A History of What Comes Next

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank my editor, Lee Harris, for giving my weird slightly-homicidal-alien-clone-space-race story a home. Thank you to the myriad of people at Tor.com who had a hand in making it an actual book. You all rock. On the other side of the pond, I’m grateful to be working with Jillian Taylor and the great team at Michael Joseph again for this series. Thanks to Seth Fishman, my amazing agent, and everyone at the Gernert Company. I’m extremely thankful to the real people whose lives I borrowed from for this story. I also can’t help but think of the thousands who helped send humans to space but whose names we’ll never know. The mathematicians, the engineers, the welders, the accountants, etc., etc. There are many who strived to build rockets or go to space but never achieved their goals because of funding, or politics, or because they were born in the wrong place, or with the wrong gender or skin color. We remember the von Brauns and the Gagarins and Armstrongs, but I wish we would celebrate the Mercury 13, the selected astronauts who never got to fly, all the scientists and engineers who worked on spacecraft that were never built. They all have one thing in common: they looked to the stars and dared to dream.