What if your new-born baby were endowed with an entire third set of chromosomes that could kill her — and everyone else on Earth?

Bill DeSmedt has spent his life living by his wits and his words. In his time, and as the spirit has moved him, he’s been: a Soviet Area expert and US/USSR exchange student, a computer programmer and system designer, a telecommunications consultant, an Artificial Intelligence practitioner, a son, a husband and lover, a father and grandfather, an omnivorous reader with a soft spot for science fiction and science fact, and now, Lord help us, a novelist. He’s tried to pack as much of that checkered history as he could into his “Archon Sequence” technothrillers Singularity, Dualism, and the forthcoming Triploidy.

Bill’s non-fiction writing credits include an unconventional two-part attempt to marry the fields of cognitive psychology and software engineering for the journal DataBase Programming & Design, a chapter on artificial intelligence in foreign language learning for Melissa Holland’s Intelligent Language Tutors, a beginner’s guide to natural-language processing for the Proceedings of the Computer Game Developers Conference, and a treatise on storytelling as a tool of military command for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.