Cosmic (20 page)

Authors: Frank Cottrell Boyce

BOOK: Cosmic

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Acknowledgments

I can just about remember sitting on the couch with my parents, watching the first men land on the moon. We really did think that we were living in the space age and that by the time I had children we would all be able to go on space holidays together. Lots of other amazing things happened instead, of course, but I am still hoping that one day I’ll go into space. In the meantime it seemed like it would be fun to go there in my own imagination. Of course, my own imagination couldn’t generate the necessary escape velocity so I had to get help. I got it from:

Alan Bean—the fourth man to walk on the moon, and one of the most inspiring people on Earth—who very kindly let me use his name here; I also borrowed the name of the real Lorraine Sass, who made a generous donation to the Waterloo Partnership in exchange for appearing in this book. The Waterloo Partnership is helping to build a library and school in the real Waterloo in Sierra Leone. For more information see thewaterloopartnership.co.uk; Andrew
Smith’s book
Moondust
never left my side while I was writing
Cosmic
; Danny Boyle first told me about Andrew’s book and made an imaginary space journey of his own; Doug Millard of the Science Museum knows everything; all the information about World of Warcraft comes from my fine friend Sam Millar; Talya Baker made sure all the rivets on the rocket were nice and tight; the amazing Sarah Dudman stayed calm in Mission Control, even when I was rolling around in a very eccentric orbit; and Denise, my wife, had the courage to shoot me down in flames when I was flying off in the wrong direction.

About the Author

FRANK COTTRELL BOYCE
is the author of two other books for children:
FRAMED
and
MILLIONS
, which was made into a movie by Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle. Frank lives in England with his family.

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ALSO BY
FRANK COTTRELL BOYCE

Millions

Framed

Credits

Copyright

COSMIC
. Copyright © 2008 by Frank Cottrell Boyce. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Library of Congress catalog card number: 2009927741

ISBN 978-0-06-183683-1 (trade bdg.)

ISBN 978-0-06-183686-2 (lib. bdg.)

EPub Edition © December 2009 ISBN: 978-0-06-199834-8

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