It’s been my custom in my book acknowledgments to give a shout-out to the people at Tor who have worked on the book in order to bring it to you, my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, first among them. This time, I want to even more directly acknowledge them, because this time I was a particularly troublesome author—I blew deadlines that I should not have and thus made them go into high-speed mode on their end to get the book out on time. Note I said “high-speed” mode and not “panic” mode—they’re too good at their jobs to panic.
So: to Patrick, to Miriam Weinberg, to Christina MacDonald (copy editor), Rafal Gibek (production editor), Karl Gold (production manager), Heather Saunders (designer), Nathan Weaver (managing editor), Megan Hein (assistant to the managing editor), Caitlin Buckley (digital managing editor), and Natalie Eilbert (senior QA associate), thank you, thank you, and again, thank you. I’m sorry you had to deal with me being a problem. I will try very hard not to be a problem to you in the future. And if I am, you can punch me (uh, like, on the arm. Not too hard, please). A shout-out to Tor UK and the folks there for their work on this as well, to Steve Feldberg and everyone at Audible, and, heck, to everyone at all of my publishers, everywhere.
Seriously: Thank you, everyone, who worked on this book with me. People like to rant about getting “the middleman” out of book production, and I wonder if they realize just how much the “middlemen”—the folks who do everything else but write the words in the book—add to their enjoyment of the work they read. I know, and I am grateful for the work and care.
Additional thanks to John Harris for his continuing and amazing artistic representations of the Old Man’s War universe, and to Irene Gallo, Tor’s art director, for her care and appreciation of the visual side of these books, and Peter Lutjen for his design. And to Alexis Saarela and Patty Garcia, who handle my publicity.
Many thanks to my literary agents, Ethan Ellenberg and Bibi Lewis, for selling me in this and many other languages. Thanks also to Joel Gotler, my film/TV agent, with whom I always enjoy taking a meeting.
My wife, Kristine, is the first reader of everything I do and is the person I most trust in the world to call me on my crap as a writer. If you enjoy the book, the credit goes to her (if you don’t, it’s my fault). I give her thanks and as always my everlasting love.
My wife is my first reader, but I am deeply fortunate that she is not the only one. This is the sixth book in the Old Man’s War universe; as I write this it’s been ten years since Old Man’s War was first released. The reason we have gotten this far into it is that so many of you, all over the world, started with it and kept reading. When I think about it, I am amazed. There is so much I owe to each of you, personally and professionally. Thank you so much.
—John Scalzi
April 6, 2015
About the Author
JOHN SCALZI is one of the most popular and acclaimed SF authors to emerge in the last decade. His debut, Old Man’s War, won him science fiction’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. His New York Times bestsellers include The Last Colony; Fuzzy Nation; his most recent novel, Lock In; and also Redshirts, which won 2013’s Hugo Award for Best Novel. Material from his widely read blog, Whatever (whatever.scalzi.com), has earned him two other Hugo Awards as well. He lives in Ohio with his wife and daughter. You can sign up for email updates here.