InterWorld

AFTERWORD

Michael and Neil first started talking about InterWorld in about 1995, when Michael was making adventure cartoon serials at DreamWorks and Neil was in London working on the Neverwhere TV series. We thought it would make a fun television adventure. Then, as the nineties went on, we started trying to explain our idea to people, telling them about an organization entirely comprised of dozens of Jo/e/y Harkers, trying to preserve the balance between magic and science across an infinite number of possible realities, and we would watch their eyes glaze over. There were ideas you could get across to the kind of people who make television, we decided, and there were ideas you couldn’t. Then, as the nineties came to an end, one of us had an idea: Why didn’t we write it as a novel? If we just told the story, simply and easily, then even a television executive would be able to understand it. So one snowy day Michael came up to Neil’s part of the world, carrying a computer, and while the winter weather howled we wrote this book.

Soon we learned that television executives don’t read books either, and we sighed and went about our lives.

InterWorld sat in the darkness for some years, but when, recently, we showed it to people, the people we showed it to thought other people might like to read it. So we brought it out of the darkness and polished it up. We hope you enjoyed it.

—Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves

2007