The Freeze-Frame Revolution

Acknowledgements

Given that this is a) only a novella,[1] and b) set so very far in the future that pretty much everything’s handwavium anyway, you don’t get one of those citation-laden background essays I’ve been known to tack on to my longer works. I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t mention a few people who helped enormously in grounding ’Sporan tech in something a bit this side of outright fantasy. Dr. Peter Lorraine, of the GE Global Research Center—in between filing all those laser patents bearing his name, and completely independent of his professional activities—generously gave me the benefit of his insights into laser tech and high-energy physics, especially when it came to extrapolating from Crane and Westmoreland’s 2009 arXiv paper “Are Black Hole Starships Possible?” (Okay, fine: there’s a technical reference for you.)

I’ve lost track of the hours I’ve spent talking with Ray Neilson about computer networks; Ray was somewhat less generous than Dr. Lorraine insofar as I bribed him with many beers, but it was still a really good deal. The latency hack emerged from one such semi-soused evening—and apparently something very much like it actually happened at the dawn of ARPANET—so beers or no, the insights were good. Hopefully, by the time you read this, Ray will have got around to recovering my Linux partition.

Finally, Caitlin Sweet—AKA The BUG—has little insight into physics or computer science. She does, however, know way more than I do about character development; her hooves are all over whatever parts of this story involve the torture of souls rather than technology.

I am profoundly indebted to all of you. Even if I could only marry one.