Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I acknowledge with gratitude the assistance of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, whose support made the writing of this book possible.

I am also most grateful to Dr Alan Guth, of the Physics Department at MIT, for his generosity: he gave me time, patience, and permission to quote from his article “The Inflationary Universe” co-authored with Dr Paul J. Steinhardt. I hasten to add that other than the attribution of this article to Koenig, no correlation whatsoever exists between my fictional character and Dr Guth. Furthermore, Drs Guth and Steinhardt must be absolved from any misinterpretations I may have made of their theory on the origin of the
universe.

Thanks are also due to my own students at MIT. They gave me fascinating insights into a mindset quite different from my own, as well as into the mores of dorm life.

I found three books (The Second Creation by Robert P Crease and Charles C. Mann; The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra; The Mind-Boggling Universe by Neil McAleer) particularly helpful for background material, and their influence will be apparent, but again, any misunderstanding or misinterpretation is entirely my responsibility.

I would like to pay tribute to Claudine Vegh’s I Didn’t Say Goodbye: Interviews with Children of the Holocaust
(NewYork: Dutton, 1984) which had an indelible effect on my imagination.

Quotations from the journals of Captain James Cook, William Dampier, and from other documents of early Australian history, were taken from Sources of Australian History, selected and edited by Professor Manning Clark.

Though the Zundel trial in Toronto was an actual event, the characters in this novel who give testimony and otherwise participate in the trial are entirely fictitious.