The secret to going broke fast is simple.

Just visit Atlantic City or Las Vegas and ask the first slot-machine player you see how to get a jackpot. "Don't change machines," they'll tell you as they pump the one-armed bandit. "Stay with it. Keep feeding it coins. If you stop to eat or sleep, someone else is sure to claim your pot."

But energetic single-mindedness is also the secret of success. A successful entrepreneur such as Bill Gates picks a single line of business and pursues it with devotion and energy. Some can focus on more than one thing at a time, but for most, to divide the focus is to risk failure.

An academic specializes. Most of those who work in more than one area risk being accused of intellectual flightiness, are taken less seriously than they should be, and fail to climb high in their fields. Our Carl Sagans are few and far between, and even they must struggle for their proper professional due.

Writers also specialize, concentrating on mysteries or textbooks or biographies. They build followings that way, and their editors know how to label them for sales purposes. If a mystery writer insists on doing science fiction, he or she often adopts a pseudonym for the purpose. Even Stephen King did this, writing mysteries as Richard Bachman before he grew so famous that his following would follow him wherever he went.

My own specialization is a little different. I'm partly a college professor, partly a science textbook author, partly a science fiction book reviewer, partly a science fiction writer, partly a poet, and entirely a pursuer of what is known in the science fiction world as "sense of wonder." That is, I have long pursued that thrill of "Gosh! Wow!" to be found in the marvels of science and the novelties of science fiction.

In that pursuit, I have explored a number of themes--biological engineering, randomness, feeding the world, virtual reality, the search for aliens, skepticism, and more. My work over the last thirty-some years has fallen into clusters of fiction and nonfiction, each cluster centered on one of those themes.

You will find some of those clusters in Frontiers of Wonder. The book was assembled in 1999 and published for the Rocket eBook, a device that was for a time a leading ebook reader. Now Rocket is defunct, its parent company bought by another and the product discontinued. But Serendipity Systems has moved on, offering the book (and others) at its Bookware site), as password-protected pdf files. So go get the book! I hope you will find in its clusters a portion of the wonder I felt in exploring them.

Tom Easton
Belfast, Maine
January 2004