I have seen the anime series and I just discovered that there is a manga.
It seems to be publishing at this moment, and I could not determine where the manga fits in.
WIthout spoiling the actual manga story, can someone elaborate if this is a different story or not?
SeventhStyle's review (quoted in Dimitri mx's answer) touches on the major issue with the Shinsekai Yori manga. The manga has brazenly explicit visuals, unsurprisingly almost entirely of Maria and Saki3 engaging in lesbian antics.1 Sure, (homo)sexuality was a major theme of the novel, but the manga really is just in bad taste, going out of its way to have Maria and Saki fornicate whenever they get a free moment. It's pretty clear that the manga isn't targeted at the same mature demographic as the novel was.2
In any case, the plot of the manga isn't identical to the novel plot, though it is similar. For example, just from volume 1 of the manga, we have the following major differences:
When the gang is on the excursion trip at the beginning, they don't find the false minoshiro; when the queerats attack later on, Rijin isn't there to help them; and they don't get split up or taken captive during the queerat attack, and hence all five of them are present when they meet Squealer. Also, there are 3 random sex scenes featuring Maria and Saki.
Summary: if you like lesbian antics, read the manga. If not, feel free to skip it. The novel and anime are pretty much objectively superior.
1 Why them and not, say, Satoru and Shun, or Shun and Saki? Well, who do you think is reading this? (Answer: teenage boys, for the most part)
2 The Shinsekai Yori novel was a proper novel, targeted at people with excellent reading knowledge of the Japanese language. The manga, on the other hand, is replete with furigana (phonetic reading aids), which are used primarily in works targeted at people who have not yet mastered reading Japanese, i.e. school-age children.
3 See spoiler below:
And also Reiko when she's still around.
As reviewed here, the manga seems to be a "Mockery of the anime". The manga loses to the serious atmosphere presented in the anime and the novel.
Whilst the anime series is handling it with a proper heavy mood, the yuri inclined manga is making a joke of it – Shinsekai Yori is portraying the disappearance of one of its side-characters as a whimsical gag.
For those unfamiliar with this series’ origin, Shinsekai Yori begins as a standard novel – the novel is a respected work, with quite a thought-provoking premise and tale. Based on the novel, Japan’s largest publishing firm, Kodansha, decided to create an exploitive pocket stuffer of a manga under the same name, which simply features excess and brazen yuri antics. It’s essentially a mockery of the original novel, and the anime is, thankfully, based on that novel – not the manga series, which as one can see below, isn’t even taking itself too seriously.
I think that the manga does have its own set pros and cons, as does the anime.
The one thing I think the manga does better than the anime is Saki's and Satoru's relationship. They actually showed how Satoru feels about her while in the anime they just
end up together at the end.
That leads into another thing I think they did better in the anime and that was showing other character's perspectives besides just Saki's. They make Maria look like a terrible person in the beginning, but over time you generally grow to like her because you see the world from her perspective. They also show more of Reiko who nobody seemed to care about at all in the anime. I mean yeah they forgot about her, but Saki and Satoru managed to remember everyone else they knew who died. A major downfall for me though was the fact that
Shun, Maria, and Mamoru's deaths
seemed way less serious and they actually made fun of them later on.
Other than that, they did explain the ecchi moments as something the characters do as a greeting rather than when they're just under stress like in the anime. Still, it will turn a lot of people off even though the anime did that too with just a couple of homosexual scenes.
Bottom line, if you are homophobic, don't watch or read either of them.
