Note 1: I will use the pronoun set "zie, zir" for Sparrow, as the least annoying of the various nongendered pronouns in use on the Internet. Strictly speaking, these pronouns are meant for people of unknown gender, a different class from hermaphrodites or neuters -- so my pronoun choice may reinforce the very misconception I am lamenting. But then, Sparrow has trouble with pronouns throughout the novel -- not just he and she, but, after the Horsemen come, I and you.

Note 2: In a latter-day recasting of this myth, Geraldo Rivera asked in the post-op transsexual Kate Bornstein as guest expert in a show entitled "The War Between the Sexes". As Bornstein commented bemusedly, "They must have figured I was Switzerland."

Note 3:Emma Bull seems to have a knack for this sort of thing. Once when I was about to attack a piece of pie at the New Riverside, my beloved told me that since I was hoping for some money in the mail, I should eat the slice point-last. "It's an old superstition that Emma made up a couple of years ago," she explained. The next day I got, not the hoped-for check, but a rejection note. That's how I knew it was a good superstition. Superstitions never work for me.

Postscript 6/20/96: Emma informs me that she didn't invent this superstition, she only popularized it.

Note 4: It is probably no coincidence that William Gibson, in Burning Chrome and Mona Lisa Overdrive, also uses voodoo in an attempt to give a mythic dimension to the electronic world. But that aspect of Gibson's novels has never quite worked for me; it seems too mechanical, trying to stuff the Net into a mold made for the spirit world. ("There is no technical manual for the spirit world." (p. 266).) Lucius Shepard's Green Eyes, which notes the resemblance of the veve for Ogoun to a circuit diagram, may be the entry point for voodoo into recent science fiction; but Shepard's aims are quite different from Bull's.

Note 5: Munequita equals, approximately, "mannequin". By chance, during my third reading of Bone Dance I heard these lyrics sung by the once-famous androgyne Boy George:

He's the mannequin of your dreams, step inside him

Nothing will stand in your way

People are sweet, but the primitive feat

Is always standing in my way

Every dream must follow where we go--

Don't let him shatter your Ego.

Capitalization added, but, well, still.