It’s November, and that means it’s once again NaNoWriMo season!
This year’s project is a little unconventional for me but I think it should be fun. Here’s a little taste for you.
The Preytax represent perhaps the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced—save ourselves. That is a truth that will of course be debated in the decades to come, as that is the way of these things. There is no doubt in my mind, however, having faced them in many engagements on many battlefields, that there is no greater external threat to humanity than the race that attacked us in the first decades of the twenty-second century.
Our allies were never able to quite warn us of what we would face when they came, though I think that they maybe hoped that we never would encounter them. This was a vain hope, though I doubt that warning would have served us as well as they would have hoped. Humanity is nothing if not overconfident in most, if not all things—another universal truth, in some ways.
There will come a time when these wars have become a distant memory, barely remembered and spoken of with an air of mystery. I do not know when that day will come, but I fear that it will come prematurely. Everything that I have observed recently suggests that will be the case.
In this, I pray that I am wrong, for there is also no doubt in my mind that this is an enemy that will return again to try to finish the job that they started decades ago.
These pages contain a fraction of the story, but at least that fraction is true.
— Justin Joseph Collins, Jr., Manchester, Aradine, October 27, 2189
Draft preface to the third edition of The History of the Preytax Wars
