Some debts to source material are more profound than others.
To say that I would have been unable to write this book if I had not first read D. T. Max’s The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is considerably more than an understatement. A book of exhaustive research that plumbs the histories of both fatal familial insomnia and the prion itself, Max’s book is everything that mine is not. Which is to say that it is a book of fact and science. Footnoted and well-referenced, it is a book that one can learn from. And the many mistakes, misunderstandings, and oversights regarding FFI and prions that can be found in Sleepless should be understood as a product of my own ignorance, laziness, and/or liberties taken with reality in the desire to tell an entertaining story.
This is also a book that I would not have written without virtually unlimited access to the Internet. My morning cruises through the Web; clipping, pasting, and archiving, provided a great deal of the primary and incidental details that helped flesh out the world of Sleepless. Some of the sites to which I am most indebted for making me aware, or setting me on the trail, of any number of oddities, technological trends, obscure current events, artworks, and ephemera are Dinosaurs and Robots, warrenellis.com, boingboing.net, beyond the beyond, NewScientist, nytimes.com, and many others.
Source material and references for many of the ideas, settings, and bits of technology found in this book can be found on my own website, www.pulpnoir.com, in the Sleepless category.