I wrote this just to see if it was actually possible. How would the web site work, how many would read it. I had thought the Falklands War had a decent plot, but it was far easier to write if I imagined space ships instead of Navy ships.

I wondered where a planetary railway system would have it's main hub and thought of Jerusalem at the junction of 3 continents. That's why I put the world capital there. I set much of the story in the Rift Valley because I used to live there and there aren't many science fiction stories set in Africa.

I was really rather proud to have invented a communications system using quantum entanglement. Till I realised Philip Pullman had it 5 years before me.

Then on 12 June 2008 Markus G. Kuhn of Cambridge University sent an e-mail to New Scientist saying:-

The first quantum key agreement protocol using polarised photons, commonly known as BB84, was proposed by Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard back in 1984. A protocol based on entangled photons was proposed by Arthur Eckert in 1991.

But I had been really rather proud for a short while.

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