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acknowledgments

Huge thanks to my lovely wife Carolyn Clink; to Ginjer Buchanan at Penguin Group (USA)’s Ace imprint in New York; to Adrienne Kerr and Nicole Winstanley at Penguin Group (Canada) in Toronto; and to Malcolm Edwards and Simon Spanton at the Orion Publishing Group in London. Many thanks to my agent Ralph Vicinanza.

Thanks to Marvin Minsky, Ph.D., of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; to Marvin’s graduate students Bo Morgan and Dustin Smith at the MIT Media Lab; to cognitive scientist David W. Nicholas; to Andy Rosenbloom of the Association for Computing Machinery; and to computer scientist Vernor Vinge.

Thanks to David Goforth, Ph.D., Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Laurentian University, and David Robinson, Ph.D., Department of Economics, Laurentian University, for numerous insightful suggestions.

Very special thanks to my late deaf-blind friend Howard Miller (1966-2006), whom I first met online in 1992 and in person in 1994, and who touched my life and those of so many others in countless ways.

Thanks, too, to all the people who answered questions, let me bounce ideas off them, or otherwise provided input and encouragement, including: Asbed Bedrossian, Ellen Bleaney, Ted Bleaney, Michael A. Burstein, Nomi Burstein, David Livingstone Clink, Paddy Forde, Ron Friedman, Marcel Gagné, James Alan Gardner, Shoshana Glick, Al Katerinsky, Herb Kauderer, Fiona Kelleghan, Kirstin Morrell, Virginia O’Dine, Alan B. Sawyer, and Sally Tomasevic.

The term “Webmind” was coined by Ben Goertzel, Ph.D., the author of Creating Internet Intelligence and currently the CEO and Chief Scientist of artificial-intelligence firm Novamente LLC (novamente.net); I’m using it here with his kind permission.

Finally, thanks to the 1,400-plus members of my online discussion group, who followed along with me as I created this novel. Feel free to join us at:

www.groups.yahoo.com/group/robertjsawyer