Ben Hawker of Weta Workshop read the manuscript and pointed out that Cradle would be rusty, a detail that had somehow escaped me; hasty last-minute alterations ensued.
Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan, by dint of their connection with the Long Now Foundation’s Revive and Restore Initiative, had much useful background to supply on the genetic challenges associated with reviving species from small breeding populations.
While the first two parts of the story are a tale of straight-up global disaster and hastily improvised technology, I always viewed the third part of it as an opportunity to showcase many of the more positive ideas that have emerged, over the last century, from the global community of people interested in space exploration. Many of the big hardware ideas in the latter part of the book have been kicking around in the literature for decades and will be recognized as old friends by longtime readers of hard science fiction.
Particular recognition and thanks are owed to Rob Hoyt of Tethers Unlimited. Following in the footsteps of the late Robert L. Forward, Rob has worked on a number of ideas in the realm of “big space machines.” One of these is the Hoytether, a hugely scaled-up version of which has found its way into this book as the basic design scheme of the tether connecting the Eye to Cradle. Another is the Remora Remover, which, in principle, is the same device as the Lamprey. Rob is also coauthor of a 2000 study on high-altitude rotating tethers, based on early work by Forward and others, that serves as the basis for the glider-to-orbit transfer described in the opening pages of the third part of this book. He deserves credit for all of those contributions as well as thanks for having given the manuscript a close read.
The first phase of Kath Two’s journey, from ground to hanger, is inspired by conversations that I have had with Chris Young and Kevin Finke about current trends in the technology of gliders. It is from talking to them, flying with them, and following leads provided by them that I came to understand the fact that the atmosphere contains all the energy we need to fly, and that the only thing preventing us from implementing something like Kath Two’s glider is commitment of resources to development of sensors and software—perhaps combined with a few improvements in the treatment of motion sickness.
Arthur Champernowne read an early draft and raised questions about the dynamic stability of the Eye-Cradle tether, which I have, with due respect, elected to ignore completely—but technically sophisticated readers might like to know that it would exhibit all manner of interesting wiggles whose management I have decided to postpone for later work. In the version that Arthur read, the flivver carrying Kath Two made its final insertion to geosynchronous orbit using a plain old-fashioned rocket burn. Arthur objected to that, not on technical but on aesthetic grounds. This finally pushed me over the brink into using an idea I had been carrying around in the back of my head for a while: having the flivver rendezvous with the end of a cracking whip. The scientific literature on this topic, though sparse, dates back to the Victorian era. The earliest technical reference that I have been able to find on the physics of moving chains is a paper by John Aitken during the 1870s, though he attributes some of its content to his friends the Thomson brothers, William (later Lord Kelvin) and James. Aitken’s work lay fallow until the 1920s, when it was picked up and used by M. Z. Carriére in a paper about the physics of whips. Subsequent work published by W. Kucharski (1940) and R. Grammel and K. Zoller (1949) filled out the picture. It is an interesting, underexplored topic in classical physics. I talked about it in a sparsely attended lecture at the Oxford Union in June of 2014, and have intentions of publishing more about it, but nothing definite as of this writing (December 2014).
Finally, I would like to express gratitude to my agents, Liz Darhansoff of Darhansoff & Verrill and Richard Green of ICM Partners, and my editor, Jen Brehl, for displaying adaptability as I devoted seven years to trying to figure out just what exactly I wanted to do with this idea.
About the Author
NEAL STEPHENSON is the author of Reamde, Anathem, and the three-volume historical epic the Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World), as well as Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
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