Our Favorite Book of All Time: Queen Millennia

When I was a very young kid in elementary school in Hong Kong, I was hooked up with reading Japanese comic Books. I got interested in the Japanese comic books because I was a big fan of watching Japanese cartoons. I learnt about this book after I watched its TV series and became a fan. Besides cartoons from America, kids in Asia (now even in China) watched a lot of cartoons from Japan. The Japanese cartoons surpass the American ones to be the favorites among kids in Asia because they're just so much more creative and compelling in terms of plots and stories. The premise of the story is about a princess from another planet who was sent here to earth by her Queen Mother 1000 years ago to rule an underground empire her predecessors had built deep under the earth. The empire served as a base where her people from her planet conducted studies on the earth and prepared for the earth's ultimate demise (it's like the preparation involved in Noah's Ark, collecting sample of everthing ).

The princess assumed two identities. The Queen of the super high-tech colony underneath the earth that existed in parallell to the human civilizations on the surface of the earth, and a daugther of the owner of a sushi restaurant who worked as a research assistant in a space center in 1997. Her parents at the little sushi restaurant were actually not her parents and their experience of giving birth to her and raising her was all planted on their brains by technology. They called it memory transplant. Those memories were actually created using memories of another Japanese couple who actually had a daugther.... ( I only found this out in later episodes when a series of events that led to the revelation of the true indentity of a beautiful sushi girl who got parents that I always thought were too different from their daughther. At the beginning, I just couldn't understand why the queen's parents on earth didn't seem to know that their daughter was an alien from out of space.)

Anyway, this girl had actually been living on this planet earth for 1000 years. Every 1000 years, her Queen Mother from her home planet would send a different princess to the earth (her other sisters). Throughout the 1000 years term, the princesses took up different cover-up identities, from Egyptian queen to Chinese princess to a modern day sushi girl in Japan. This is because the host families only had a life span of decades, meanwhile each queen had to live on earth for a thousand years until a new queen was sent to take over. All the pains in bidding goodbye to her host families due to death impacted this "1000 years" Queen and gave her a lot of compassion with the humans and ultimately a strong emotional attachment to the earth.... The story and plots are really twisty. Eventually, she had to decide whether she would choose her home planet or the earth, and it's not just a personal preference, her decision would force her to choose either the survival of her home planet or that of the planet earth where she had spent 1000 years living in. Her planet was predicted to be on its course to crash into the earth from thousands and thousands of years ago. It was due to the magnetic force change of the universe that altered the track of her planet. With that knowledge, her queen mother sent her daugthers to the earth, to study it and to document everything there only because she knew that by the time when their planet crashed into the earth, the earth and everything on it would be totally destroyed and burnt to dust. Her mother's goal was to collect as much memorabilia from the earth as possible for their own research interest (from the aspect of culture, language, history, and the earth's smartest scientists, etc etc) and built documenation about their observation of the earth, its civilizations, and the human beings from their very beginning to the very end, before they were completely destoryed by the ultimate collision. Meanwhile, this queen's planet was so much more advanced in techology and science that their planet had this invincible shield that would close around the planet and completely protected it from the impact of collison. This protective shield actually would intensify the collision and therefore magnify the damage to the earth. The naked earth on the other hand would crash and burn and eplode into space dust. There were a few options that were explored during the TV series to minimze destruction of the earth and to save the human beings. But all of them involved her home planet to share certain casualties with the earth...which her Queen Mother would not allow. Her queen mother was headstrong that, "hell with the earth, we will crash with them, but we won't have a dent....and since the primitive humans can't figure out a way to save themselves, it's none of our business."

As the paths of the two planets came closer together, the earth was experiencing lots of natural diasters and climate change. There were a lot of chaos among governments who couldn't come to a consensus of what to do and which people should they let to board the space ships they were building with the help of this alien queen (this is the part where the movie 2012 probably copied from this Japanese cartoon). There are lots of great stories in every episode and it just kept building audience's curosity and also answering their questions from watching the previous episodes. (I think cartoons like this just made us smarter...cause it kept us thinking) The series was so good. It was not predictable at all. The now popular "Twilight" series is totally lame compared to this one. Below is the English version MTV of this all time favorite cartoon TV series in Japan and a lot of countries, (except the U.S.). I first watched it in 1983. I was very young then but I was able to recite all the scripts the next day when I played with my Barbie and dressed her up as the "1000 years queen".