Stumbled across this while browsing my Facebook news feed a few minutes ago: illustrator Martin Frei’s text-free cover art for the German translation of my Star Trek: Typhon Pact novel, Zero Sum Game.
Feast your eyes on this:
Pretty sweet, eh? For those of you in Europe, look for this from publisher Cross Cult in June 2013.
I picked up a parcel at the post office today. The delivery notice had said it was from the Deutsche Post, so I was hoping it was a copy of the German-language version of Star Trek Vanguard: Declassified, which was published at the same time as the English version. I opened the envelope to find my wish granted—and more:
Enclosed with my copy of Star Trek Vanguard: Enthüllungen was a copy of In Wassermelonen Zucker—a German translation of the Richard Brautigan novel In Watermelon Sugar.
This was a special surprise for me, because Brautigan is one of my all-time favorite authors, and this was the novel that introduced me to his work when I was only a teenager. I currently own copies of all of Brutigan’s published novels, and a few of his published volumes of poetry (which are extremely difficult to find).
During my trip to FedCon XX a couple of months ago, I had mentioned to Filipe, the Cross Cult intern, my affinity for Brautigan’s work, and he had tried to send a copy of this hard-to-find, out-of-print book with some Star Trek books he shipped to me last month, but that parcel had been damaged in transit and the copy of In Wassermelonen Zucker had been lost. But, as further proof of just how resourceful and diligent Filipé is, he found another one.
So, a tip of my hat to mein Bruder, Filipe!
Well, I’m back from my long-anticipated trip to Deutschland, and Europe’s largest Star Trek/SF convention, FedCon — and what a fantastic trip it was!
First off, I need to thank my German publisher, Cross Cult, and one of its top executives, Andreas Mergenthaler, for inviting me to attend FedCon as their guest, for paying my airfare and hotel costs, feeding me and buying me drinks for five days, and for helping me to really enjoy my first visit to Germany.
The rest of this post is going to be rather long, so I’ll put it behind the cut to spare the disinterested. (more…)
Today I received my flight ticketing information from Cross Cult, the German-language publisher of Star Trek books, for my trip to FedCon XX in Duesseldorf this April.
Wow, it’s really real now. I’m being flown to Germany as the guest of a publisher. This is kind of awesome. 🙂
Just released: the cover art for publisher Cross Cult’s new German-language edition of Star Trek Destiny, Book I: Gods of Night —
I hope my editors at Simon & Schuster will forgive me, but I like this cover better than the one used for the original version, and I sincerely hope the nice folks at Cross Cult might consider sending me a few of these…
(Thanks to Defcons Treklit, from whose LiveJournal I did snurch this, and to TrekWeb for the heads-up.)
ETA: As noted in the comments on my LJ mirror of this post, this illustration by German comic-book artist Martin Frei is not the final cover image, just the first draft. I hope they don’t change it too much, because they are definitely on the right track here. See the comments for links to more information about Martin Frei.