Foreword

Wheels Within Wheels is listed as my second novel. And it almost is. (A novel, that is.)

It’s rooted in the high point of my writing career to that time: When the original “Wheels Within Wheels” novelette snagged the cover of the September 1971 Analog with a fabulous (not a word I use very often) cover by John Schoenherr that perfectly captured the menacing elements of the story. Talk about a thrill. To a newbie SF writer in those days it was equivalent to a garage band making the cover of Rolling Stone. I didn’t have it made, but I felt I had made it.

After Healer, Doubleday wanted another novel. I decided to follow the same process that had sparked that book: Take one of my Analog stories and use it as a springboard. “Wheels Within Wheels” begged for expansion, and so it got the nod.

Doubleday offered a fifty-percent increase in my advance (up to a whopping $3000), and Jim Frenkel took paperback rights for his SF line at Dell.

I was cruising.

WWW the novel is less episodic than Healer, and certainly hangs together better, but it still strikes me as not quite as cohesive as a novel should be.

Perhaps I’m being too tough on it. The important thing now is that after twenty-eight years – I wrote it in 1977 – it still works on many levels. But not all.

Its main failings are those suffered by any science fiction written in the seventies, in the Dark Ages before…

…the microchip revolution: Computers you can hold in your palm? Get out.

…the communications revolution: World Wide Web – are we talking giant spiders? Email – what’s that? Wireless telephones the size of a cigarette pack – crazy.