Body of Glass

I would particularly like to thank the head of the Research Department of the State Jewish Museum in Prague, Dr Vladimir Sadek, who was extremely kind to me when I showed up for an appointment that turned out in a mysterious comedy of errors never to have existed. Above all, Jirina Sedinova of the Jewish Museum shared her time and research with me and was very helpful and warm, as well as fun to gossip with about Judah and David and company. I was in Prague in “68 and in the course of writing this novel returned; like Malkah, I remain in love with that city.

I would like to thank a particular student at Loyola in Chicago, where I put in a week of residency one April shortly after I had started this novel. In the course of a lively conversation about science fiction, he told me that when he read
Woman on the Edge of Time,
he couldn’t believe the date of publication, because the alternate universe that Connie blunders into in Chapter 15 anticipated cyberpunk. What’s cyberpunk? I asked, and he started me off. I enjoy William Gibson very much, and I have freely borrowed from his inventions and those of other cyberpunk writers. I figure it’s all one playground. Donna Haraway’s essay A Manifesto for Cyborgs’ was extremely suggestive also; Constance Penley of
Camera Obscura
was kind enough to send it to me.

I have found the newsletters and meetings of the Artificial Intelligence group of the Boston Computer Society stimulating. Lest anybody think that the experiences in the Net and Base in the novel are fantastic make-believe, be aware that even now companies are working on sensor nets that permit a person to “walk into’ data and experience it as real objects in imaginary space. As for the destruction of the ozone layer and the results of global warming, your local library surely has this information, as mine did.

I would like to thank Arthur Waskow for suggesting to me, at a meeting of the Siddur Project of P’Nai Or on which we both worked, that I might find kabbalah valuable to study. I owe a debt, as does everyone interested in kabbalah or the Golem, to Gershom Scholem and, even more, to Moshe Idel and, in understanding Judah Loew, to Andre Neher. My interpretations, of course, are very much my own.

Finally I want to thank Lois Wallace, my agent and friend, for her vigorous efforts on behalf of my work; and Sonny Mehta, the editor of this novel, for his valuable tough reading and helpful hints for cyborg makers.

As always with the novels of mine I most enjoy writing, this has been a strange and instructive journey.

to the memory of Primo Levi

His books were important to me.

I miss his presence in the world.

one

Shira