Any book is the work of many people, not just the author. Much of the credit for what you are reading goes to a lot of other people. Any mistakes in it are of course mine alone.
First and foremost, I would like to thank my editor at Princeton University Press, Vickie Kearn, whose support and enthusiasm made this project possible. I would also like to thank Quinn Fusting, Natalie Baan, and Marjorie Pannell for their invaluable help, and all of the other staff at the press and elsewhere who worked on the book.
I would like to personally thank one of my favorite science fiction writers, Larry Niven, for letting me quote from his letter to Roger Zelazny. I found the quotation in Zelazny’s papers, held in the Azriel Rosenfeld Science Fiction Collection at the Albin O. Kuhn Library at the University of Maryland–Baltimore. I thank the staff of the library, especially the curator, Thomas Beck, for their help. Much of this book was researched and written at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; I thank the staff of the main reading room for their help in retrieving books and articles, and for maintaining such a wonderful place to work.
The science fiction writers who have influenced me are too numerous to be mentioned here by name in every case, but two must be singled out for special credit: Poul Anderson, to whom the book is dedicated, for his essays on writing science fiction, and Olaf Stapledon, who provides the best example of what speculative fiction can do. Among scientists, Freeman Dyson has probably seeded more ideas used in hard science fiction today than any other living physicist.
My colleague, Mark Vagins of the University of Tokyo, had the initial idea for the section “Thrown for a Loop” in chapter 7. Mark is one of the smartest people I know, and has been a close friend since high school. It is with his kind permission that the analysis is reprinted here. Anthony Bowdoin “Bow” van Riper is an expert on science and popular culture. He gave me invaluable information on infrastructure costs associated with the Space Shuttle program. Raymond Lee, a physicist and meteorologist at the Naval Academy, measured the luminous flux of several candles for chapter 3, “Why Hogwarts Is So dark.” He also discussed subtle points concerning different types of photometric measurements and gave me advice on calculating luminosity and luminous flux from various light sources. I also thank Zeke Kisling, who gave me invaluable advice on formatting and presentation in the book.
The anonymous reviewers for Princeton University Press pointed out several issues with the book that needed correction. I thank them for their diligent reading, and their support for the book. I also wish to thank Larry Weinstein and Paul Nahin for their reviews of the original proposal.
I tested out a lot of the ideas in this book in the class “The Science of Science Fiction” offered at St. Mary’s College in the spring semester of 2009. I thank the students in the class, Roger Ding, Adam Hammett, Galen Hench, Devon Jerrard, Malory Knott, James Moderski, David Panks, Abby Taylor, and David Tondorf-Dick, for beta testing much of the material in the second and fourth sections of the book. I’m sorry there wasn’t enough room in the book to include their great class projects. I also ran a much earlier version of this class at Cleveland State University in 1996. I thank the students who took that course, although I no longer have their names.
My mother, Louise Adler, read one of the earlier drafts of the book and gave me a lot of support and several practical suggestions about organizing the work. Finally, and most important, I thank my wife, Karen, and our daughters, Alexandra and Cassandra, for their love and support at all times, especially while I was writing the book. Scio quid sit amor.