When I first heard of Anther Strein, and of the famous Theory for which she is chiefly responsible, I was sitting in a lecture hall at the University of Manifold. I was about to fall asleep. I was wrenched rudely back to full consciousness by the sheer audacity of the assertions being made before me. Only once I had assured myself that the words emanating from the professor at the front of the room were not, in fact, generated by my own semi-conscious hallucination, but were uttered in complete sincerity, did I begin to realise the full impact of what I was hearing. The elegance of Anther’s ideas and the fundamental truth behind them struck me deeply; they cast new insight on everything I knew of the living world. I wished immediately that I had learnt of them much earlier.