In the Ocean of Night

Начало книги

I did not set out to write a series of interconnected novels over a span of twenty-five years. I’m sure that if I’d known it would grow to a million words, I’d not have started. The project grew on me, and I made plenty of mistakes bringing it to fruition. And now here it is, in a uniform edition at last.

I could describe here my inner struggles alone, the endless interior workings one performs before the blank page—but external events proved just as important. I suspect this happens more often for hard science fiction, and more often than most of us would like.

In 1977 I published my fourth novel, In the Ocean of Night, concerning an irritable astronaut, Nigel Walmsley, who discovers evidence of a galaxy-spanning network of intelligent machines. Walmsley was named for a friend of mine in graduate school, an astrophysicist who years later politely asked why I’d done it. It seemed a perfect English name, I said. The novel was nominated for awards and I went about my normal tasks as a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine.

Читать дальше →