The Genius Wars - Hardcover

Amazon Exclusive: A Letter from Catherine Jinks, Author of The Genius Wars

Well, here it is--the final installment. I'm sorry it's taken so long for The Genius Wars to reach you over there in the U.S., but at last your wait is over!

I've had a lot of messages on my website asking me if this is really the end of the series. My answer continues to be: yes, this really is the last we'll see of Cadel, if only because I've pretty much tied up all the loose ends in his story. At the conclusion of Evil Genius, Cadel was left in a kind of limbo. At the end of Genius Squad, Prosper English was still looming in the background. (It was quite obvious to me that Prosper wasn't going to just vanish into thin air, leaving Cadel to get on with his life.) But now, in The Genius Wars, I've sorted things out between Cadel and Prosper. And since the whole series revolves around their relationship, there's nowhere else for me to go.

Besides, I'm not a computer expert. I'm not a math whiz, either. That's why these books have been incredibly hard to write; if my friend Richard Buckland hadn't helped me, I wouldn't have been able to finish them at all. For those of you who aren't familiar with Richard, he's a bona fide computer expert--and a math whiz, too--and he appears in The Genius Wars under his own name because I felt that he deserved some kind of recognition. (You can view many of his university lectures on YouTube, by the way; his lecture on Turing is particularly fine.)

Of course, if someone offered me a million dollars to write a fourth book, I'd be horribly tempted. How could any author not be? But I'd be dancing with the devil if I did accept an offer like that, knowing full well that trying to write a fourth book would not only half-kill me--it would be downright wrong. In a funny sort of way, it would also be unfair to Cadel. You'll know what I mean, once you read the book.

So happy reading! And thanks for all the positive feedback you've given me over the years. I wouldn't have been able to keep slogging on without it.

(Photo © Peter Dockrill)