I'm running very late this month, but I'll try to post all of the Thanksgiving Author's Notes before I run off to the big SFWA party tonight. To start off with, here's Jack McDevitt on his new novel Odyssey, one of our Main Selections:

Boobus Americanus.

I first ran across this phrase — I think — in one of the news stories recounting the cerebral thrombosis that had disabled one of the literary giants of the first half of the twentieth century. It was 1948, and H. L. Mencken's career was effectively over. He would die eight years later.

Reading about Mencken, I saw that some had asked him why, if the U.S. was such a ridiculous place, he chose to live here? Why, he answered, did men go to zoos?
He didn't like anybody very much. To him, the world was full of conmen and idiots. Leading the pack were politicians, college professors, bishops, lawyers, uplifters, do-gooders, true believers, and almost anyone in authority. It was too much for a 13-year-old, and I loved him from the first minute.

It was presumptuous of me to try to reproduce him in a science fiction novel, but I couldn't resist, and he showed up as Gregory MacAllister in Deepsix. Writing the character was pure joy. So it was inevitable that he'd be back, especially in a novel that combines Hutch's Academy with a 23rd century hellfire preacher and a few UFO's.