Old & New

Posted on May 19, 2007    Posted by John Scalzi

Here’s an interesting contrast of things that came in the mail today: First, the Japanese version of Old Man’s War, and underneath that, a photocopy of a story collection of mine from 1984 — which, for those of you too lazy to do the math, was when I was but a callow sophomore in high school. I personally had no copies of these stories, but my friend Natasha, who did, sent me copies as a birthday present, because she rocks.

How are the stories, you ask? Well, pretty much exactly how you would expect stories from a 15-year-old boy who thought he was pretty damn clever would be (there’s a reason that in my advice to teen writers I make the notation that at their age, their writing pretty much sucks). Don’t worry, I won’t subject you to these stories. Be that as it may, it’s nice to have copies for my own archival purposes. Incidentally, this picture also confirms my story that that werd-ass signature of mine was something I worked on since I was a teenager; you can see a proto-version on the cover sheet there.

As for the Japanese copies of OMW, I note that it’s interesting that in the cover art the female soldiers’ nipples are protruding despite the fact she’s apparently wearing full body armor; those are some nipples, I’d have to say. It’s exciting to have these copies nevertheless. Now I have copies of OMW in every language in which is it published, except Chinese, Bulgarian, and Polish. Which reminds me, in case I forgot to mention it: I sold OMW and TGB in Polish. Go OMW.

One other publishing bit of note, regarding “The Sagan Diary”: The trade edition of TSD sold out its entire 2,000-copy first printing, which is pretty nice considering it’s a novelette, and there’s enough of a continuing demand that Subterranean has run a 1,500-copy second printing. If you kick in the 400-copy print run of TSD’s limited edition (a few of which are still available, incidentally), that means that there are now more copies of “The Sagan Diary” (3,900) than there are of the first printing of Old Man’s War (3,800). I think that’s pretty cool.