"Time Gods" - a novel by Wayne Boyd

Acknowledgments

This is the web version of the book. It is not here in its entirety. To read the entire book, you must purchase the printed version, to be released soon.

During my life I've been fortunate to travel to 37 countries and 49 states in the U.S., living in many of the locals mentioned in these pages. Former residences included India, New York and London. I've been to a few other places described herein such as Paris and have also explored valleys and hiked slopes of Himalayan mountains in Nepal.

During the fifteen years it took to write this tale, several people assisted me in various ways.

Andre Petrov, from Russia, read the manuscript and loaned me a copy of The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov and translated by Mirra Ginsburg (published by Grove Press). Originally written during the Soviet crackdown of the 1930s, the book cloaks an anti-Stalinist message in a complex allegory of good and evil. Similarly, Dan Brown's Angels and Demons and Anne Rice's Memnoch the Devil, teach us that an author may successfully include religious leaders like the Pope or even Satan himself as characters in a novel.

My friends at the very real Hare Krishna temple on Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn, NY, helped me with historical accuracy, and a dear associate living in the Republic of Ireland, Satsvarupa das Goswami, allowed me to rewrite excerpts from his biography of the life of Srila Prabhupada.

As the work began to take shape in the 1990's, my friends from Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, provided new ideas and editing corrections.

My publisher, Atma Communications, founded in Liverpool in 1996 by Arjuna Krishna-Das, agreed to adopt this project and see it through to the printed word. No book can exist without a publisher. Atma's involvement has seen the project through to final fruition.

The greatest contributor to this novel besides myself has been my close friend Richard Cole, also known as Radha-Mohan das, from the United Kingdom. Without him this book would and could never have been completed. More than anyone else, Richard has read and re-read the manuscript dozens of times, always coming up with corrections, ideas, criticisms and encouragement.

Lastly, I owe tremendous gratitude to my wife, Charlotte Jean Boyd, for putting up with my long hours while I poured over endless research and rewrites, and who acting in concert with Richard Cole in the U.K., checked spelling, punctuation, and consistency in the final edit before publication.

All of us hope you will enjoy the story that follows.