Andrew Sweet

It was partially due to this ability that Andrew began his real-life adventure of joining the United States Marine Corps. He served as a programmer in the USMC for four years until his occupational specialty was retired, and there he went into the civilian world. It was also due to this that Andrew met his wonderful wife and his two children.

Time passed. Andrew got older and more scatterbrained and less patient. Having never stopped writing, Andrew refocused much of his energy back on his craft in 2015. This is where he dusted off the draft of Eidelweiss Blooms and shopped it around to agents, getting soundly rejected (and for good measure—it wasn’t yet to the level to win awards). Andrew rewrote it and rewrote it, and asked for help from other author friends, to ultimately develop Models and Citizens five years later, the first novel in the Reality Gradient trilogy.

When people actually began to buy Models and Citizens, Andrew decided he’d actually finish the somewhat strange and esoteric trilogy that materialized in his mind. The idea of genetically-altered clones, called models, that emerged from the League City, Texas “new silicone valley” expanded into models coming from different factories across the nation, churning out fighters in New York City, sex workers from factories in Caldwell, Texas, legal aids from other New York factories and a strange religious sect from Abernathy.

Then Andrew thought—clones aren’t strange enough. How about consciousness transfer? The second book was formed around the idea of what would happen if consciousness transfer was a thing. And then…what happened at the very beginning of that, instead of generations later like in Altered Carbon (fantastic book if you’ve never read it)?

When his first novel was well reviewed by Kirkus and received 5-stars from Readers’ Favorite, Andrew decided to go through with publishing the next. The first and second novels went on to win BookFest awards as well. It was this and positive feedback from fans that prompted Andrew to start the Virtual Wars Saga, which overlaps and extends the Reality Gradient universe, but takes on the ambitious (and exhausting) work of tracking Larken Marche through almost a hundred years of living, fighting, and sometimes dying.

The writing continues, and Andrew’s first historical fantasy was a finalist in the 2024 PNWA Awards for Speculative Fiction. He has a utopian science fiction novel set a thousand years in the future currently being worked and to be released this year, along with the third novel in the Virtual Wars Saga. Finally, his favorite book to write, Drift (think Resident Evil meets the Walking Dead) has a second book that Andrew plans to release later this summer.