My depiction of the galactic centre as something other than a black hole comes from a speculation by Nobel laureate Robert B. Laughlin. Not from the Laughlin book cited below, however – that belongs here because of its emergent-properties perspective on fundamental physics.
In the previous volumes, the Absorption scene in Berchtesgaden contains a nod to Roald Dahl, and Gavriela’s homecoming after the US trip in Transmission, though it came into my head fully formed, is homage to Nicholas Monsarrat for The Cruel Sea.
The fictional SRS’s pre-deployment antics are inspired by a description in Robin Horsfall’s book, Fighting Scared.
For long-lived academic supervision, encouragement and friendship, infinite thanks to Professor Jim Davies. And thanks to everyone else at Oxford’s Department of Computer Science, previously the Computing Laboratory.
Thank you to physicist/writer Dave Clements for organising the Science for Writers conferences at Imperial College, and giving me Imperial as a setting.
Many, many thanks to Fluffy Mark for reminding me about Kian.
At my redoubtable publishers, enormous gratitude goes to the magnificent Marcus Gipps (thank you for the insights, which made this and the previous book so much stronger), the stupendous Simon Spanton, and jolly Jon Weir.
Thank you to Bonbon and Nutmeg, for putting in an appearance in Labyrinth, and being wonderful.
As always and ever, love and gratitude to Yvonne, who puts up with it and gets me through it all.
While I was writing this, the third and final volume of Ragnarok, researchers reported definitive evidence that in the eighth century, during the year 775 or 776, Earth experienced a blast of gamma radiation. (Note that Stígr was corrupted over a year before Ulfr encountered him.)
Several days before I submitted the completed book, news from the Fermi Space Telescope came to my attention: patterns in the data suggest some of the gamma-rays emitted from the galactic core are produced by dark-matter interactions.
It seems the darkness is on the move . . .
Mid Glamorgan, Wales, January 2013
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Also by John Meaney from Gollancz:
Bone Song
Dark Blood
Ragnarok Trilogy
Absorption
Transmission
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
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