About the book: year / “The Big Leap”... It was fun. I actually came up with the idea for the story and I still love it. Its essence is the direct conversion of thermal energy into electrical or kinetic energy. The idea behind the story came from buying my first air conditioner and realizing that I would need to pay for the system and connect electricity to it, that is, run power to the system to remove energy from my room. This seemed terrible to me, and I wanted to find a way around it. <…> Later, Isaac Asimov told me that this was impossible, that I was violating the second law of thermodynamics, but I was in another state where this law did not apply” (W. Tevis).