![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerEvery 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.”
The one thing that might have lulled me along to using the new translation of the original novels as free-shipping ballast was recalling impressions of the anime having been “talky” and supposing “at least prose fiction is a medium where lengthy discussions go by a bit easier.” I still let the hardcover omnibus (although hard covers designed to not need dust jackets can seem a bit atypical to me) sit around for months before picking it up to start reading it over Christmas holidays. That I’ve needed until now to be able to post about this is one more illustration of having to snatch reading time, of course.
Once I had started reading, though, I did find the book more palatable than I’d first been worried about. One thing about it was that the romanization of the character names had changed from the old anime subtitles. A detail I hadn’t remembered from before, though, was that the arrival of the Abh conquerors had been a form of “first contact” for the human-colonized world. It was also explained the Abh were out to conquer space not “just because we can,” or because their “anime elf” genetic engineering was proclaimed to make them out-and-out superior, but because after discovering speedy interstellar travel they supposed to have more than one organization with that would mean danger for all worlds. As it turned out, though, another interstellar alliance had set itself up unbeknownst to the Abh, and an “it’s them or us!” war resulted anyway.
Jint (as his name is now romanized), the boy in the story’s opening, is caught up with some years later as he meets the Abh girl Lafier. (Her art in the colour plates at the beginning of the omnibus does have the strange lumpiness in her face I remember from the anime.) They have to bail out of a first battle of the war (the superluminal mechanics of which do have some distinctiveness), then find “getting to rule” has gone to the head of one Abh noble in a way Lafier dislikes. I did start to think there was more action described in the story than I’d quite remembered from the anime. Then, after winding up on a mere world the Abh’s overlordship of maintains an apparently typical light touch but the “liberators” of which are much pushier towards, I got to the point where I wasn’t really remembering anything at all from the anime, and getting more impressed with the story’s action. I hadn’t remembered either casual comments in the worldbuilding that the Abh had started as creations of an ancient state very much implied to be Japan, and that their language (represented with many bold words in the translation) had also evolved from Japanese.
I’m still less than enthused with “space nobility” on general principles, but Crest of the Stars wound up palatable enough I was merely wishing things could have been different in this case (while acknowledging how I also don’t often like the sort of critique that amounts to someone else explaining at length how they’d do things). Whether I’ll look into its follow-up omnibuses from J-Novel Club as I’d once watched the sequel anime (where the “face lumpiness” did smooth out) remains a question, but I suppose I’m always aiming for free shipping.
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.”
The one thing that might have lulled me along to using the new translation of the original novels as free-shipping ballast was recalling impressions of the anime having been “talky” and supposing “at least prose fiction is a medium where lengthy discussions go by a bit easier.” I still let the hardcover omnibus (although hard covers designed to not need dust jackets can seem a bit atypical to me) sit around for months before picking it up to start reading it over Christmas holidays. That I’ve needed until now to be able to post about this is one more illustration of having to snatch reading time, of course.
Once I had started reading, though, I did find the book more palatable than I’d first been worried about. One thing about it was that the romanization of the character names had changed from the old anime subtitles. A detail I hadn’t remembered from before, though, was that the arrival of the Abh conquerors had been a form of “first contact” for the human-colonized world. It was also explained the Abh were out to conquer space not “just because we can,” or because their “anime elf” genetic engineering was proclaimed to make them out-and-out superior, but because after discovering speedy interstellar travel they supposed to have more than one organization with that would mean danger for all worlds. As it turned out, though, another interstellar alliance had set itself up unbeknownst to the Abh, and an “it’s them or us!” war resulted anyway.
Jint (as his name is now romanized), the boy in the story’s opening, is caught up with some years later as he meets the Abh girl Lafier. (Her art in the colour plates at the beginning of the omnibus does have the strange lumpiness in her face I remember from the anime.) They have to bail out of a first battle of the war (the superluminal mechanics of which do have some distinctiveness), then find “getting to rule” has gone to the head of one Abh noble in a way Lafier dislikes. I did start to think there was more action described in the story than I’d quite remembered from the anime. Then, after winding up on a mere world the Abh’s overlordship of maintains an apparently typical light touch but the “liberators” of which are much pushier towards, I got to the point where I wasn’t really remembering anything at all from the anime, and getting more impressed with the story’s action. I hadn’t remembered either casual comments in the worldbuilding that the Abh had started as creations of an ancient state very much implied to be Japan, and that their language (represented with many bold words in the translation) had also evolved from Japanese.
I’m still less than enthused with “space nobility” on general principles, but Crest of the Stars wound up palatable enough I was merely wishing things could have been different in this case (while acknowledging how I also don’t often like the sort of critique that amounts to someone else explaining at length how they’d do things). Whether I’ll look into its follow-up omnibuses from J-Novel Club as I’d once watched the sequel anime (where the “face lumpiness” did smooth out) remains a question, but I suppose I’m always aiming for free shipping.