What do I even say, I wonder? Sorry I kept you waiting. Here’s the book.
Time flies at a blistering clip, let me tell you. After the second book came out, I got hit by “CREST is getting an anime,” followed by “it’s getting a manga,” “it’s getting a game,” “it’s getting a Korean translation”... and now BANNER is getting an anime, too. I even hear news from across the Pacific about an English-language dub of CREST.
And what have I been doing during all this? All I did was write one longform novel and several shorts.
Don’t get me wrong — it’s not as though I began to dislike writing BANNER. But it is true that it prevented me from going back out into the world. While I chained myself to my desk, I realized I was turning over ideas that I wasn’t sure would lead anywhere.
To all of you who were looking forward to the book coming out, I truly apologize. And while I’m at it, I might as well apologize over something else: When I wrote in the afterword of the last book that this was the “Dyaho Trilogy,” many readers took that to mean that BANNER OF THE STARS would stop at three volumes. The idea of the “Dyaho Trilogy” isn’t meant to be taken one hundred percent seriously, but it’s technically accurate. BANNER isn’t just the story of Dyaho; the Dyaho Trilogy is just one of the segments of the larger saga.
There’s still more story to BANNER.
Throughout the rest of this afterword, I’ll be assuming readers have already read the rest of the book, so if you don’t want any story spoilers, then I ask you save the afterword for later.
My initial concept for the Dyaho Trilogy was to describe the events that coincided with the rare tiger-striped cat born in the Clybh Royal Palace getting dropped off at the Hyde Count’s Manor, which was where the trilogy was to end. Dyaho would obtain a family in the Hyde Countdom, and see out the rest of his days there. His owner, Jint, was also going to stay in his home system, while Lafier was going to return to the battlefield. In other words, the plan was to depict Lafier and Jint’s first true parting.
But when I put that onto the page, it ended up sucking the joy out. I think that’s probably one of the reasons it took so long. That aside, I just couldn’t progress things as planned, so ultimately I decided to keep them together. As a result, Dyaho was now the one to settle down in his place of birth, not Jint. Pretty different from what I’d originally imagined, but all the same, I managed to wrap a bow on this section of the saga.
From here on out, I plan to focus more on the tides of history roiling between the stars than on the personal affairs of the characters. There will be more opportunities to paint the pictures of the opposing nations in greater detail, as well. I’ve expounded on various aspects of the Humankind Empire of Abh, but I haven’t depicted the other interstellar powers much at all (which is not to say I didn’t give them any thought).
The Humankind Empire of Abh and planar space navigation are inextricably tied. After all, a power like the Empire would seldom come about without it (or any other hypothetical form of faster-than-light travel using warp points). Actually, I’ve forgotten whether I came up with the Empire as a power capable of ruling over a world where planar space navigation is possible, or whether I came up with planar space navigation to make the concept of the Empire work. Either way, they fit each other to a tee.
It was a relief I was able to make sense of the world-building and mechanics there, but what about the enemy nations? It’d have been lame if I made their political systems exactly the same as the Empire. So I pondered whether a nation-state with modern-society sensibilities could possibly arise in such a world. I’ll spare you the long process; I concluded that, while it wasn’t impossible, it would be more difficult to maintain for larger-scale polities. It wasn’t a conclusion I was thrilled about, but I did have fun thinking up conditions I could apply to make such a society viable. The more I came up with, the farther away the nations of my fiction veered from my image of what a nation-state entailed, but that wasn’t a bad thing. These nations which advocate for democracy share much in common with what the average modern Japanese person would associate with a democracy, but they also differ in myriad ways.
I haven’t yet come up with the name of the section to follow the Dyaho Trilogy. I just know that that will probably happen to them, and then that will happen there, which’ll lead to that, that, and that... And then a distinct new segment of the saga will come together.
My pace will be slow, but please, stick with me.
Here’s hoping this time it will go according to schedule — I say, while tormented by doubt.
10-Feb-01