The Taos had different challenges in raising their other two sons, although all three excelled in math. Trevor, two years younger than Terry, is autistic with top-level chess skills and the musical savant gift to play back on the piano a musical piece—even one played by an entire orchestra—after hearing it just once. He completed a Ph.D. in mathematics and now works for the Defense Science and Technology Organization in Australia.
The youngest, Nigel, told his father that he was “not another Terry,” and his parents let him learn at a less accelerated pace. Nigel, with degrees in economics, math and computer science, now works as a computer engineer for Google Australia.
“Journeys to the Distant Fields of Prime,” by Kenneth Chang, The New York Times, March 13, 2007[/bq]
Acknowledgments
An earlier and very different limited edition version of Quipu appeared in Australia under the title Transmitters, published handsomely by Russell and Jenny Blackford at Ebony Press, and generously supported by a grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. I am delighted to have the opportunity now to reimagine and broaden the background of my characters.
I have never been a member of Mensa nor any other of the well-known high I.Q. social organizations. Quipu is not a roman à clef. Ingenious readers might attempt to match up my hapless characters with real people; it is a fruitless endeavor, for my benighted rogues are constructs, like the quipu world they create and inhabit. Bad luck, Brian. Even so, I gladly acknowledge my absolute debt to the horde of fanzine writers, editors and illustrators who’ve enlivened my mailbox and my life over the past 40 years.
I am delighted to witness here the inclusion of certain passages (something borrowed, you might say) written in their first draft by my good friend and frequent collaborator, Rory Barnes—Valencies, Zones, Stuck in Fast Forward, The Book of Revelation, Transcension, The Hunger of Time, I’m Dying Here—which appear here with his kind permission. These appropriated passages were originally offcuts, in fact, from the Ur-manuscript of our first joint novel, Valencies, and I could not bear to let them go undisplayed when they fit so wonderfully into my emerging scheme for this novel. Thanks, cobber.
Robert Scholes’ essay “The fictional criticism of the future,” from which I draw several of my chapter epigraphs, first appeared in TriQuarterly 34, Fall 1975, pp. 233-47. Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, from which I draw another, was published by W. W. Norton, New York, 1981.
San Antonio, Texas, May 2009
Quipu Page 27