> I don’t give a rat’s ass about the name of some scrub who does a speed dash inside a bar. Running indoors is for dogs and children too young to know better.
> You looking for a fight?
> I’d say I’m finding one.
> Leave the new guy alone, Ricky.
That was Masumi, butting in.
> That tournament’s bringing these guys out of the woodwork. I bet this one thinks he’s got the brass to take on the top four.
> I’m just here looking for Jack.
> To fight him, I know. You really want a fight, go to an arcade. You can find Pak out in Shinjuku.
> At an arcade?
> Don’t make me type it twice. A-R-C-A-D-E
> That’s a little behind the times, isn’t it?
> You just don’t get it, do you? Times may change, but holy ground is holy ground.
That was how the story had unfolded three days ago. And then Xevale came up with his plot proposal—one in which the Celestial received a distress signal from the mining base the moment it came out of warp and entered the planetary system—only today. And how the away team took the shuttlecraft Dart to the base only to find that the workers had all been killed by some mysterious force.
“This story better have a resolution,” I said to myself, dubious about the whole turn of events. Knowing Xevale, he probably didn’t have an explanation for the workers’ deaths. He only liked to create these kinds of mysterious incidents.
I could just ignore Xevale’s plot submission. But then simply destroying the planet and the DS as planned didn’t provide much of a catharsis. The story could use one more twist before the end. After thinking about it long and hard, I pasted the text written by Xevale onto a new web page, created a link from the contents page, and clicked PUBLISH.
Just as I opened a new tab on the browser to verify the changes on the website, there was a knock at the door.
“Coming!”
I left the computer running and went to answer the door. I couldn’t remember ordering anything by mail order. The only people that came knocking on the door on a late Saturday afternoon were either newspaper solicitors or some lady from a local religious group. I’ll just get rid of them.
Standing on the other side of the peephole were a young policeman and a balding middle-aged man.
I cautiously opened the door just a crack, and the middle-aged man asked, “Are you Nanami Shiihara?” He pulled out his ID from his gray coat and held it up in front of my face. Although I’d seen plenty of police IDs being flashed on TV, this was my first exposure to the real thing.
“My name is Iioka. I’ve been asked by the Niigata Prefectural Police to investigate an incident. Do you know a young man by the name of Yuichiro Tanizaki?”
Yuichiro Tanizaki—several seconds went by before I could retrieve that name from my memory. It was the name of Shawn Mornane in Maintenance.
“Yes, I know him,” I replied.
“Is he a member of your club?” the detective asked.
TWO hits in the world of science fiction. The first is this neat-o interview with yours truly over at the World SF blog: An Interview With Nick Mamatas, in which I am so clever I say things like:
And the translator, unlike the author, cannot simply do wholesale rewrites to make something work. We’re playing a hand that has already been dealt. Then there’s the issue of translator skill; few have the ear of a novelist. That’s when I come in. I’ve managed to find some excellent creative translators, but can also nudge and pull and yank and tug at the work. So far I haven’t had to put in any footnotes to explain this or that untranslatable term or cultural reference, though part of my luck there has been the immense cultural exchange between Japan and the English-speaking world over the past two decades thanks to video games, manga, and anime.
We’re also thrilled that the January issue of Locus Magazine has reviewed Usurper of the Sun. The review isn’t online and I’m not about to key in the whole thing, but here are some highlights:
…based on John Wunderley’s translation of Housuke Nojiri’s Usurper of the Sun, [Haikasoru] promises to be a fascinating program…The main provocative idea that Nojiri introduces here has to do with the nature of mind and perception, and what he calls the difference between adaptive and non-adaptive intelligence, but to say more would be to reveal the story’s most intriguing surprise. With that in his basket, a tightly focused narrative line that marches us relentlessly through 35 years of future history, and a genuinely engaging heroine, he’s acquitted himself well.
Not only do we have two publicity coups, we have two new books out today! Here’s my shakeycam pic of The Book of Heroes out in the wild.
Yes, sadly it is in the manga section and not either Science Fiction/Fantasy or Young Adult, so keep an eye out!
And we also have Yukikaze hitting shelves today. Don’t have a snap of that book yet, but people are reporting buying it. This guy seemed to like it. I mean, he SHAT BRICKS. That’s positive, right?
Hello! Today we have a special guest post from book designer extraordinaire, Courtney Utt! Not much else to say except to remind you all that when you see a copy of The Book of Heroes in the store tomorrow (and of course you’re all going to the store tomorrow) remember to actually flip through it!
How To Make a Flipbook by Courtney Utt
When we first started contemplating a design for the interiors of The Book of Heroes in relation to Brave Story the editor, Nick Mamatas, suggested making a flipbook of flying books to match the cover illustration. Brave Story has illustrations in the margin showing when the main character finds a magical gem for his sword, and we wanted to make something fun for this book too. I said yes immediately. What a great idea! Little did I know what I was actually getting myself into…
Making a flipbook looked simple when I watched how-to videos on YouTube. But I think in the end it took a lot more work than anybody expected. I first started by outlining one of the books from the cover illustration in Illustrator. Dan May, the same illustrator that created the cover art for Brave Story, created another great illustration for this book which includes a lot of flying books. This process was taking so long, so I took a break from it for the day.
When I got home from work that night I told my boyfriend and favorite illustrator Roderick Constance about trying to create this flying book flipbook. He immediately suggested finding a video on YouTube of something flying so that we could see what wing movement actually looks like, to model the book after. A bird? Too complex, not stiff enough. A butterfly? Yes, but… We ended up finding a slow motion video of a moth beating its wings.
Perfect! That’s what i want the book to look like in the margin! But now, how should I draw those wings, make them look like a book, and how many frames should I make?
Luckily, Roderick offered to help. “When do you need this done by?” he asked. “Uh, I need this in two weeks!!” A few days later I received via email a short Flash video of a roughly illustrated flying book. Wow. I was impressed. Thirty-six frames of a book imitating a flying moth. The cover is red and the pages are blue so that I could see the two elements moving together.
From there we cut a few frames so that we could have the flipbook repeat exactly eight times, according to the final page count. We were now at thirty frames. Then I brought each frame into Illustrator and vectorized each element. After creating thirty Illustrator frames of the flying book I went back in and created a light source, shading each book to give them more of a three-dimensional feel because the outline was too flat. After finalizing the thirty frames I placed the flying book into the layout 170 times—once for each page—but only on the recto. [That's the right-hand side for you landlubbers out there. —NM] I then copied the recto placement and flipped it for the verso.[Verso=left—NM] So that if you were to flip through the book you can see the flying book if you flip both front-to-back and back-to-front.
Two weeks later we were done. It looked great on screen, was fun to play with out of the laser jet, but it really needed to be perfect once it came back from the printer!
Finally, here is a slide show of our local San Francisco inspiration for flying books. Check out this public art installation on the corner of Columbus and Broadway, on the border between Chinatown and North Beach called The Language of Birds.
