The original trilogy won the Seiun in 1997. It's a fun space opera, very light. In English the flow is somewhat disturbed by parentheticals that give Baronh transliterations for the words whose meaning was just rendered in English. (The editor said, in Volume I, that the Japanese version put the Baronh in "rubi" (furigana) above the kanji, so the linear flow was less obstructed.) When just the Baronh transliterations are given, which is quite common, a reader has to jump to the glossary or commit the term to memory. These two factors make the book slightly less of a quick read than it otherwise would have been.