Haikasoru

This is apparently old news, but I just heard it, and it was quite a happy OMGWTFBBQ moment: the American Japanese-entertainment-publisher Viz is going to release Japanese science fiction (as in books, stories, novels, not manga, not comics) in English under an imprint called Haikasoru, starting this summer. Apparently Scalzi has tasted some and liked it, and there are positive advance reviews for at least two titles, All You Need is Kill and The Lords of the Sands of Time.

For a moment I grumbled to myself “well, that’s what I get from extending my regular early-warning feelers to only one news site”; and then I noticed that that site had told of Haikasoru too. Apparently the fault is not in the number of my feelers, but in the communication between them and my cranium.

Given that I am unable to resist anything Japanese — I even fall for shoujo, though it makes me feel like I’m in a bad dream and can’t wake up — and dearly, dearly like SF, this feels like being a kid watching the landing of a starship full of dinosaurs made entirely of chocolate!

Oy.

Well, seriously: Japan has roughly half the population of US, and assuming population is the only significant factor (feel free to howl in protest to this wild, crazy, unfounded assumption), that should mean Japan has half the SF writers, and half the good, worthwhile SF writers US has. And how many have been translated before? Not many.

So, at the moment, I’m grinning so maniacally the next person I come across will probably faint right away.