The Hollow Man

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank the following people for turning an impossible task into a merely difficult one:

Sue Bolton and Edward Bryant for reading the book that was written rather than the one that was expected by others. Tabitha and Steve King for the long, cross-country reading marathon … and for the helpful words that followed. Niki Gernold for demonstrating the mechanics of telepathy. Betsy Mitchell for showing the courage of our shared convictions. Ellen Datlow for liking (and buying) the story that began it all, lo these ten long years ago. Richard Curtis for eschewing obfuscation via quintessential professionalism. Mathematician Ian Stewart for provoking a passionate response from a mathematical illiterate. Karen and Jane Simmons for their love, support, and tolerance as I perversely kept trying to turn a merely difficult task back into an impossible one.

In addition to these wonderfully alive people, I must thank several who are no longer with us:

Dante Alighieri, John Ciardi, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Thomas Aquinas

All of whom have explored, far more eloquently than my powers would ever allow, the obsessive theme of—

Wandering between two worlds, one dead

The other powerless to be born