Orson Card - Pathfinder

Thanks also to managing editor Kathleen Bellamy and editor Ed Shubert of my online magazine Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show (www.oscIGMS.com), for accepting the early Ram material as a separate short story. Since I own the magazine and they both work for me, I submitted it to them under a false name, so they would consider it without bias. The fact that they took it and decided to make it a cover story before I revealed that I was its writer gave me the assurance I needed that it actually worked as a short story without the rest of the novel to sustain it.

I am grateful for all who keep my household functioning when I’m buried in the writing of a book—Kathleen Bellamy in her guise as my assistant, Scott Allen as our webwright and IT expert, and of course my wife, Kristine, and our daughter Zina, who tolerated the strange writer man who wandered back and forth between the attic and the rest of the house, occasionally making sense in conversation but usually, because of the madness of this story, not.