This is the way it was meant to be. Well, not all pixellated and virtual or (at best) home-printed, but integrated, dammit, a single novel in a single package, and fuck the beancounters and their Solomonesque book-splitting travesties. We aren't in the old-school economy any more, Toto— we're giving this stuff away now, and you can judge it for better or worse as a single standalone entity. You may agree with Publisher's Weekly and call this the capstone to one of the major works of hard-sf in the new century. Or you may side with Kirkus and dismiss it as horrific porn, rife with relentlessly clinical scenes of sexual torture. (Hell, you may even decide they're both right.) But whatever you decide, at least you'll be basing that assessment, finally, on complete data.

—Peter Watts, 2007

The usual gang of suspects, without whom I could never have pulled this off:

David Hartwell, my editor, nailed some serious structural problems with the first draft and helped me fix them. Moshe Feder took point through the day-to-day grind from delivery to rewrite to kicking-and-screaming to rending-of-garments to wracking, hysterical sobs, and finally to parturition

In what has become an annual rite, a motley collection of subversive literary and political malcontents—Laurie Channer, Cory Doctorow, Nalo Hopkinson, Becky Maines, John McDaid, Janis O'Conner, Steve Samenski, Isaac Szpindel, and Pat York— met clandestinely at an Undisclosed Location back during the summer of 2002. There, they tore apart the first two chapters of this puppy (among others), then helped to sow them back together again. This is the second time that a whole bunch of people have seen how my novel begins, while virtually no one sees the rest until it's too late to change anything. I suspect self-esteem issues may be involved.

But the fact that hardly anybody read the whole thing doesn't mean that lots of people didn't contribute to it. David Nickle offered advice, insights, and endless mockery throughout the process; his input proved so valuable I can almost overlook the fact that I had to get up at five thirty in the fucking morning and go running for ten miles to avail myself of it. Laurie Channer withstood endless pissing and moaning over a story for which her input was frequently solicited even though she was never actually allowed to read the damned thing. (She still hasn't, as of this writing.)

I owe many details of the helicopter crash scene to Glenn Norman and Glenn Morrison, both pilots, and both more helpful to pesky authors than I had any right to expect. I was astonished to learn that even when a helicopter loses all power in mid-flight, it's still possible to walk away from the crash by practicing an emergency technique called "autorotation". Glenn Morrison, in fact, survived a crash eerily parallel to the one described herein, except for the fact that he is not blind. (For the record, he doesn't think there's a hope in hell off pulling off that maneuver in real life if you are blind, and he knows his stuff. On the other hand, he doesn't know Ken Lubin.)

Parts of other people's life histories made their way into the story. Certain impressionistic details of the dog attack took their inspiration from wild canines encountered by one Rob Cunningham on his travels through India. (You may know Rob as the dude who created those gorgeous spaceship designs for Homeworld and Homeworld 2, the RTS computer games from Relic Entertainment.) Eight-year-old Achilles Desjardins's experiments with aerobraking were lifted from the childhood confessions of Mark Showell, fisheries biologist, although Mark is not a sexual sadist so far as I know. (If anything he's a masochist, judging by the guy he chose to do his Master's under.)

Isaac Szpindel, MD, Ph.D., skilled in so many and varied endeavors that it makes me sick, helped me load Taka's lines with plausible medical chrome. Dave "the bioinformatician" Block answered numerous impertinent questions about artificial nucleotides and minimum genotype sizes. (Unfortunately, one of the things he taught me was that you can't cram a 1.1MB genotype into a cell 250nm across, which contradicts physical stats for ßehemoth already described in Maelstrom.) Major David Buck, of the New Zealand Defence Force, helped me out on the subject of Fuel Air Explosive ordnance. Steve Ballentine, Hannu Blommila, Rick Kleffel, Harry Pulley, Catriona Sparks, Bebe Schroer, Janine Stinson, Mac Tonnies, and David Williams have all pointed me to relevant research papers, reviews, opinions, and/or news articles that went into the ßehemoth mix one way or another. Jan Stinson also went through the manuscript with an editorial eagle-eye, catching typos and bigger problems which I hope the rest of you won't notice. Not to mention others whom I've probably forgotten, and of whom I hereby pre-emptively beg forgiveness.

You can't blame any of these good folks if this book sucks, since none of them were allowed to read it. (If it does suck, maybe that's why.) You can't even blame David Hartwell, who did read it, because the book would have sucked even harder without his input. You can only blame me, and you might as well since I've already got your money.

Well, fifty cents of it, anyway.

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