Ten elite space cadets, from different races spread across the galaxy, are assigned to board a decommissioned spaceship as their final test. Their orders are to survive as long as they can with what they have. Once in the ship, they find that their crew has gained an eleventh member. Given the circumstances of the cadet selection process and how rushed the exams were, no one can remember the original members well enough to recognize which is the new face nor how they got there. As the days pass, the eleven must deal with their suspicions of each other as well as the sudden news that the spaceship is in dire straits. Winner of the 1976 Shogakukan Manga Award, They Were Eleven is heralded as one of the turning points in shojo manga history for its prespectives on the sci-fi genre and gender roles.
Author
Moto Hagio (萩尾望都 Hagio Moto) is a manga artist born in Ōmuta, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan, though she currently lives in Saitama Prefecture. She is considered a "founding mother" of modern shōjo manga, and a member of the Year 24 Group (24-Gumi). She helped pioneer modern shōjo manga, modern science fiction manga, and BL manga. In addition to being an "industry pioneer", her body of work "shows a maturity, depth and personal vision found only in the finest of creative artists". She has been described as "the most beloved shōjo manga artist of all time." Moto Hagio made her professional debut in 1969 at the age of 20 with her short story Lulu to Mimi on Kodansha's magazine Nakayoshi. Later she produced a series of short stories for various magazines for Shogakukan. Two years after her debut, she published Juichigatsu no Gimunajiumu (The November Gymnasium), a short story which dealt openly with love between two boys at a boarding school. The story was part of a larger movement by female manga artists at the time which pioneered a genre of girls' comics about love between young men. In 1974, Hagio developed this story into the longer Toma no shinzo (The Heart of Thomas). She was awarded the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1976 for her science fiction classic Juichinin iru! (They Were Eleven) and her epic tale Poe no ichizoku (The Poe Family).
