Justin Leiber is a professor of philosophy at the University of Houston. His nonfiction books include Can Animals and Machines Be Persons? (Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett, 1986), An Invitation to Cognitive Science (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) and Paradoxes (London: Duckworth, 1992); his fiction includes Beyond Rejection (Ballantine, 1980) and its two sequels, and The Sword and the Eye and The Sword and the Tower (Tor Books). He did a B. Phil. at the University of Oxford, coming in first of 20-odd on a degree for which the minimum passing requirement is the equivalent of an undergraduate first in Greats. His daemon was Shasta IV, a cougar of the University of Houston, who had a deep rumbling purr and did loop-the-loops on the ceiling of her cage when he came alone in the evening to visit with her inside her cage. He misses her dreadfully.