Seikai no Monshou
Crest of the Stars

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This review is based on J-Novel Club's Collector's edition.

Crest of the Stars is a classic space-opera. It acts as a prelude to it's sequel, 'Banner of the Stars.' And it's one of the best light novel science fiction stories out there.

The main reason to love this story is the carefully crafted world and it's characters. The protagonists are Lafier (Lafiel in the anime) and Jint (Jinto in the anime). Lafier is an Abh, part of a genetically advanced race. This race controls most of the galaxy as a major empire. As a whole, the Abh are intriguing as an ideal, yet still a flawed existence.

Jint ... on the other hand is a 'landworlder,' someone who is born on one of the many worlds as a regular human. But through luck and circumstance, he becomes an Abh noble and meets Lafier.

Jint and Lafier are great characters, and they have a lot of fun banter. Jint offers a human perspective that the reader can sympathize with and understand easily, while Lafier offers a fantastical and wondrous perspective from her heritage and way of thinking. It makes her character perspective fascinating. However both Jint and Lafier are at their best as characters when they are a pair.

As for the other characters, the Abh as a whole have a lot of colorful personalities that make them fun and engaging. I think my only complaint in this department is that the antagonists felt a bit over the top- the corny 'muhahaha I'm so evil' types.

The story acts essentially as a prologue to an epic space opera. I think the biggest weakness here is the massive load of vocabulary jargon the story throws at you. I have to give the translator (Giuseppe di Martino) a lot of credit here for making these terms easier to digest. However it was still a slog to get through all the technical terminology in places, and it does make the reading slower than I'd like at times. Regardless, the story was fun to read. I was excited to learn how Lafier and Jint's circumstances would affect the situations they ended up in.

There isn't much art to speak of, sadly. The only art to be found is at the beginning of the book, which has illustrations of the original novel covers. It's nice art, but there's hardly any here.

Overall Crest of the Stars is a great science-fiction story, highlighted by it's fun characters and epic scale. The lack of art is somewhat disappointing though, and the technical terminology reads stiff at times. Still, if you like space operas this is a must buy series. Onward to the sequel- Banner of the Stars.

8/10