Starfish (56 page)

Sexual abuse as an addictive stimulus

I first encountered the idea that chronic abuse could be physiologically addictive in
Psychological Trauma
(B. van der Kolk, ed,, American Psychiatric Press 1987). False Memory Syndrome is explored in
The Myth of Repressed Memory : False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse
by E. Loftus & K. Ketcham (St. Martin's Press 1996).

I put all these words together myself. However, I shamelessly exploited anyone I could to put them together
properly
.

At the start:
Starfish
began as a short story. Barbara MacGregor, then of the Domestic Violence Lab at the University of British Columbia, critiqued early drafts of that story.

At the end: David Hartwell bought the manuscript; he and Jim Minz editted it. Of course they have my gratitude, but I hope their reward extends beyond such cheap verbiage; I hope Starfish sells well and makes all of us lots of money. (The copy you're holding is a start. Why not pick up others and hand them out to Jehovah's Witnesses at street corners?)

In between:

Glenn Grant took it upon himself to approach David Hartwell on my behalf when I was too chickenshit to do it myself. Major David Buck of the New Zealand Army gave me the benefit of his expertise on explosives, nuclear and otherwise. I was a bit disturbed to learn just how much thought some people have put into the effects of nuclear explosions on the seabed.

When I wanted to check out the geology of spreading and earthquake zones, I posted a question to a couple of geological Usenet groups in lieu of actual research. This netted me a lot of advice from people I've never met and probably never will: Ellin Beltz, Hayden Chasteen, Joe Davis, Keith Morrison, and Carl Schaefer gave me pointers and references on vulcanism, plate tectonics, and (in one case) the length of time it would take a nuclear submarine to get shot zit-like from the mouth of an active volcano after being swallowed into a deep-sea subduction zone. John Stockwell of the Center for Wave Phenomena (Colorado School of Mines) was especially forthcoming, sharing formulae and tables that described earthquakes in nice, graspable, "Hiroshima equivalents". I'm tempted to never do my own research again.

I'm also tempted to blame all these nice people for any technical mistakes you find in the following document, but of course, I can't. It's my book. I guess that means they're my mistakes too.