The second book was Freeman Dyson’s DISTURBING THE UNIVERSE. Freeman Dyson could have been a mighty figure in the genre if he’d become a science fiction writer instead of a mere world-class physicist at Princeton. I was lucky enough to have lunch with Freeman Dyson a couple of years ago. I was able to thank him for the fact that I had filed the serial numbers off his prose, hot-wired it and employed it in my work. Professor Dyson had never read SCHISMATRIX, but he was astonishingly good-humored about the fact that I had boldly hijacked thirty or forty of his ideas. What a gentleman and scholar!