From millimeter waves to martial artists to Magic: The Gathering, I needed a lot of help with this one. In addition to those I’ve thanked in previous books (whom I still owe), a few people deserve repeated or new thanks. Thank you first to my wife, Kristi, without whom I’d be working some job I hated. Thanks for tolerating the six-day workweeks for the last couple years, honey. I’ll try to be more sane… eventually. Thank you to Elisa, for taking on so many of the business duties so that I can write more. Thank you to Don Maass, Cameron McClure, and the rest of DMLA for finding the right people for us to work with, for guidance, for expert explanations, and for excellent story advice and encouragement. The writer’s life is too often solitary, and you’ve been sanity and wisdom.
Thank you to Orbit Books (Devi, Anne, Alex, Tim, Susan, Ellen, and Lauren P. especially), who all continue to amaze me with the hard work they do, their innovation, and their responsiveness. I hear horror stories from writers who landed elsewhere, and I’m glad to call Orbit home. Thank you to all those behind the scenes who make the whole machine run so smoothly.
Thank you to Mary Robinette Kowal (Shades of Milk and Honey) for being my first ever beta reader. Excellent feedback, and great catches. You made the book better. Plus, that one thing, that place in book 3 where things look really bad, and you suggested something to make it utterly horrible? Yeah, I’m totally stealing that.
Thank you to mathematics professor Dr. N. Willis, who read The Black Prism and immediately asked me if I’d played Magic: The Gathering. (His sneaky way of seeing if I would play with him, without admitting his geekery straight out.) I had never played MtG, but soon saw the mathematical beauty of the game. The seed for the in-world game Nine Kings was planted there (though the mechanics and play are different). To forestall some emails I know I’ll get about this: Yes… but it’ll be years. Thanks also for helping me structure the Blackguard trial, which somehow got incredibly complicated. Go figure.
Thank you to a certain special forces friend of mine, E.H., who got me the (declassified, totally legal!) brief on millimeter wave technology. Who says fantasy can’t use cutting-edge science?
A big thanks to Sergeant Rory Miller, whose books on violence should become necessary texts for those who wish to depict violence convincingly in their fictional worlds, and for those who wish to avoid it in the real one! (Start with Meditations on Violence.) For one thing only I don’t forgive him: talking about rates of adrenaline release in a world and time period that doesn’t yet have the word “adrenaline” was hell. (Thanks to Peter H. at Powell’s for hand-selling that book to me—and hand-selling mine to others!)
Thank you to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose “Ulysses” I quoted briefly in both The Black Prism and The Blinding Knife as being written by Gevison. Immortal lines, sir. Meant to acknowledge you in the last book and overlooked it. My apologies.
Last, thank you to my readers. I love what I do, and I get to keep doing it because of you. That’s a huge privilege and an honor, and I feel a debt of gratitude to you. I can’t promise you much except that I’ll work my hardest to tell you the best stories I can. How about I do that, and you keep forcing my books on your friends. Deal?
—Brent Weeks