At this time I was reading Samuel (Chip) Delany's autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water. His autobio and mine were published two months apart, so the two invite comparison. I knew Chip briefly, and liked some of his work. He is an award-winning science fiction writer. On the surface the two of us are quite different. He is a black, dyslexic, homosexual literary writer, while I am a white, heterosexual commercial writer. But these differences may be superficial. Underneath there are parallels. Both of us differ from others to more than average degree. I may have been dyslexic myself; in my day there were no learning-disabled children, only stupid or perverse ones, so I had no excuse for struggling to get through first grade. But I made sure that my dyslexic daughter Penny did not have to endure what I did. It may be said that when I finally got fed up with taking it, I started dishing it out, and the evidences of that militancy are all around me and in this Note. Chip seems to have been nicer, and so he may have suffered more and had a less dramatic career. I wonder whether he read my book with as much interest as I read his?

I finished that book, and started on the next: Chaos, by James Gleick. We had bought a copy through the Book-of-the-Month Club, but I had not yet looked at it. Then a fan, the artist Kurt Cagle, sent me a copy, and I looked at it and saw the illustrations of the Mandelbrot Set. I had seen such pictures before, but this time they registered, because I had a need of a simple way to structure a complex new universe for a new series of novels.

The Set offered such a way. Thus the footing of my future work occurred in the late stages of my present work. The Mandelbrot Set is too complicated a matter to get into here, but those who are interested in art and mathematics should find it fascinating. It held me for hours at a time, when I had a novel to finish.