Philip Newman was born in Weymouth, a coastal town in Southern England where he attended the local technical college. He left home at sixteen to train as an aircraft engineer with what was then British European Airways. Since that time he has lived in Australia, London, Nairobi, New York, Singapore and San Francisco. Global circumnavigation became routine when he was a flight engineer with the former British Overseas Airways, but for him the most exciting journeys were by sea to Antarctica, the Orinoco River and the Tuamotu Atolls. He joined the Anglo-French Concorde project in 1978 where he served as a flight engineer and public relations officer for the next fourteen years. His books are based on observations spanning twenty-five years of world travel, a Flight Engineer's inside knowledge of the Concorde, and a sailor's wanderings in the southern oceans.

Although Meira McMahon is a fictional character, the technology of the Ancient's revealed in this story is proven, and is the subject of extensive research and analysis by Christopher Jordan, a science graduate of Sussex University. Of particular significance is the practical use of the spherical mirror, as illustrated by the Sothic Triangle, to do the work of the parabola, and of the pendulum, the Ank, to make its construction childishly simple. These two elements alone are sufficient to harness the Sun's energy to provide high temperature, scalable, and wholly manageable heat machines. If you factor in the Ancient's predilection for huge stones - the monoliths and megaliths, the pyramids and ziggurats, and the so called sacrificial altars - as energy storage devices, then their infinitely renewable, pollution free, total energy system stands out clear as day.