enter Kataklysmus

[adelaidesean]

This is the cover of the French edition of Echoes of Earth, out now from Bragelonne. Beautiful, isn't it? The interior looks just as classy. Our translator, Mikael Cabon, fixed some errors in the Adjusted Planck Units appendix, for which I'll be forever grateful. (That table is one of my proudest achievements. Galling to think it's not been 100% correct until now!)

Meanwhile, work on the German Books of the Cataclysm continues apace at the Otherworld Verlag laboratories, ahead of a January 2009 launch. The Crooked Letter turned out to have no satisfying translation, so the first book has become Die Spiegelzwillinge) ("the mirror twins") and the series "Bücher Des Kataklysmus". Me, I think those titles are totally awesome. Things sound ten times more apocalyptic in German. (Thanks to Michael Krug for such attention to detail.)

Lastly, I reported a while back that my story "The Seventh Letter" will be translated for Czech magazine Pevnost as "The Fourth Letter" ("Čtvrté písmeno"). Here is the last sentence, as rendered by Pavel Bakič:

"A jeho sny, tak jako barevné sny slepců, byly plné prodejů, zasedání představenstva a lenochodů dštících durmanový dým ze dveří nadskakujících dostavníků."

Because it looks cool.

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Listening to: Hammock - City in the Dust on My Window

Comments

[derekcfpegritz.livejournal.com]

BTW, I really liked the Orphans trilogy. It was, in fact, that trilogy that first exposed me to your and Shane's work. The thing I loved the most about the trilogy was the fact that even after the Spike in Solsys, there were still vicious, strange alien civilzations even more powerful passing through the Spiral Arm. It's the only series I've ever read that managed to combine transhumanist and Lovecraftian concepts. I seriously kept expecting one of the Starfish to be blown open to reveal Cthulhu crouched over the controls....

[ladnews.livejournal.com]

Thanks, man. That means a lot. Lovecraft was very much on my mind while writing the last book in the series. How does one possibly capture the unknowable in words alone? That's a problem I've faced several times now, and I'm still looking for the answer.

[derekcfpegritz.livejournal.com]

That's something I deal with all the time myself, especially since one of the stories I have planned for my Footnotes to the Human Species (http://footnotes.pegritz.com) series literally takes place in the creaky last days of the cosmos as it's literally dissolving into nothingness and in the first moments after the Big Bang itselfas the Great Race of Yith and the Great Old Ones take on the Other Gods for control of the multiverse. HPL's probably spinning through all eleven dimensions in his grave.

Human language simply isn't designed to capture this kind of surreality because, fundamentally, language is just a means for encoding information for transmission between human brains via a really clumsy analog method. So I've discovered that--at least for me--indirection and "hinting" at incomprehensible things is a great way to give readers something to envision, something to imagine, in a rather vague way to let their imaginations run wild. The nature of the incomprehensible is that each individual entity is going to perceive a common experience in different terms, so much as HPL did, you just leave that stuff up to the readers' imaginations.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Or show your protagonists's reactions, in true Spielberg-style (but better, of course). :-)

[derekcfpegritz.livejournal.com]

My protagonists' reactions are generally just slackjawed glares of mindcrushing incomprehension....But, hell, what would you do if you suddenly found yourself transferred into an 11-dimensional body made of cultured quagma and artificially-summed worldlines, facing down a patch of completely decayed vacuum that is coughing out amorphous, tentacled beings whose "bodies" consist completely of "molecules" whose "atoms" are entire universes bonded together via hyperhyperhyperdimensional wormholes?

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

hell, what would you do...?

"[S]lackjawed glares of mindcrushing incomprehension" sounds about right. :-)

[aliettedb.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's an awesome cover--I'm pretty sure the book will be in a place of honour in our bookshops :)

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

That's really good to hear. ^_^