and sorcery?

Captain Corinth is translated by Laura Egan.

We've been conditioned to think of isekai as either a case of transportation/summoning, being reborn, or some other form of portal fantasy. ButCaptain Corinth takes a different approach: the protagonist of this sci-fi isekai story ends up on a new planet that no one in the Galactic Navy has ever been on, pretty literally sending him to a new world. He's not there by choice – Alan Corinth was the only survivor of the destruction of his spaceship, something that happened only because he was stuck in the bowels of the ship doing routine maintenance. As the lone human remaining, the ship's AI elevates him to the role of captain and immediately makes it her priority to keep him safe. Since the ship is moments away from disintegration, this means getting him off it; before he really has time to process the loss of everyone he's been working with, Alan finds himself in an escape pod jetting towards the planet below. Because his ship was forced out of hyperspace when attacked, it's not a planet that he has ever been to, or that even exists on any charts. Luckily for Alan, the air is breathable, the water potable, and it generally looks like he's going to be okay in terms of basic survival. Less luckily? He seems to have been dropped right into a sword and sorcery fantasy.

At this point in genre saturation, a space soldier being dropped into a medieval fantasy planet feels positively revelatory. While we've certainly seen this before in, for example,Combatants Will Be Dispatched!,Captain Corinth takes things in a more serious light. Alan has no idea if he will ever be rescued from the planet, and he learned relatively quickly that while it is easy to survive in terms of necessities, it's a human planet with problems like any other, problems he'll have to learn how to deal with. We as readers start to get the idea of what kind of planet he's on relatively quickly; the first humanoid beings he meets are green-skinned men with pointy ears who are decidedly hostile – in other words, goblins. At first Alan thinks that these are the primary inhabitants of the planet; he soon discovers wheel ruts that indicate otherwise, and at about the halfway mark of the volume he finds himself rescuing the sole survivor of a wagon that had a run-in with dangerous animals. Thus is the heroine introduced: despite appearances, Cleria is not a damsel in distress, something we know because she was accompanied by many knights who did not survive, and she was fighting with them. Although he doesn't say as much, we can see that Alan feels at least a little bit of solidarity with Cleria – after all, both of them find themselves in roughly the same position.

Even for a first volume, this one is a lot of setup. We learn the basics of what's been going on in the sci-fi part of the story, the history of the hero Alan's ship was named for, and how his future tech more or less functions. That last one takes up a fair amount of page time; Alan is equipped with nanomachines that help him navigate the world, and they function more or less like a combination of the Internet and a personal physician. Although these are absolutely nothing special where he comes from, to Cleria they make him look like the typical overpowered isekai protagonist, which is a nice way of getting around that most basic of tropes. Cleria assumes that he's using some sort of magic, and indeed nanomachines are able to help Alan learn to use magic, since that's a thing on this planet. Alan, meanwhile, is mostly interested in ensuring Cleria's and his own survival until they can reach civilization, while systematically setting out to learn more about this new world he finds himself in. While it feels like a given that eventually some sort of romance will develop between the two of them, that's really not at all the focus here; this volume is much more interested in establishing the situation Alan has landed in than anything else. Despite that, all of the characters introduced thus far (Alan, Cleria, and the AI who is modeled after the heroic captain from the past) are likable and interesting. This really feels like a story that is taking its time to set things up, and the nimble pacing does not make that feel like a drag on the plot.

The art is dynamic and easy to read, and it's worth mentioning that it does a good job of showing the violence without being stomach-churningly graphic. When Alan first meets Cleria, she has had an arm and a foot torn off by wild animals; we get enough of an impression of the jagged edge that remains without the art lingering too long on the horrors. Similarly, Alan's near-death escape is not graphic in nature; we see the destruction of the ship without the gruesome remains of his shipmates. While we don't see too much of how Alan's tech works – he manages to produce a prosthetic leg for Cleria without us ever really seeing how he pulls that off – it's still enough for us to understand the basics of how advanced his society is comparison to the one of the planet he has landed on. All in all, there is simply a good balance to this book, and that goes a long way to making it an immersive reading experience.

It's always nice to see a story that twists are familiar genre just a little bit so that it's still recognizable without feeling just like every other book out there.Captain Corinth's first volume does just that, and while it may go off in more typical directions later on, this introduction to the series does its job by making me want to read volume two. Sci-fi isekai isn't something that we see all that often, at least not in English translation, making this feel both familiar and new. The closest comparison may be the pulp novels ofEdgar Rice Burroughs, but even without that, this is an intriguing start to the series and a pretty good read.