SCHISMATRIX was my third novel, but the first to go into an immediate second-printing—in Japan. I’ve valued the Japanese SF milieu very highly ever since. Recently SCHISMATRIX became my first novel to come out in Finland. Perhaps there’s a quality in a good translation that can’t be captured with the original. One might not think that a book this weird and idiosyncratic could survive translation into non-Indo-European languages; but on the contrary, it’s that very weirdness that seems to push it through the verbal and cultural barriers. SCHISMATRIX is a creeping sea-urchin of a book—spikey and odd. It isn’t very elegant, and it lacks bilateral symmetry, but pieces of it break off inside people and stick with them for years.