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calculations about. Freed of the bonds of The Astrophysical Journal, I have
felt at liberty to speculate on what processes might have transpired, over the
galaxy's ten billion years of furious cooking, to create forms of life and
intelligence beyond our ken. (Coincidences: Just after writing the above
paragraph, I got a note from the editor of that same august journal
appreciating an earlier novel. Someday I must attempt to trace the
interactions between science and science fiction. Or, better, an energetic
graduate student. There's a good doctoral thesis lurking there ... )
This novel and all those earlier in the "galactic" series--In the Ocean of
Night, Across the Sea of Suns, Great Sky River, Tides of Light--owe a debt to
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Gregory Benford the scientists, editors, academics, and writers who have kept
me going over two decades with ideas, advice, encouragement, and insightful
reading.
These include, in no particular order, Marvin Minsky, Sheila Finch, David
Hartwell, Mark Martin, David Brin, Betsy Mitchell, David Samuelson, Steven
Harris, Lou Aronica, Joe Miller, Jennifer Hershey, Stephen
Hawking, Gary Wolfe, Norman Spinrad, David Kolb, Ruth Curl, and
Arthur C. Clarke. Stimulating ideas kept drawing me on.
I especially thank Mark Morris, of UCLA, who assembled and directed the
International Astronomical Union's Symposium on the Center of the Galaxy. The
data and theories of that and later meetings spurred me to look beyond the
models I had concocted for magnetic phenomena at the galactic center. Speaking
at length about my own notions, and having them raked over by the
observers--always a daunting prospect for a theorist!--made me confront the
bewildering profusion of neon-brilliant displays, violent explosions, piercing
energies, and (mysteriously) highly organized structures that mark our
galactic center. Doing so opened my imagination to the possibilities of life
(and, I suppose, of death) in so virulently extreme a place.
I apologize to the readers who have waited several years between volumes of
this series. Other novels begged to be written.
And then there is Real Life, too, always demanding. My ideas about life in the
universe have changed greatly since I set Nigel Walmsley on his odyssey in
1970 (beginning with a short story, "Icarus Descending," which was later
slightly adapted and now opens In the Ocean of Night). Despite such
evolutions, I have tried to keep these novels consistent. Events spanning
several tens of thousands of years are not often reconciled, especially when
the author has been off doing other things.
The concluding volume of this series is now in sight. I promise to have done
and published within a year of this book's appearance. I may venture back into
this universe in future, if the impulse occurs, but the plot and lines of
reasoning should be intact and resolved by the end of the next novel. What a
long, strange trip it's been.
GREGORY BENFORD June1993
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