NEW RELEASES
The Devil Castle of the Pacific by Jūza Unno
Memoirs of a Courtier of 1815 by Benito Pérez Galdós
PRE-WORLD WAR II JAPANESE SCIENCE FICTION
Before Isaac Asimov, before Arthur C. Clarke, and before the golden age of American science fiction, a Japanese electrical engineer named Jūza Unno was writing novels about secret submarine bases, mechanical sea monsters, and the weaponization of the deep ocean. Published in 1939, The Devil Castle of the Pacific is the work of the man recognized in Japan as the founding father of Japanese science fiction, the author whose legacy runs from the pages of Shinseinen magazine through Space Battleship Yamato to the technological imagination of modern anime and manga. This is the first time any of his novels has appeared in English.
Mysterious disappearances are plaguing the Pacific. Ships vanish without a trace. A transpacific airliner goes silent. A German steamer sends a distress call and is gone before rescuers arrive. When a battered tin washes ashore containing a blood-smeared note describing an attack by a colossal sea creature, Naval Intelligence sends young oceanographer Tachikawa Tokio to investigate. What he finds beneath the waves is not a monster but something far more dangerous: a vast undersea fortress hidden inside a volcanic formation, stocked with submarines and a fleet of mechanical attack craft, operated by a rogue military force with plans to ignite a war between the great powers. Captured, imprisoned, and a thousand meters below the surface, Tachikawa must find a way to escape the fortress and warn Japan before the first shot is fired.
Written four years before the technology it imagined would reshape the Pacific War, The Devil Castle of the Pacific is a landmark of pre-war science fiction, a book that belongs in the same conversation as Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Wells’s The War of the Worlds, and a book that has waited nearly ninety years for English-speaking readers to discover it. The translation, by Kenji Weaver, is the first-ever English translation and is now available on Amazon.
Excerpt
Something was wrong in the Pacific. One incident after another, and no one could say why.
No one was watching more closely than Colonel Hara, chief of the Pacific Division at Naval General Staff Headquarters.
At that moment, Hara sat across a table from a sharp-eyed young man in one of the headquarters offices.
“Tachikawa. These disasters keep piling up out in the Pacific. What do you make of them?”
Colonel Hara was built like a wrestler: broad and solid, with ruddy cheeks, a close-cropped mustache, a receding hairline, and keen eyes set in a face that managed to be both kind and hard. Everything about him said career Navy.
“Well, sir—”
Tachikawa clenched his fists on his knees. He didn’t know what to make of them.
From what Hara had just told him: this spring, a transpacific passenger plane had vanished. Shortly after, a squadron of four bonito boats sailed south for the fishing grounds and never came back. Most recently, a German steamer had radioed a distress call. A Japanese vessel in the area rushed to the coordinates and found nothing. Not a shadow, not a trace. The German ship might as well have been a ghost.
True enough. Strange disasters had been piling up across the Pacific. But Tachikawa couldn’t explain them. He was an oceanographer, young, still doing research at the Fisheries Institute where he’d studied. He knew the science of the sea. Nobody had ever asked him to play detective.
Hara’s eyebrow twitched.
“The past incidents can wait. The reason I called you in today is something more urgent. Have a look at this.”
He pushed a small, battered tin across the table. He’d been turning it over in his fingers the whole time they talked.
“Sir? What is this?”
Tachikawa picked it up, frowning. The tin was round and small, just filling his palm. White enamel coated the sides, printed over in red, black, and blue with foreign lettering, though the enamel had chipped away in patches. The thing had been through rough handling. He turned it, reading the print. Some kind of premium oil, it seemed. American-made. The tin was surprisingly light, but when he tilted it, something inside shifted with a soft clunk.
He was curious now. But he had no idea what it meant.
Hara pointed a thick finger at the lid.
“Go ahead. Open it. Examine what you find.”
“You’re sure?”
With permission granted, Tachikawa pried the lid open, wondering what he’d find inside.
The lid came free.
A slip of white paper, folded small, lay inside. He pinched it out and found something else still in the tin. He turned it over and tapped. A chunk of metal dropped into his palm, small as a copper coin but far thicker, jagged-edged and surprisingly heavy. It looked like shrapnel. And its surface wasn’t the color of bare iron. Something reddish-black and sticky coated it. A strange fragment altogether.
Nothing else in the tin.
A folded slip of paper and a filthy piece of metal.
That was all.
“Unfold the paper,” Hara said. “Read what’s written on it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tachikawa unfolded it. He drew a sharp breath.
What had young Tachikawa seen on that scrap of paper to shock him so?
It was simple enough. The paper was smeared with what could only be human blood. Bloody fingerprints dotted the surface. Beneath them, someone had scrawled in pencil. Not carefully. Not steadily. The hand of a man writing in blind panic, the pencil driven across the page by sheer desperation. Tachikawa smoothed the paper flat and read:
“Morning of the 12th. Sea turned white and cloudy. One hour later, a great sea demon appeared off the port bow, raising a round head one meter across out of the water. Its neck stretched upward fifty meters. Glaring eyes. Its long body snaked across the waves, curving and twisting for four hundred meters. Before we could react it spat fire and hurled iron shot. Our ship smashed. All hands wounded. Sank in seven minutes. Avenge us. As proof I pulled a fragment from the wound in my leg and sealed it in this can. Ninth Hiraiso Maru. Written by Miura Sumikichi.”
An astounding report. But could any of it be believed? A sea demon that raised its head fifty meters, its body stretching four hundred meters across the waves? It sounded like something out of a fairy tale. A sea serpent from the old stories. In this age of science, who could take such nonsense seriously? Tachikawa Tokio, trained in modern marine science, could only read it as a tall tale.
THE 12TH BOOK OF THE EPISODIOS NACIONALES
“Open your ears, then, and hear how a clever and upright man might rise by the sole virtue of his own deserts.”
Thus begins the confession of Juan Bragas de Pipaón, a flatterer, informer, and self-made courtier, who rose from the obscurest den of the royal offices to a cushioned seat of power, and would have you believe he did it all through pure honesty and merit.
Madrid, 1814. Ferdinand VII has returned, torn up the Constitution, and loosed his vengeance on the liberals who once ruled in his name. In the shadow of that reaction, the ambitious Pipaón thrives: hunting fugitive deputies through the night, distributing bribes in the low quarters, flattering the powerful, betraying the fallen, and thanking God for his salary all the while. In his own telling he is a model of piety and virtue. What the reader sees is one of the most notorious scoundrels in Spanish literature, a man who condemns himself with every self-satisfied word.
Simultaneously dark and funny, Memoirs of a Courtier of 1815 shows Pérez Galdós at his most wickedly ironic. He paints a portrait of servility, corruption, and the shameless men who so often prosper when a nation is in turmoil The second novel of the Second Series of Episodios Nacionales, it stands on its own as a masterpiece of the unreliable narrator, and carries forward the sweeping chronicle of nineteenth-century Spain begun in King Joseph’s Baggage.
This first-ever English translation, by Vox Day, brings the full comic malice of Galdós’s courtier to the English-speaking world. It is now available on Amazon.
Excerpt
In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, I begin the history of a most principal part of my life: I mean to say that I begin to set down the string of labors, services, feats, and exertions by which I passed, in no great span of time, from the obscurest den of the royal government warrens to the warming of a cushioned seat in the Royal Council and Chamber of Castile.
Open your ears, then, and hear, and understand how a clever and upright man might rise and exalt himself by the sole virtue of his own deserts, without once setting foot upon the tortuous paths of intrigue, without flattering the ears of the great with the music of adulation, without setting a tariff upon his conscience or a base price upon his honor, as your paltry little climbers of the present day are wont to do, now that wholesome custom, modesty, sobriety, and Christian meekness have fled the world in shame, and the age is grown so beggarly of virtue that a man of worth is not to be found though you offered half a million rascally opportunists in exchange for him.
Blessed be God, father of the needy, sustainer of the weak, provider of the hungry, harborer of the forsaken, shelter of the naked, comfort of all the poor souls who wish to earn their bread, and steward of the larder to the ants, the birds, and the place-seekers! Blessed be God, I say, who has preserved unto me my salaries, perquisites, pensions, travel-money, emoluments, and incidental fees, that I might, at my ease and free of troublesome cares, recount every step of my fabulous career! Oh, why should I conceal it? A career such as mine has been matched by no more than four men since the stalk of public employment first sprouted from the fertile earth and the dusty paper corollas opened on the dossiers of Arbitrios, Propios, Tercias Reales, Noveno, Pósitos, Paja y Utensilios, Frutos Civiles, Mandas, Renta de la Abuela, Chapín de la Reina, and sundry other herbs that composed the pleasant garden of the Administration.
It is true that, if I attained great heights, I received some handsome blows upon that blessed ladder, struggling tooth and nail with those who wished to climb ahead of me. If I rose far and fast, I also clung to some excellent coattails. But let no man say that my life is stained, as are the lives of others who cut a fine figure in their careers, with base and shameful deeds. No indeed; before all else stands the immaculate whiteness of my Christian soul. God is my witness that never once did I put my hand in another man’s pocket… Good heavens, what a horror! I would sooner have let myself be roasted upon a gridiron than take from the coffers of the Treasury a single farthing of those that lay there, duly entered in the books of account… Begone, accursed Lucifer! Vade retro! I detest violent measures, particularly when the prudent, self-regarding man wants not for a thousand ingenious expedients, judicious subtleties, and most skilful devices to remedy his shortfalls. I was not the inventor of such remedies; I learned them from most learned masters, laden with emoluments, decorations, and titles of excellence, who passed for the firmest pillars of the state and of the Church, from which I conclude that the aforesaid stratagems could hardly have been sinful. I shall say no more for the present, for in due time and season the keenness of my wit shall be made plain, and neither the philosopher nor the moralist will be able to do otherwise than approve.
“And who are you?” my readers will surely ask. I am he, I reply, who in the first years of his administrative life was called Juan Bragas, a name which, to speak truth, has no music to distinguish it, nor the least savor of elegance, nor any ring or suggestion of nobility. And so, no sooner had I begun to draw my foot from the mire than I added to my parents’ surname the name of my birthplace; which being Pipaón in Rioja de Álava, I came to style myself don Juan Bragas de Pipaón. This sounded with fine pomp in my ears, and I would repeat my own name aloud to bask in its grandeur, which by the mere effect of its syllables announced the person of an ambassador, a councillor of the Indies, a fiscal of the Rota, or a governor of Seville. Later, as the Bragas no longer struck me as being in the best taste, I suppressed it altogether, remaining for the present world and for posterity as don Juan de Pipaón, a name brief and round, that leaves harmonious echoes wherever it is pronounced, and to which the little tail of a marquisate or earldom, such as I have set my sights upon, would not come amiss.
Blessed be God, I say again, who never forsakes the needy; blessed be the bountiful hand that gives to each his remedy, now a morsel of bread if he suffer hunger, now a good friend to aid him if he harbor little ambitions of advancement. What would have become of me had I not stumbled face to face upon that most noble, that peerless personage, who perceived my aptitudes and bore me from the Purgatory of obscurity and want to the Paradise of favor, fame, and plenty? A better man was never born of woman, nor has there been seen an equal genius for all that fell within the jurisdiction of supreme intrigue, by virtue of which gifts he was the great head of those times, and a marvelous present bestowed by God upon the fortunate Spanish nation, that he might deliver her from the sorry state in which she found herself.
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In the 1930s, the transoceanic airliner would be a four engine seaplane, a Sikorsky or equivalent Japanese model. They set down at atolls and island harbors to refuel and resupply. Taken out by an undersea threat is very possible, fits the rest. That's a good mystery hook to start a story.