Foreward

Author’s Note:

To start with, this is part of The Thinking Horndog’s “The Swarm Cycle”, a shared story-universe about a future war with aliens. It, like all the others, was intended to be published on “Storiesonline.net” and “ASSTR.org”, two websites that allow pretty much anyone to publish anything. Some of the stories you’ll find on those sites are good, well-written, fun yarns. Some of them aren’t so good. Anyway, if you haven’t read any of the other Swarm Cycle stories, well, there’s probably a lot in this one that won’t make any sense.

You wouldn’t believe all the trouble one single ‘story’ on a free website has caused. To start with, this isn’t really a story. Like my “The First Command” which is really an outline of the Swarm War from Years -1 to +2 or so, published for the public to enjoy and for other authors to use as a reference, this narrative “Ending This Mess” is an outline of the Swarm War for Years +10 to +15 or so.

See, when The Thinking Horndog first created this shared universe and opened it up for other writers to play in, he asked that none of us write the ending. He didn’t want anyone to write the last story that told how it all ended. As long as the ending was up in the air, everyone could write stories that told a little part of it and the universe was still available for other writers. Don’t kill anyone else’s characters without their permission, don’t tell us who wins the war, etc, etc, etc. CERTAINLY, don’t write a story that includes the final solution to the “Swarm Problem”.

Fast forward some 15 years. I’ve well over than 300 Swarm Cycle stories by more than 50 different writers. Not all of them got published, of course. Some never got finished. Some of them violated some canon principle and we asked the writer to change something, and the writer took off in a huff and was never seen again. Most of them got published, either on SOL or on ASSTR, and we’ve pretty much figured out that the humans are going to win. Eventually. Probably. That’s no longer a secret.

There’s gonna be a lot of blood and anguish first, though. Starting with Earth itself, right? Several stories talked about Earth getting invaded by these aliens who consider humans to be particularly troublesome food. The invasion is canon, and we gotta deal with it.

So ... I wanted to write a sequel to “Independent Command”. Anne N. Mouse, Corsair, Nuke Danger 3rd Eye, Omachuck, Smiley Smith, Starfiend, Tomken, there were a lot of people looking at what was happening on Earth during and after the landings. And, while we all had our own ideas on how the war would go, none of us wanted to step on each others’ toes. The collected Swarm Authors needed a ‘canon’ outline that we could all follow. What was worse, whatever we came up with had to somehow work with all the older stories about the (space) Battles of Earthat -henceforth BoE- that happened before the landings, and the (land) Battle for Earth -henceforth BfE- that happened after the landings, that had already been published so that they didn’t get left behind.

We all accept that The Thinking Horndog ‘owns’ this story-line. He invented it and lets the rest of us play here. We bugged him for YEARS about what happens next, and he wouldn’t give us a straight answer. He wanted to see what we came up with. Well, sure, but we all know that he holds a veto over what we say, so we had to involve him whether he wanted or not.

Does that make sense? “Who cares what he thinks! We need his opinion!” Just as a tie-breaker, if nothing else. And to give a final blessing to our compromises.

We had people fly to conferences about this! Look, none of us are getting paid for this. We’re doing it for our own enjoyment. Maybe some of us will someday make the jump to being paid writers, but I’m certainly not there yet. Sure, when I was in the service I wrote quite a few documents, including some that made it into NavSea’s library as the official last word on a couple of subjects, but that was more of a collateral duty than a profession. Anyway, several of the Swarm Cycle’s authors cared enough to fly or drive to conferences about this.

The conference I attended was in Tampa, since three of us live in the area. Thinking Horndog and FrostFyre flew in for that one. FF had family to visit but I think that TH combined it with a business trip. I drove over from the coast. Nukie got it easy; since he set the conference up he chose a restaurant near where he worked. Tomken was here anyway, all the way from Seattle, to see some family. Does every Swarm Cycle author have family in Tampa? Justin Radically never made it, unfortunately. He lives just 15 miles or so from where we were meeting, but his wife was going downhill and even us assholes agreed that that was probably a higher priority.