Cecilia Lynn-Jacobs

The tiny cat-like creatures of the barley asteroid belt, all killed with an engineered plague that made their organs dissolve out of their skin.

You follow?

Each alien civilization is different, but every one of them died out from some sort of world-spanning conflict or alien-made catastrophe.

As you read the anthropological reports, you get a sense of the culture that's writing the reports.

It's cold, almost dismissive of them, as if they knew that there was no way the civilizations could succeed.

The culture has difficulty with singular pronouns, refers to everything as they, even if it's a singular creature.

A suspicion starts to form in the back of the reader's mind, and then the final anthropological report.

Humans, of Sol System, wiped out from nuclear conflict, cast systems simultaneously clear yet ill-defined, no obvious mark of sentience.

The dominant species on the planet, the cockroach, is promising.

Perhaps we can contact them in 400 years.

It was an idea for one.

I'd written the ending for it.

I like to write the endings first most of the time.

Helps to know where you're going.

Gives the story momentum.

It still needed work.

All the best twists are things that the reader already knows but can't quite put into words.

It can't come out of nowhere.

Are you a fan?

Science fiction.