From the Bookshelf: Crest of the Stars omnibus

Every once in a while I do try to scale the high “free cross-border shipping” threshold of the online anime store Right Stuf by ordering other things than anime. Manga and translated novels do feel a bit less intimidating to work through than anime, even if rather often now I find myself reading in brief swallows and stretching things out that way. One omnibus of translated novels ordered, though, did find me a bit ambiguous in advance.

I recall the first episode of a science fiction anime called Crest of the Stars being shown back in my university’s anime club, even if it hadn’t been screened in my first years there. That opening had involved a boy’s childhood being interrupted by diplomatic conquerors from space. Some time after that I bought a collection of the series on DVD, but as with at least one other title I could name I was left wondering if the first episode had formed expectations in my mind the rest of the series had never quite addressed. All in all I’ve long been uncertain and suspicious and ambiguous about science fiction that just happens to include “interstellar governments where hereditary monarchies rule into perpetuity and common folk get no say whatsoever.” I do make an exception for Princess Leia in Star Wars, and for that matter I live in a constitutional monarchy with no personal desire to see it abolished, but the seeming shrugging assumptions in the “space empires” of science fiction do not appeal to me. Crest of the Stars did seem to amount to “become entangled in a system of hereditary rule, and get a thoroughly sublimated relationship with a cute anime space girl in the process.”
( One thing did lull me along... )