Acknowledgments

No novelist works in a creative vacuum. Whatever we do, we owe a debt to the giants upon whose shoulders we stand. This book might not have happened if I hadn’t read the works of H. Beam Piper and Roger Zelazny.

Nor would this book have been written without the intervention of several other people. My agent, Caitlin Blaisdell, nudged me to make a radical change of direction from my previous novels. David Hartwell of Tor encouraged me further, and my wife, Feòrag, lent me her own inimitable support while I worked on it.

Finally, I’d like to thank all those (too numerous to name) who helped by test-reading and typo-spotting at various times in the history of this book.