"When we first proposed the book to publishers, she said, "they thought the father-daughter thing was just too icky and weird.
Mr. Rae, 78, lives in Morristown, N.J., and proposed the book to Arcadia after finding no local histories while visiting his son, Chip, who has a house in East Hampton, and later helped his father collect photographs and wrote the book's introduction.
I had carted from New Delhi to London to Maryland some of the taped interviews and other materials that provided a beginning for the journalistic history that became "Ghost Wars," but I had never proposed the book to a publisher because I feared there would be little interest.
For instance, when I first proposed the book and wrote an outline for it, I did not include the first chapter about my father.
He proposed the book as "an interim volume to expand the Dungeon Masters Guide and Players Handbook", as the information was spread out in several places and difficult to keep track of.
The film and the book propose the same situation — a planet from which humans have suddenly disappeared — and go down some of the same paths in tracing the consequences: flooding subway tunnels, corroding bridges, burning skyscrapers, cities disappearing beneath blankets of vegetation.
Some propose that the book, the printed artifact that once carried all the intellect of the past centuries, will one day be replaced by its characterless digital successor.
He really is proposing, as the book's title puts it, a "new kind of science".
The ideas proposed in the book prompted debate and soul-searching among the green movement in Britain.
She had proposed turning the book into a series of films, but Sheila Nevins, HBO's documentary unit president, was most interested in Renfrew.
