Peter Watts: Starfish

The absolute coolest source for up-to-the-minute information on hydrothermal vents, however, is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) web pages. Everything's there: raw survey data, research schedules, live maps, three-dimensional seaquake animations, and recent publications. To name but a few. Start at http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents and go from there.

The rudimentary telepathy I describe actually made it into the peer-reviewed technical literature back in 1994. Check out Does Psi Exist? Replicable evidence for an anomalous process of information transfer by Bem and Honorton, pages 4-18 in Vol 15 of the Psychological Bulletin . They got statistical significance and everything. Speculations on the quantum nature of human consciousess come from the books of Roger Penrose, The Emporer's New Mind (Oxford University Press, 1989) and Shadows of the Mind (Oxford, 1994).

The smart gels that screw everything up were inspired by the research of Masuo Aizawa, a Professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, profiled in the August 1992 issue of Discover magazine. At that time, he'd got a few neurons hooked together into the precursors of simple logic gates. I shudder to think where he's got to now.

The application of neural nets to navigating through complex terrain is described in «Robocar» by B. Daviss ( Discover , July 1992.), which describes work being done by Charles Thorpe of (where else) Carnegie-Mellon University.

The theory that life originated in hydrothermal vents hails from "A hydrothermally precipitated catalytic iron sulphide membrane as a first step towards life", by M.J. Russel et al. ( Journal of Molecular Evolution , v39, 1994). Throwaway bits on the evolution of life, including the viability of ribosomal RNA as an alternative genetic template, I cadged from "The origin of life on earth" by L.E. Orgel ( Scientific American , October 1994). ßehemoth's symbiotic presence within the cells of deepwater fish steals from the work of Lynn Margulis, who first suggested that cellular organelles were once free-living organisms in their own right (an idea that went from heresy to canon in the space of about ten years). Once I'd stuck that idea into the book, I found vindication in "Parasites shed light on cellular evolution" (G. Vogel, Science 275, p1422, 1997) and "Thanks to a parasite, asexual reproduction catches on" (M. Enserinck, Science 275, p1743, 1997).

I first encountered the idea that chronic abuse could be physiologically addictive in Psychological Trauma (B. van der Kolk, ed, American Psychiatric Press 1987). False Memory Syndrome is explored in The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse by E. Loftus & K. Ketcham (St. Martin's Press 1996).

I put all these words together myself. However, I shamelessly exploited anyone I could to put them together properly .

At the start: Starfish began as a short story. Barbara MacGregor, then of the Domestic Violence Lab at the University of British Columbia, critiqued early drafts of that story.

At the end: David Hartwell bought the manuscript; he and Jim Minz editted it. Of course they have my gratitude, but I hope their reward extends beyond such cheap verbiage; I hope Starfish sells well and makes all of us lots of money. (The copy you're holding is a start. Why not pick up others and hand them out to Jehovah's Witnesses at street corners?)

In between:

Glenn Grant took it upon himself to approach David Hartwell on my behalf when I was too chickenshit to do it myself. Major David Buck of the New Zealand Army gave me the benefit of his expertise on explosives, nuclear and otherwise. I was a bit disturbed to learn just how much thought some people have put into the effects of nuclear explosions on the seabed.

When I wanted to check out the geology of spreading and earthquake zones, I posted a question to a couple of geological Usenet groups in lieu of actual research. This netted me a lot of advice from people I've never met and probably never will: Ellin Beltz, Hayden Chasteen, Joe Davis, Keith Morrison, and Carl Schaefer gave me pointers and references on vulcanism, plate tectonics, and (in one case) the length of time it would take a nuclear submarine to get shot zit-like from the mouth of an active volcano after being swallowed into a deep-sea subduction zone. John Stockwell of the Center for Wave Phenomena (Colorado School of Mines) was especially forthcoming, sharing formulae and tables that described earthquakes in nice, graspable, "Hiroshima equivalents". I'm tempted to never do my own research again.

I'm also tempted to blame all these nice people for any technical mistakes you find in the following document, but of course, I can't. It's my book. I guess that means they're my mistakes too.