Acknowledgments

I had to lean on a number of people in order to get this story out of my head. Some provided expertise I didn’t have, some acted as a sounding board and/or quietly put up with me, and a few did a little of both.

For the technical stuff: John Blackwell, who provided me with answers to my many astronomical questions; David Wallace-Wells, who does not know me, but who wrote the invaluable and terrifying The Uninhabitable Earth; and the Friends of the Blue Hills Reservation—​specifically the ranger whose name I have tragically forgotten, but who was willing to answer a long list of rather outlandish questions during what was supposed to be a company outing.

For putting up with me: my coworkers Nikki Durand, Kevin Wong, Noam Katz, Shane Dwyer, and Hongshuang Li. Specifically, Kevin for mentioning the wild boars of Fukushima, Nikki for talking me out of a half-dozen titles, and Noam for confirming that MIT really does have a tunnel system. You guys let me rant on about the apocalypse on the company’s time and nobody called HR or anything, so thank you.

Thanks to my editor, John Joseph Adams, for thinking “it looked like Robbie slept through the apocalypse” was a decent place to start, and Jaime Levine of HMH, for answering every random question with a sincere “Let’s go find out.”

And finally, thanks to my wife, Deb, who has spent years walking around Cambridge and Boston with me, little knowing that half the time, in my head, I was saying, What if ALL these people were just . . . gone? And just for putting up with me, in general.