It was my first novel to take place entirely on Earth. It was the first novel of mine to be told entirely from a first-person point of view. It was my first book-length effort at combining the science fiction and mystery-thriller genres. And it was my first novel to have a hardcover first edition in the United States (my four previous books had been published in hardcover in the UK). All this represented changes I was going through at the time. In late 1990, my wife and I moved from New England, where we’d been living for the past five years, to St. Louis, her hometown. Linda had gotten homesick and wanted to return to the place where she’d come from, and I was ready for a change of scenery, so we packed up our stuff and moved to the Gateway to the West, where we’d live for the next seven years before deciding to move back east. I’d lived in Missouri before when I’d gone to grad school at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and so I’d visited St. Louis many times; the city wasn’t completely unknown to me.
