Yeah yeah, no 3 or 2 over the weekend. It’s not like you guys were at your computers either.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of one of humanity’s greatest achievements: the Apollo 11 moon landing. While, of course a feat of both engineering and political oneupsmanship, the influence of science fiction on the moon landing (and the moon landing’s subsequent influence on SF) cannot be denied.

And tomorrow, we here at Haikasoru have a launch of our own. Finally, our books will be in stores. It would have been very clever of us to have planned this all out, but really it’s just a matter of our distributor happening to ship so that books hit shelves on Tuesdays.

Haikasoru has been a long time in coming. In fact, we can trace the idea to this list of the Top 20 Geek Novels published in the UK Guardian back in 2005. The list was passed around the office just to see how geeky the editors were. Eric Searleman—manga editor and occasional poster here (he’s the guy who doesn’t like Boogiepop, boo! hiss!)—had only read a few of the titles, while our illustrious boss Masumi Washington had read eight of them, including Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle…in Japanese! The editors began chatting about the books, and a couple of folks had also read the English edition of Japan Sinks and an idea was born.

As far as the name Haikasoru, that came a bit later. We’re all big Dickheads out here, and the deliciousness of a book about Japan’s takeover of California was just too much for us to resist. “High Castle” had already been used as an imprint name, so we went with the Japanese pronunciation. Dick himself is also a big deal in Japan. Here’s the cover to a recent Japanese edition of The Man in the High Castle, which we think is pretty swank:

See you all tomorrow in bookstores across America!