info@imaginpress.comWell, I’m embarassed.
It turns out that we had a pretty serious error in The Emperor in Hell, the fifth book in our 31-book Journey to the West series, and it took five years for anyone to notice it.
If you’re familiar with the story, you know that the Dragon King of the Jing River, who is responsible for bringing rain, is horrified to learn that a fortune-teller is giving advice to a fisherman on how and where to catch fish, thus putting all the river creatures in peril. He goes to the city of Chang’an and confronts the fortune-teller, calling him a fraud. The fortune-teller calmly replies that he knows exactly how much it will rain the next day. The Dragon King scoffs at this, but later than night he receives an order from the Jade Emperor in heaven, telling him exactly how much rain needs to fall the next day. Not wanting to admit that he was wrong, the Dragon King disobeys the Jade Emperor’s command and brings a little bit less rain that he is commanded to. He goes back to the fortune-teller, who informs him that he is to be executed for failing to obey the Jade Emperor’s command. Devastated, the Dragon King goes to beg for his life from… and here we go… the emperor.
The problem is, it’s a different emperor. He’s gone to see Taizong, the human emperor, and not the Jade Emperor in heaven.
Believe it or not, I missed this when I wrote the book five years ago. My writing partner Xiao Hui Wang missed it when she did the translation. And thousands of our readers also missed it – or perhaps they saw it but were too polite to point it out. Only recently did two of our readers, Mandy Paulsen and Simon Li, bring it to our attention.
Well, anyway… it’s fixed. We have updated the story to clarify the business of the two emperors, and we have republished all 12 books that contain the story. This includes The Emperor in Hell (simplified paperback, simplified ebook, and traditional paperback); The Journey to the West Books 4, 5 and 6; The Journey to the West in Chinese (simplified paperback and ebook); The Journey to the West in English (simplified paperback and ebook); The Journey to the West in Chinese, Pinyin and English (hardcover and ebook); and Sun Wukong: The Journey to the West in English (paperback and ebook). Yes, it was a lot of work. We have not updated the audiobook, that’s way too complicated.
So, apologies to our readers. If anyone wants to replace an old version of any of these books with a newer, corrected version, we can do this for you at roughly half price, to cover our printing and shipping costs. Email us at info@imagin8press if you’d like this, and be sure to include a photo of the offending book so we’re sure you really have it.
