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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


This book shouldn’t exist.

I want to impress that fact upon you, dear reader. With the breakdown of my ongoing arrangement with my former publisher, it looked like the Sun Eater series and universe was done. Enter Baen Books’ Toni Weisskopf, my former employer, my friend. No set of acknowledgements for this book would be quite right without first thanking her. Asking a publisher to pick up any series midway through is a tough proposition, and asking any publisher to pick up a series six books in is next to impossible. But Toni believed in the series—and in me—and I hope I have not disgraced that trust with this volume.

Without her, Hadrian’s exile on Jadd would have been very long, indeed.

I’d like to also thank the rest of the Baen team: Marla, Joy, Leah, Rabbit, Jason, David, and Dave—Dave most especially (D.J. Butler, author of Witchy Eye, that is), for his editorial direction and invaluable aid helping me to locate some 40,000 words that could be safely removed from the original manuscript. I’d like also to thank artist Kieran Yanner and the cover designer, Jennie, for keeping the signature Sun Eater look as it has looked. I can’t think of a publisher change in science fiction history that’s gone down this smoothly.

There is another group of people who must be thanked for their part in keeping the series going: BookTube (that being the informal community of sci-fi/fantasy book reviewers on YouTube). It is to them I owe the largest part of my readership, most especially to Mike of Mike’s Book Reviews, without whom I think the Sun Eater might have been just another casualty of Covid-19. It’s in no small part thanks to him, and Dan and Jonathan and Madison and Jordan and Scot and Liam and KC and Jimmy and John and Alex and Petrik and Daniel—and all the others (I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few) that I’ve found my audience faster than I could have ever done alone.

My beta readers deserve their perennial thanks. Victoria, Joe, Micheal, Erin and Eddie, Nick, David, and Father Gabriel, thank you for helping keep me sane through what was the longest, most torturous book in the series (so far, let’s see how Book Seven treats me), and for helping squash as many errors and inconsistencies as possible. I couldn’t do it without you all. Likewise, I couldn’t do this without my wife, Jenna. Her support and graphic design help has made so much of the Sun Eater stuff possible, and she has changed my life, certainly, in every way. I love you, dear.

Lastly, dear reader, thank you. Long series such as this are vanishingly rare, and would not be possible without the support of readers like you. I know that many of you have lost faith in writers as a class and have grown wary of anything longer than a trilogy (and so have publishers, to tell the truth). I would never have been able to come this far—to tell what I hope is the best version of Hadrian’s story possible—without your support. As I write this, I am writing chapter ten of the seventh and final Sun Eater novel.

I never thought I’d actually make it this far . . . and that—if you’ll permit me to ape the immortal Ronnie James Dio—is thanks to you, and you, and all of you!

—Christopher Ruocchio,

December 2023 AD


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