Postscript and Acknowledgements

Assorted notes from author(s):

This story ain’t got no sex it it! How can it be a Swarm Cycle story without any mindless gratuitous irrelevant graphic sex?

We aren’t real happy about the ending here. It smacks too much of a ‘Mary Sue’ story where the hero knows everything, can do anything, and always gets the girl. There’s no drama, if we know that he’s always gonna succeed in whatever he’s doing.

Also, it’s one of the rules for writers in the Swarm Cycle that we don’t want to publish a story that ends the war. If we do that, it closes off all the unwritten stories that new writers will give us in the coming years. So, we don’t want to write that “eventually, the Humans won” or even that “eventually, the Sa’arm won”.

Still, this was written mostly to establish the overall course of the Battle for Earth. We gotta get this story published so it becomes ‘canon’ for the Swarm Cycle, allowing other writers to use it as a reference. Until it’s published, any part of it can change if the writer gets a wild hair up his ass. They need it published so it’s stable.

Readers should be aware that the ending may change once we figure out what we are missing. For that matters, readers should let us know if they see a better way to put something. I’m not proud. If someone else has a better idea I’ll happily steal it. I’ll even give credit, if the donor wants.

This story includes suggestions from some of my readers, including a Jake who may want to remain otherwise anonymous.

Beyond that, endless thanks go to all the various authors on the Swarm author’s list, who keep pointing out where I’m screwing up. They were especially busy with the part about Earth’s defense, since that part of the story line was not yet ‘set in stone’ when this was started and there was a lot of discussion about how that would play out.

Last, since those guys have read the drafts so many times, they would be worthless as final proofreaders. I asked for help from SOL and received very much from dlh, Windmill, Gerrit, TrunkMonkey, Fred, Anthony LoSecco, Gus, and several others who wish to remain unnamed.

I also got a couple of final read-throughs from some of our ‘newer’ Swarm Cycle writers, the ones who haven’t been staring at it for five years. Aroslav is a really nit-picky proofreader. I may start using him as the ‘last guy through’ (*).

(* Tom Kenyon, publishing on ASSTR and SOL as “Tomken”, died last year of cancer. For years the Swarm Cycle writers used him as the ‘last man through’. After all the alpha-readers, all the proofreaders, we have to fix all the mistakes they find. Naturally, that gives Murphy a wonderful chance to introduce new mistakes. We all used Tom as the guy we handed our story to when everyone else was done. When we get it back from him, we fix what he caught and send it out before any new bugs can creep in.

While Tom lived in the Seattle area when I started writing, he had family in the Tampa area and we met several times as he was coming and going. We spent several enjoyable afternoons at local restaurants arguing over assorted topics. After his wife passed away he and his daughter moved to the Philippines where they could start over again in new surroundings. I and several other Swarm Cycle writers served as his links to the US as needed. He passed away last year, surrounded by family and friends.)