Science Fiction Writer
ROBERT J. SAWYER
Hugo and Nebula Winner

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Every SF writer should be lucky enough to have a good friend who is both a Ph.D. in physics and a lawyer specializing in intellectual property. Thanks, Ari, for helping me launch the Argo on its relativistic flight, work out the Lagrange points for the Quintaglio system, design a chemical structure for a new form of matter, and prosecute an extraterrestrial defendant.

This novel coalesced from my primordial cloud of ideas [just as a solar system coalesces out of a primordial dust cloud . . .] with the help of:

Editors:

• Susan Allison at Ace [who commissioned this book from a brief outline on January 24, 1994]
• Dr. Stanley Schmidt at Analog [who bought the book for serialization, and, as he had with the serialization of The Terminal Experiment, made some excellent editorial suggestions]

Agent Richard Curtis [who sold the book from a brief outline];

Dr. Ariel Reich [whose virtues are extolled above in the Dedication];

Fellow writers:

• J. Brian Clarke [of Calgary, past president of the Alberta Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada; regular contributor to Analog; author of the novel The Expediter. Brian provided invaluable technical feedback on the astronomy and cosmology in the book.]
• James Alan Gardner [a great SF writer in Kitchener, Ontario, who did his masters' thesis on black holes]
• Mark A. Garland [of Syracuse, New York, who critiqued the outline of the book in exchange for me critiquing the outline of his book, The Demon Blade]
• Jean-Louis Trudel [a French-Canadian SF writer who was working on a Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Toronto, and provided lots of technical expertise]

proofreader extraordinaire Howard Miller [a blind-and-deaf man on CompuServe, who proofreads my books with a Braille reader]

and my usual incisive manuscript readers:

• Ted Bleaney [high-school buddy, who has read all my books in manuscript]
• David Livingstone Clink [my brother-in-law]
• Terence M. Green [Toronto SF writer]
• Edo van Belkom [Brampton, Ontario]
• Andrew Weiner [Toronto SF writer, who critiqued the outline]
• and, most of all, my lovely wife, Carolyn Clink [yes, indeed!]

More Good Reading

Other dedications and acknowledgments
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