I’d been putting the finishing touches on my fourth book, and had hopes, as all authors do, that this would be the one that would once again earn me some critical attention, even if only in the cozy SF community, but in the pit of my stomach knew it wouldn’t be. The novel would be published to little fanfare. There would be virtually no publicity. The author tour would consist of two magazine interviews by phone. It would be ordered by the major book chains in such disappointing numbers as to make it impossible to create an impressive display of copies near the front of the store. Instead, it would be put back in the regular stacks, spine out, on a shelf reachable only by NBA stars, thereby guaranteeing that no one would ever find it. The publisher would arrange one book signing, not at one of the big chain bookstores, but at a mall store, where I would be seated behind a table in view of passing shoppers weighed down with Gap and Banana Republic bags and carrying containers of vinegar-soaked New York Fries, who would wonder who I was but not care enough to stop and ask, and I would smile and nod as they passed, and then, miracle of miracles, a middle-aged couple would slow as they walked by, pause and look at the display of my books, turn, and approach, and my heart would begin to swell, that someone was actually going to talk to me, and maybe even buy a book, which I would be delighted to sign, to make out personally, even. And the woman would say to me, “Do you know where the washrooms are?”

I actually thought this new book might have a chance. It was a sequel to my first novel, Missionary, a title my publisher really liked because it would make people think that, at some level, it was about fucking, but which was actually about missionaries of the future. Or more precisely, reverse missionaries. The time is several hundred years from now, and religion has been outlawed on Earth. Faith has been overtaken by technology. Computers are God. The missionaries decide to take their message to other worlds, to persuade civilizations deemed more primitive than ours to abandon their beliefs in supernatural beings and embrace the computer chip. Things go badly when our know-it-all Earthlings, in the act of setting ablaze a house of worship on the planet Endar, have the life crushed out of them by a huge hand reaching down from the clouds.