For more than eighteen years, Louis Moesta was a proofer and trusted test reader on all my novel manuscripts. My wife’s father was a former English teacher, science-fiction fan (long before it was mainstream), world traveler, and extremely interesting man.

Over the years, he offered countless insightful suggestions on my plots, characters, and prose. (I don’t think he ever met a sentence that couldn’t use an extra comma or two, though.…) He recently passed away at age eighty-nine. Blood of the Cosmos is the last novel manuscript of mine that he read.