ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When Steve was in high school, he coerced six of his friends into joining him in a Star Trek e-mail RPG affectionately known as “the sim,” which lasted a few years before sputtering out—fellow participants are listed in the novel’s dedication. But he would be remiss if he did not note that that RPG eventually spawned a series of amateur audio drama adaptations, one of which contained the seeds of this very story. Those audio dramas would have not gotten very far without the patience and assistance of a great many people, whom he would like to thank here: Josh Donaman, Nicholas Frey, Geoffrey Hamell, Adam Johnson, Lori Kinney, Bradley Knipper, Todd Kogutt, Timothy Moeller, Catherine Mollmann, Grady Owens, David Poon, Stephen Poon, Georg Rudorff, Harrison Sand, James Sand, Benjamin Stevens, Christopher Tracy, and Laura Waiss, not to mention Steve’s parents, who put up with a dozen teenagers stomping into the house to use the microphone time and again.
Without DeForest Kelley’s fantastic performance, Doctor Leonard McCoy would have been a much lesser character—and this novel would have had much less to go on. Credit must be given to Kelley for creating such a fun, irascible, enduring character. We should also acknowledge the many other actors, from big stars to background performers, who played the various other characters who populate this novel: Jeanne Bal (Nancy Crater), Majel Barrett (Christine Chapel), Michael Barrier (Lieutenant DeSalle), Booker Bradshaw (Doctor M’Benga), Richard Carlyle (Karl Jaeger), Frank da Vinci (Lieutenant Brent), James Doohan (Montgomery Scott), Victoria George (Jana Haines), Jim Goodwin (John Farrell), Deirdre L. Imershein (Lieutenant Watley), Walter Koenig (Pavel Chekov), Perry Lopez (Esteban Rodriguez), Cindy Lou (Zainab Odhiambo), Blaisdell Makee (Lieutenant Singh), Patricia McNulty (Tina Lawton), Sean Morgan (Ensign Harper), Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura), Leonard Nimoy (Commander Spock), Eddie Paskey (Lieutenant Leslie), Naomi Pollack (Lieutenant Rahda), Bill Quinn (David McCoy), David L. Ross (Lieutenant Galloway), Barry Russo (Lieutenant Commander Giotto), William Shatner (James T. Kirk), George Takei (Lieutenant Sulu), Woody Talbert (Bobby Abrams), Maurishka Taliaferro (Yeoman Zahra), Joan Webster (Cheryl Thomas), John Winston (Lieutenant Kyle), and Grant Woods (Lieutenant Kelowitz).
We drew on the work of a few other authors when writing this novel, for both backstory and inspiration: Carmen Carter (Dreams of the Raven), Diane Duane (Doctor’s Orders), Brad Ferguson (Crisis on Centaurus), Michael Jan Friedman (Constitution and Shadows on the Sun), David R. George III (McCoy: Provenance of Shadows), Vonda McIntyre (Enterprise: The First Adventure), and Howard Weinstein (The Better Man). Thanks for the bits we pilfered, and we hope you don’t mind that there are bits we ignored.
Others here and there provided help where we needed it: fellow Trek scribe David A. McIntee gave us some assistance in Scottish dialect matters. Michael Bellos and Christopher L. Bennett provided us with some much-needed quantum physics knowledge. Several books were also useful in this regard, especially The God Effect: Quantum Entanglement, Science’s Strangest Phenomenon by Brian Clegg, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe by Lynne McTaggart, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Michael A. Nelson and Isaac L. Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Communication: Theory and Experiments by Mladen Paviĉić, and Quantum Computing: A Short Course from Theory to Experiment by Joachim Stolze and Dieter Suter. Of course, any errors were made completely intentionally for purposes of dramatic license, and not because these dense books threatened to do our heads in. Camilo José Vergara’s American Ruins inspired some of the early scenes on Mu Arigulon V.
One book we must give thanks to above all others is Isaac Asimov’s A Choice of Catastrophes: The Disasters That Threaten Our World, from which we brazenly stole a title. Someday we might even read it.
Special thanks must be given to Steve’s fellow members of the Storrs Eight: Jared Demick, Gordon Fraser, Chantelle Messier, Hayley Kilroy Mollmann, Zara Rix, Christiana Salah, and Jorge Santos, plus auxiliary members Angela Demick and Phill Messier. Once again, without your recommendations, repasts, and rapport, this would have been a much lesser work.
Last of all, Steve must thank Hayley, whom he married between the first and second drafts of this novel, for her patience and support. Our own adventure is just beginning.