A Thousand Suns

Acknowledgements

Perhaps this kind of thing is best done in some sort of chronological order. I owe thanks to Frances, backdated, for seventeen years of love and support — most of those misguided years spent making music and computer games. I really should’ve started writing earlier. I owe her for all of that first-class proofreading and the copious red ink in the margins, and for helping me make some pretty critical plot choices.

Thanks also due to my author-brother Simon, and my dad, Tony. You see, both of them read a screenplay of mine a few years back, entitled Silent Tide. I never finished the damned thing. I think I got about three-quarters of the way through and couldn’t decide whether the Germans should… tsk tsk, nearly… anyway, both agreed it would make a fine book and I should pull my finger out and get on and write it. Well, here it is, guys, several revisions later. Thanks for nudging me towards writing the novel. And Dad, thanks for the help on the research side, and boy, was there was a lot of it, painstaking fact-checking. You pointed me in the right direction more than once.

Merric Davidson, I thank you. You spotted the potential in that first draft and nursed it through some early surgery, and, of course, found an excellent home for it with Orion.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to my editor Jon Wood and assistant editor Genevieve Pegg over at Orion for truly taking the story to another level and holding down our patient while I indulged in a little more keyhole surgery. Thanks also due to them for showing such unstinting enthusiasm for the book and for Jon’s infectious evangelising.

And of course Eugenie Furniss at William Morris; a good agency, a great agent.

Finally… a little thank you to that piece of cheese I had the night before that dream… the one that led to the screenplay that ultimately led to the book. Cheers, bud.