Rollback

Acknowledements

I’ve had many writing students over the years, but none was more talented than my dear friend Robyn Herrington, to whom this book is dedicated. I first met Robyn at Calgary’s science-fiction convention Con-Version in 1996 and published one of her poems in the 1997 anthology Tesseracts 6, which my wife Carolyn and I coedited.

Robyn workshopped with me at the Banff Centre in 2000 and 2001, and you can find stories by her in, among other places, three of Mike Resnick’s DAW anthologies: Return of the Dinosaurs, Women Writing Science Fiction as Men, and New Voices in Science Fiction. Robyn passed away in May 2004, after a long battle with cancer; at her request, I read the eulogy she herself had written at her funeral in Calgary. The one-sentence high-concept behind part of this novel was Robyn’s, and I thank her, and her husband, Bruce Herrington, for letting me pick it up and run with it.

Many thanks to those kind souls who read and commented on an entire draft of this book in manuscript: Asbed G. Bedrossian, Ted Bleaney, Reinhardt Christiansen, David Livingstone Clink, Marcel Gagne, Richard Gotlib, Peter Halasz, Andrew Zimmerman Jones, Al Katerinsky, Herb Kauderer, Joe Mahoney, Terry McGarry, Howard Miller, Kirstin Morrell, Ariel Reich, Sally Tomasevic, Hayden Trenholm, Andrew Weiner, Elizabeth Westbrook-Trenholm, and my brother Alan B. Sawyer.

In addition, I thank the friends and colleagues who let me bounce ideas off them or otherwise provided input, including Paul Bartel, Charissa Bartlett, Dan Evens, Chris Ellis, Terence M. Green, W. Thomas Leroux, Charles Levy, and Irwin Tan.

Special thanks to Dr. Jerome H. Barkow, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University (who gave the keynote address at the symposium "Encoding Altruism: The Art and Science of Interstellar Message Composition," referred to in this novel); Dr. David DeGraff, Chair, Department of Astronomy and Physics, Alfred University; and Greg Armstrong, Senior Research Technician, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.

Huge thanks to my lovely wife, Carolyn Clink, and my agent, Ralph Vicinanza, and his associates Christopher Lotts, Vince Gerardis, and Eli Kirschner.

Many thanks, too, to my editor David G. Hartwell and his associate Denis Wong; to Tom Doherty, Linda Quinton, Irene Gallo, Dot Lin, and everyone else at Tor Books; to Harold and Sylvia Fe

Thanks also to Danita Maslankowski, who organized the Fall 2005 "Write-Off" retreat weekend for Calgary’s Imaginative Fiction Writers Association, at which much work on this manuscript was accomplished, and to my father, John A. Sawyer, who loaned me his vacation home on Canandaigua Lake in Upstate New York, where I squirreled myself away while finishing this book.

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Finally, thanks to the 1,200 members of my online discussion group, who always provide wonderful support and feedback. Feel free to join us at: www.groups.yahoo.com/group/robertjsawyer

About the Author

Robert J. Sawyer is one of only seven writers in history to win all three of the world’s top awards for best science fiction novel of the year: the Hugo (which he won for Hominids ), the Nebula (which he won for The Terminal Experiment ), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (which he won for Mindscan ); the other wi

In total, Rob has won thirty-eight national and international awards for his fiction, including nine Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards ("Auroras") and the Toronto Public Library Celebrates Reading Award, one of Canada’s most significant literary honors. He’s also won Analog magazine’s Analytical Laboratory Award, the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award, and the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award, all for best short story of the year, as well as the Collectors Award for Most Collectable Author of the Year, as selected by the clientele of Barry R. Levin Science Fiction Fantasy Literature, the world’s leading SF rare-book dealer.

Rob has won the world’s largest cash prize for SF writing, Spain’s 6,000-euro Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficcion, an unprecedented three times, and he’s also won a trio of Japanese Seiun awards for best foreign novel of the year. In addition, he’s received an honorary doctorate from Laurentian University and the Alumni Award of Distinction from Ryerson University.

Rob’s books are top-ten national mainstream bestsellers in Canada and have hit number one on the bestsellers’ list published by Locus, the American trade journal of the SF field. His nonfiction has appeared in Archaeology, Maclean’s, and Sky Telescope, and he edits the acclaimed "Robert J. Sawyer Books" SF imprint for Canada’s Red Deer Press. He’s also a frequent TV guest, with over two hundred appearances to his credit, and has been keynote speaker at many science, technology, and business conferences.

Born in Ottawa in 1960, Rob now lives in Mississauga, a city just west of Toronto, with poet Carolyn Clink, his wife of twenty-two years.

For more information about Rob, and access to his blog, visit his World Wide Web site, which contains more than one million words of material, including a readers’ group guide for this novel. You’ll find it at sfwriter.com.