We would like to thank master roboticist Guy Immega (again!), ace physicist Douglas Beder, and Renaissance man Bob Atkinson for technical assistance in matters both scientific and speculative; K. Eric Drexler, Chris Peterson and Gayle Pergamit for explaining the nearly infinite potential of nanotechnology with their historic and indispensable book, Unbounding the Future [Quill/William Morrow], a follow-up to Drexler's classic The Engines of Creation (almost none of what we read there made it into this volume, but we couldn't have written the first word without all of it); Peter Mathiessen for hipping us to the Kingdom of Lo and the Festival of Impermanence in the quarterly journal Tricycle; Murray Louis for continuing to help us believe that meaningful words can be written about dance; Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi for the inspirational butoh-influenced dance of Kokoro, and Lafcadio Hearn for preserving and translating the eerily appropriate hauta found in Chapter 20.
We also thank Tenshin Zenki (Reb Anderson), Zoketsu Norman Fischer, Herb Varley, Robert and Virginia Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Jon Singer, Jordin and Mary Kay Kare, Greg McKinnon, David Myers, Dr. Thomas O'Regan, Marie Guthrie and all the members of Jeanne's women's group for an assortment of things too numerous, blessed, shady, trivial, profound, personal or otherwise unmentionable to mention.
Ongoing thanks go to our beloved agent Eleanor Wood and our editor Susan Allison, without whom all of this would not have been necessary. And we would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who voted the original "Stardance" story the Best Novella Hugo in 1977; without you this book would not exist. We might not either.
In addition to all the sources cited in Starmind's two prequels, Stardance and Starseed, and the ones cited above, we drew upon The Book of Serenity—One Hundred Zen Dialogues; The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche; and Thich Nhat Hanh's Touching Peace. Musical influences this time around included Charles Brown, Stan Getz, Holly Cole, Kenny Loggins, Paul McCartney ("Off the Ground" was a favorite track), Dianne Reeves, the Oscar Peterson Trio, Wynton Marsalis, Jake Thackray and virtually the entire blues and R&B catalogues of Holger Peterson's Stony Plain Records and Tapes.
Finally, we thank our daughter, Terri Luanna—for this whole saga was begun when she was an infant, for the sole purpose of getting her back home to Canada after we'd gone broke while showing her off to our families back in the Old Country. She is now a twenty-year-old college junior—fully grown and out of the nest . . . and so at last, more than a quarter of a million words later, is the story she inspired. We two have already agreed between us to collaborate on other books in the future. But this tale is now complete.
—Spider & Jeanne Robinson
Vancouver, British Columbia
24 October 1993
