Acknowledgements
The task of researching and preparing this book has been considerably aided by generous assistance from a variety of sources.
Our efforts in trying to trace an original authoritative source for the story involving René Descartes and Queen Christina of Sweden (Sect. 2.1) were greatly helped by invaluable feedback and suggestions from many experts in the field: John Cottingham, Stephen Gaukroger, Minsoo Kang, Jessica Riskin, Gary Hatfield, Justin E. H. Smith, Roger Ariew, Theo Verbeek, Erik-Jan Bos, Susanna Åkerman, Mike Wheeler, Robert Freitas, Martyn Amos and Moshe Sipper. We are extremely grateful to all of them.
Nancy Henry was very helpful in providing information and feedback as we explored the work of George Eliot, and we very much appreciate her assistance. Likewise, we are very grateful to Nora Eibisch for her guidance as we explored the work of Konrad Zuse.
We also thank Justin E. H. Smith for bringing Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s work to our attention (Sect. 2.1), Seth Bullock for highlighting Alfred Marshall’s contribution (Sect. 3.2), and Jeremy Pitt for pointing us to Robert Sheckley’s sci-fi work (Sect. 4.1.3).
Our research activities benefited greatly from the facilities and helpful staff at the National Library of Scotland, the Special Collections staff at the University of Edinburgh Library, Monash University Library, the online resources of the National Library of New Zealand, the online resources of the Wellcome Library in London, Kathryn Mouncey and Jane McGuinness at the British Library, Rosemary Clarkson at the Darwin Correspondence Project of the University of Cambridge and Dagmar Spies at the University Archives of the Technical University of Berlin.
Some small sections of Chaps. 3, 4 and 7 were previously published in a conference paper presented at the 2018 Conference on Artificial Life (T. Taylor & Dorin, 2018). That publication is copyright MIT Press, and the text is reproduced here in accordance with the publication agreement between MIT Press and the authors.
We gratefully acknowledge the use of Overleaf, the free online collaborative LaTeX authoring tool, in preparing the draft of this work.
We also gratefully acknowledge the use of the Bookdown tool for the production of this HTML version of the book.
TT’s Acknowledgements for the Afterword
The afterword (Chap. 8) is a slightly modified version of an article written by me (TT) and previously published in the Artificial Life journal (T. Taylor, 2024). That publication is copyright MIT Press, and the text is reproduced here in accordance with the publication agreement between MIT Press and me.
I am very grateful to Fred Stahl for an email conversation we had in December 2020 about his work on artificial life in 1960, and for his comments on a draft of the journal version of the afterword in late 2023. Aged in his 80s, Fred was nevertheless still enthusiastic about discussing his work.
Thanks also to Hamish Dewar for the email conversation we had in January 2021 about the self-reproducing program (quine) he wrote in the late 1960s.
I originally became aware of the work of Etzler and Karinthy, and some of the pulp sci-fi stories discussed in the afterword, by reading an article on SciFi StackExchange.161 In particular, I thank users hypnosifl and M. A. Golding for their valuable contributions to the discussion thread.
Thanks also to John Clute and David Langford for their assistance in my search for the true identity of “Dudbroke”, author of The Prots: A Weird Romance mentioned in the afterword (Sect. 8.2), even though the search did not lead to a conclusive result.
And finally, many thanks indeed to James McIntyre for reading over a draft version of the section in the afterword on John Adolphous Etzler (Sect. 8.1.1).