GENERAL Andrew Sweet

Major General Andrew Sweet was born the resistance in the year 2185, the same year that the modeling process was revolutionized in a tiny strip mall in League City, Texas. Like the protagonists of his novels, the general was an orphan at birth, of undisclosed parentage. This cast him into the Orphan Program, where he began collecting stories. He observed at an early age that the boundary between genetically-altered clones, or models, and the rest of humanity was paper-thin, and held no basis in reality.

In grade school, he competed and won in writing competitions until they were no longer offered when he reached the sixth grade. He transitioned into music then, competing on various instruments such as the euphonium and the tuba. It was his lifelong dream to be a classical musician, but most of the earth positions that humans could compete for were so highly competitive that, though more than adequate, he couldn’t find a job. Highly trained and bioengineered models chaired the more prestigious ensembles. Despite their slave status, this flared up in him an animosity that drove him to join the controversial Human Pride Movement in his early twenties.

Writer’s Note: It is General Sweet’s belief in full transparency that caused the above admission. Disclaim that the writing staff told him not to, but he insisted on the confession, and the inclusion of the following paragraph.

Enticed in by their formal and polite branding, and jealous for the career he could never have, he rose in the ranks until he was assigned to a task force, taking to military-like service with ease. In 2215, he led on his first factory raid. Witnessing the forced reclaimation (he asked us to use the word murder) of most of the models they captured turned his stomach. He fled, never to return to the violent extremists again. That’s when he met the future revolutionary Larken Marche. In part as retribution for his time with HPM, he dedicated what he could of his life to her cause, supporting models in her Bremerton compound. He became her personal biographer until she vanished without a trace. It was Larken who bestowed upon him the title of Major General.

Over the years following her disappearance, General Sweet watched the decline of society as corporations and government agencies one after the other bend the knee to the tyrannical Liberti Custodi global organization, he absconded from the fight, realizing that all of humanity had lost their way. He resigned himself to a hermit-like lifestyle in what little undeveloped land remained in the Oneida reservation in New York. There, he waited for almost a third of a century…

…until he heard rumors of Larken’s return. These rumors brought him from hiding, and they made no sense. With aching bones and weakened muscles, he felt Larken would have suffered the ravages of age as he had. Therefore the rumors of her return, which indicated that she was very much the same age as she had been thirty years earlier, couldn’t have been true—at least he didn’t believe them. Whoever it was had set Liberti Custodi scrambling and on a rampage across the nation trying to capture them. With little else to do, General Sweet set out to find the new resistance leader, and was able to catch up to them in the Midwestern Desert. There he discovered both Larken, along with her lover, Dandelion, fighting against the Liberti house-to-house. The general fell back in with them, and it was through their time together that he finished telling the rest of her story.

He began chronicling the life of Larken from her time in high-school, when she first discovered she was a model and the ramifications this discovery had on her life. With a brother accused of murder within a legal system in which models were guilty until proven innocent, she had little recourse but to lie about her heritage. The defining battle at the end of this novel warped Larken’s body, but the fires of conflict burned away any weakness, preparing her for the next stage of her life.

The general further explored how Larken, even when trying to re-adjust to normality, became sucked back into the conflict. When her friend was captured by the Human Pride Movement, she embarked on a journey of revenge that cemented her as enemy number one in the eyes of the extremists. It was this pivotal decision that gained her the world famous Bremerton compound.

Writer’s Note: The Bremerton compound still stands. Interested parties can visit the city of Bremerton, WA and tour the grounds for free on a self-guided tour. A fully guided tour is priced at, last time this writer traveled there, the affordable price of about a thousand dollars.

He chronicled the rise of Larken and the fate of Dandelion as a new extremist threat expanded their influence from Europe into the Eastern United States. National anti-clone laws teetered on the edge of being repealed, yet the Liberti Custodi found purchase for their human superiority ideas among a populace still reeling from the destruction of their environments and homes. Larken became cynical and jaded, and the general didn’t hold back from the truth. Endless fighting wore her down and for the first time in nearly a decade, she began to doubt that her fight was winnable, or worth fighting at all.

General Sweet continued, writing of Larken’s disappearance, re-emergence, and continued fight against the Liberti Custodi. An old man by the time he finished, the title of general became more of an honorific in his later years. Toward the end, he relied on Larken’s stories and Dandelion’s indelible memories to finish what he now considers his magnum opus: the Virtual Wars Saga, the story of the rise, fall, and rise of Larken Marche.

Works by the General:

Andrew’s first novel, Models and Citizens, received 5-stars from Readers’ Favorite, and subsequently won a silver BookFest Award. Andrew published his second novel, Bodhi Rising, in the series shortly thereafter, and received another 5-star Readers’ Favorite award, as well as another BookFest award. Andrew finished the Reality Gradient Trilogy with Libera, Goddess of Worlds. The entire series was short-listed for the Chanticleer International Book Award in 2024.

The Virtual Wars Saga: The Story of the Rise, Fall, and Rise of Larken Marche, begins with Evasion and Defiance, which won both a bronze BookFest Award and a Global Golden Globe Ebook award. The others have not been submitted for awards at this time.

In other writings, Andrew’s The Witch of the Isle, an unpublished work about a young Lysiane Fontenot who interferes in a battle between two dueling gods over for the fate of the earth, was a Finalist for the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association award for Speculative Fiction.