ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m happy to thank a number of people who read this book in its early stages and made sensible and encouraging suggestions or lent me needed inspiration: Paul Buchanan, Heather Buchanan, John Blaylock, Lew Shiner, Tim Powers, Karen Fowler, and our old friends Sue and Barry Watts of the St. John’s Lodge in Bowness-on-Windermere, England.
I first began writing Zeuglodon as a sort of illustration for the students in my Origins and Sources of Fiction class at the Orange County High School of the Arts, so they’re largely to blame for its existence. By now they’ve all gone out to make their way in the wide world, but perhaps the stuff of this book (if they ever run across it) will call up pleasant memories.
Finally, in the writing of this novel I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to a number of luminous books (and the authors who wrote them), many of which books my mother encouraged me to read at an impressionable age, thus sealing my fate as a certain sort of writer: Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Mysterious Island, At the Earth’s Core, Pellucidar, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Huckleberry Finn, Edith Nesbit’s The Treasure Seekers, and the seafaring novels of Howard Pease.
“We shall pick up an existence by its frogs. If there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte.
One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.”
Charles Fort
Lo!