I want to thank the people who helped me through this: Allan Schmidt, who gave me the crazy idea in the first place and helped to make the gaming aspects work; Cara Herman, who gave much needed encouragement as I struggled through the first draft; Harry F. Leonard, who annoyed the hell out of me by quibbling endlessly over minor flaws until I saw the light and corrected them, much to the betterment of the story, if not my disposition; Robert Lee Thurston and Judith Heald, who gave me good criticism and better friendship; Doug Kaufman, who put his money where his mouth was; Barry B. Longyear, whose advice always helps when I'm wise enough to take it; Kim Tchang, who told me to relax and write the damn thing; my agent, Cherry Weiner, whose help and support went beyond the call of duty; my editor, Sheila Gilbert, who not only knew a good thing when she saw it, but knew how to make it better; and the members of Haven: Deborah Atherton Davis, Mary Kittredge, Mark J. McGarry, and Kevin O'Donnell, Jr., who gave this book the line-by-line, word-by-word examination and dissection that a first novelist so desperately needs.
And, most particularly, I'd like to thank Robert Anson Heinlein, whose work has been both example and inspiration, for Thorby, Colonel Baslim, Oscar Gordon, and so much more.
The great problems of life . . . are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious . . .The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic, but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, "divine."
—Carl Gustave Jung
. . . for every human being there is a diversity of existences . . . the single existence is itself an illusion . . .
—Saul Bellow
It seems to me that there might well be the equivalent, with regard to the collective unconscious, of the concept in physics of "critical mass." Are we approaching it? Quite possibly—consider the resurgence of spiritualism, in all its guises, and don't neglect the function of the fantasy role-playing games. The characters, the situations . . . all seem to touch something that is basic and fundamental.
But where would the locus of crisis be? And how can it be exploited? The Elder Edda, The Song of the Harper, The Book of the Dead, even The Great Hymn to the Aten offer only hints, suggestions, intimations.
Perhaps the best approach would be neither induction nor deduction, but, rather, empirical experimentation. Perhaps . . .—Arthur Simpson Deighton