The longer I write novels, the more I appreciate first readers. This one had quite a few, aside of course from my wife Deborah and daughter Claire. Paul McAuley and Jack Womack weathered countless near-identical iterations of the first hundred pages or so. Ned Bauman and Chris Nakashima-Brown both waded through cold reads of the book at midpoint, always valuable but tricky work. James Gleick and Michael St. John Smith did the same, but toward the conclusion. Sean Crawford, Louis Lapprend, and the enigmatic V. Harnell ran a sort of tag team. Meredith Yayanos kept a careful eye on Inspector Lowbeer throughout, an acute and articulate tunnel canary amid some issues I know little about. Sophia Al-Maria read the first completed version, helping mightily with Hamed in terms of Gulf Futurism.