Thanks are due to Andy Sawyer of the Science Fiction Foundation Collection, Sydney Jones Library, Liverpool University, for his assistance with research, and to Edward James of Reading University and to Eric Brown for reading drafts of the manuscript. Any errors or omissions are, of course, our responsibility.

This book, of its nature, contains a great deal of speculation on historical figures and events. Some of this is reasonably well founded on current historical sources, some of it is at the remoter fringe of respectable theorizing, and some of it is little more than the authors’ own wild imaginings. We leave it as an exercise to the reader to sort out which is which, in the anticipation that we are not likely to be proven wrong until the invention of the WormCam itself.