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Question from the Forum:

I guess it’s not really a question more a oops on my part. Iranians don’t speak Arabic. I actually know that. They speak Persian. I meant to either change Moon’s background to Saudi, or change the Arabic references to Persian. As sometimes happens the fix did not get made; my apologies. I have changed it for the British and American paperbacks. I would have preferred to keep Moon half Iranian and change the Arabic to Persian references, but the book is now already typeset so any changes must be small. Moon is now from Saudi Arabia where they do speak Arabic.

One of the reasons I went back and forth on what country I wanted Moon to be from was the strong feeling I had that as one of our bad guys was Mid-Eastern I wanted one of our good guys to be Mid-Eastern, too. We have a lot of good people in this country that are of Mid-Eastern descent and I wanted to make certain that my book showed that. You’ll find that most of my police and military units are more racially diverse than they might be in the "real" world.  You’ll also find more women. If I know for a fact that women would never be acceptable I’ll play by the real world rules, but as we have more men and women in areas where there is no true frontline we are having more women than ever before in our history seeing combat. A lot of them are on transports basically trucking our shit across some piece of desert, and the enemy neither knows, nor cares, that these soldiers aren’t supposed to see actual combat. We are sending home a record number of wounded that are women.

I actually had one gentleman write in and complain that I had women in the unit that helped Merry at the end of SWALLOWING DARKNESS. My idea was that these were Illinois National Guard training at the nearest airbase which would be Scott. When the call for help went out, they sent the soldiers they had, and the reality of modern combat is that women are in the line of fire. I felt one, that there would probably be women in the unit anyway, and two, if the fairer sex is getting shot up then they get to be the heroes on paper in my books.

The world isn’t fair, but I try to be.