Triggers

Acknowledgments

Huge thanks to my lovely wife Carolyn Clink, to Ginjer Buchanan at Penguin Group (USA)’s Ace imprint in New York, to Adrienne Kerr at Penguin Group (Canada) in Toronto, to Malcolm Edwards at Orion Publishing Group in London, and to Stanley Schmidt of Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine. Many thanks to my agents Christopher Lotts, Vince Gerardis, and the late, great Ralph Vicinanza.

Thanks to my writing colleagues who saw this project through multiple drafts, especially Paddy Forde and Herb Kauderer. And thanks to James Alan Gardner for being there early on and getting me on the right track.

Thanks, too, to all the other people who answered questions, let me bounce ideas off them, or otherwise provided input and encouragement, including: Chris Barkley, Asbed Bedrossian, Ellen Bleaney, Ted Bleaney, Linda Carson, David Livingstone Clink, Marcel Gagné, Shoshana Glick, Julie Marr Hanslip, Larry Hodges, Al Katerinsky, James Kerwin, Brian Malow, Christina Molendyk, Kirstin Morrell, Kayla Nielsen, Virginia O’Dine, Sherry Peters, Alan B. Sawyer, Sally Tomasevic, Jeff Vintar, and Romeo Vitelli. And a tip of the hat to Danita Maslankowski, who organizes the twice-annual “Write Off” retreats for Calgary’s Imaginative Fiction Writers Association.

Many thanks to Lisa McDonald and Nicole Pokryfka of the George Washington University Hospital in Washington, DC, and to Bettina Trotter of the Woman’s Hospital of Texas in Houston.

Finally, thanks to Pauline Martin, Librarian/Archivist, The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas; to Ian Randal Strock, author of The Presidential Book of Lists; to Zachary Wiita of the office of Congressman Maurice Hinchey, Washington, DC; and to The New America Foundation, Arizona State University, and Slate magazine, which jointly brought me to Washington in February 2011 to speak at their “Future Tense” conference entitled “Here Be Dragons: Governing a Technologically Uncertain Future”—I piggybacked much research for this novel on that trip.