The Science of Avatar

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’m very grateful to James Cameron, Jon Landau and their team for sharing their work with me for the purposes of this book and, still more precious, giving up some of their own time. It has been a privilege to get to know them and their work in some depth, and this book would not have been possible without their generosity. This book is a tribute to their exercise of disciplined imagination.

Thanks too to my publishers at Orion Books, including Paul Bulos, Malcolm Edwards and Rowland White, for a bright idea in the first place, and for hard work above and beyond the call of duty in making it happen.

I’m deeply grateful to the members of my Critical-Readers Clan who kindly donated their time and expertise in reviewing drafts of the book; without them the text would have been even more riddled with howlers. Thanks to: technology lawyer Simon Bradshaw; Malcolm Burke of Sharperton Systems; Dr. David L. Clements, lecturer in astrophysics at Imperial College London; evolutionary biologist Dr. Jack Cohen (www.drjackcohen.com); David Langford, author, critic and publisher of the newsletter Ansible (http://ansible.co.uk); and our good friends Alison and Nick Smart. Any misunderstandings, errors or ambiguities are of course my sole responsibility. And to you, the reader of this book: Irayo, Eywa ngahu.