Burning Paradise

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Informal conversations with friends and family were indispensable to the writing of Burning Paradise. It would be impossible to do justice to them all, but I need to single out old friends John S. Barker (for a discussion about the philosophical concept of qualia, which contributed to my conception of the hypercolony and the simulacra) and Taral Wayne (for countless conversations about cosmology, evolution and the nature of sentience).

Readers might be interested to know that the laser-launch technology I gave to the parasitized breeding ground is a real and potentially practical way of putting small payloads into orbit and is currently under investigation by several agencies and aerospace firms. The Atacama Desert has been suggested as a possible launch site.

As a source on insect behavior and the concept of distributed intelligence, E. O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth and The Superorganism (written with Bert Hölldobler) were useful. For the daunting task of imagining a largely peaceful twentieth-century Europe, Tony Judt’s Postwar was an invaluable resource. And while much has been written on the subject of the Atacama Desert, Lake Sagaris’s Bone and Dream stands out as a deeply thoughtful and wonderfully evocative example.