ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Two artists have helped us envision the gigantic structures and events of this three-novel sequence, most deeply the extraordinary astronomical artist Don Davis. He was an invaluable resource. Brenda Cox Giguere made all the matchless zingo illustrations in fine line drawings. We used our own photos of things that we took to look unearthly.

To Al Jackson for extensive work on gravitational radiation from black holes—including a coauthored paper with Benford: “A Gravitational Wave Transmitter,” https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02334.

We consulted earlier parallel ideas to the Cobweb: Stephen Baxter’s story “Goose Summer” and “The Trellis” by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper, plus Robert L. Forward’s novel Rocheworld. The Cobweb is a built lifezone, though, not just a connector.

Shell world advice we got from Ken Roy and Robert Kennedy, who with David E. Fields published the original paper,”Shell Worlds” in Acta Astronautica 82. Others who advised them on this are David Bowman, B. Derk Bruins, Dwayne A. Day, H. Keith Henson, Eric Hughes, Les Johnson, Michael R. Johnson, Greg Matloff, Amarak Panya, John Wharton, Martha Knowles, and David Woolsey. Our shell worlds differ somewhat in physics, of course, for Glory is a more besieged world, as one of a pair of exotic planets.

Our wise agent, Eleanor Wood, deserves special thanks, as does Bob Gleason, who stepped in to edit the book after its contracting editor, David Hartwell, tragically died.

Thanks also to those who made comments on the manuscript: Dave Truesdale, Rob Jackson, Brenda Cox Giguere, James Benford, and our concluding editor, Robert Davis. We are grateful for all their help.

This has been a decade-long project, and much fun. We hope our readers enjoy it, too.

On an autobiographical note, GB’s early choice of smart birds as aliens, the Folk, may well stem from his experience while growing up in southern Alabama, south of Fairhope, on his grandparents’ farm beside Fish River. The picture below shows him with twin brother, Jim, about age five, confronting the chickens they started feeding with ground dry corn kernels. Chickens thronged the corn-throwers as soon as the boys began grinding the corn through the kernel stripper. Force was essential to avoid getting hit by birds flying to get to the grub first. Early experience can shape fiction! Of course, we didn’t know then that birds came from the dinosaurs.