This last point wasn’t lost on the novel’s author. Cockcroft himself apparently turned, not unlike his protagonist, to “dicing” for a time in his life, living nomadically with his family on a Mediterranean sailboat, in a kind of Brownian slow motion. At some point, however, his annealing schedule cooled off: he settled down comfortably into a local maximum, on a lake in upstate New York. Now in his eighties, he’s still contentedly there.
