I mentioned earlier in Minds, Machines and Evolution that contemporary science is satisfied that such phenomena as the emergence of life and conscious mind can be adequately explained by the laws of physics and the principle of evolution, without needing any additional guiding powers. Given variability and selection, the rest follows mechanically. Thinking about this got me intrigued by the thought of a story involving a world inhabited by a naturally evolving biosphere made up of machines. The problem was, I couldn't think of a way to get it started. We can see how abiotic molecules could assemble themselves into structures that eventually came to exhibit self-replication and life, but with machines it's not so simple. As Taya insisted in Silver Shoes for a Princess, something had to make the first machine.
Then in 1982, Rodger Cliff, an AI scientist with NASA, invited me to take part in a one-week seminar at the Goddard Space Center which NASA was arranging to examine the role of computers in future space missions. The group included people from NASA, from the academic world, and from industry. One of the possibilities we talked about was an idea for a self-replicating lunar factoryan initial package of robots and machines to be landed on the Moon, which would grow exponentially and transform the entire lunar surface into an automated mass-production facility dedicated to supplying Earth's needs for products and materials. The implications were staggering. From an initial one-hundred-ton "seed" system, the annual output after ten years of unrestricted, self-reproducing growth would be a million tons, and by twenty years it would exceed the entire yearly output of today's human civilization!
I'm a rather slow thinker, which is perhaps why I chose to be a writer and not a talker. The connection didn't occur to me until I was on the plane back to California. Of course! Here, possibly, was the means I'd been looking for to get a machine biosphere started. Suppose, for example, that long ago an alien civilization sent out seeds like that on an interstellar scale, and one of them had mutated and gone out of control for some reason.
This must have been genuine inspiration, because I began typing Code of the Lifemaker the very next day. Since then, a number of readers have written or told me that the prologue alone was worth the price of the book.
So, hoping among other things that it might sell a few more copies, I thought I'd include it here.