Science Fiction Writer
ROBERT J. SAWYER
Hugo and Nebula Winner

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[Ted was my best friend in high school; we were both very active in school politics, and in running the Northview Association for Science Fiction Addicts, our school SF club]

This novel came to life with the help of many fine souls, including:

• Christopher Schelling and John Silbersack at HarperCollins [John bought The Terminal Experiment in an auction conducted by agent Richard Curtis; after the book was bought, it was assigned to Christopher for editing. Christopher loved the book, and accepted it as originally submitted, without requesting any changes.]
• Stanley Schmidt at Analog [Stan serialized the novel under my original title for it, Hobson's Choice; he did ask for some revisions, which I gladly made]
• Richard Curtis [the agent who auctioned this book from a completed manuscript]

The advice of David Gotlib, M.D., was enormously helpful. [David is the older brother of my high-school buddy Richard Gotlib; David is currently with the Department of Psychiatry, The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland. Besides raising several excellent philosophical points, David also worked out the murder scenario involving the antidepressant drugs for Rod Churchill]

I received wonderful feedback from writing colleagues:

• Barbara Delaplace [Vancouver writer who asked to read the book in manuscript]
• Terence M. Green [Toronto writer whom I asked to read the book in manuscript]
• Edo van Belkom [Brampton, Ontario, writer whom I asked to read the book in manuscript]
• Andrew Weiner [Toronto writer whom I asked to read the book in manuscript]

As well, these friends gave me valuable insights:

• Shaheen Hussain Azmi [an old buddy from high school — I still call him Shanu, which is the juvenile version of his first name; we worked together with one other writer on the first book I ever did, a 375-page non-fiction directory called The Key to North York (North York was a city in the old Metropolitan Toronto, before everything was amalgamated into one big city in 1998) published in 1982. Shanu helped me with the references to Islam in the novel.]
• Asbed Bedrossian [high-school friend, now living in Los Angeles, who read the book in manuscript]
• Ted Bleaney [did I mention that I keep in touch with a lot of my old friends from high school?]
• David Livingstone Clink [the oldest of my wife Carolyn's three brothers]
• Richard Gotlib [co-founder with me of NASFA, my high-school SF club; now a lawyer in Toronto]
• Howard Miller [my deaf-and-blind friend who proofreads my novels with a Braille reader hooked up to his computer]
• Alan B. Sawyer [my younger brother, who read the book in manuscript]

Special thanks to the Ontario Arts Council for providing me with a Writers' Reserve grant to aid in creating this novel.

[I'd never had an arts-council grant before, and I'd gotten tired of certain people in Canadian-literature circles considering that fact significant, so I applied for, and received, the lowest value grant the Ontario Arts Council gives — all of Cdn$500. OAC grants have to be sponsored by a Canadian publisher or approved periodical; mine was sponsored by Books in Canada magazine, which had recently profiled me for their special March 1993 Speculative Fiction issue.]

Finally, my deepest thanks to my wife, Carolyn Clink.

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