Part of Series
For the first few years, Rick Galloway and his band of mercenaries were doing well just to survive. They'd been swept off a hilltop in Africa by a flying saucer, and deposited on an alien world where the other inhabitants were human—but from various and unfriendly periods of history, all collected by flying saucer raids. Rick has faced facts: This place is going to be home, permanently. To create a society safe for themselves and the families they are gradually building, they need to do more than just survive. The must convince the others that a unified, peaceful society is better than a collection of warring tribes. Force would not be Rick's chosen method of persuasion, but on a planet where the other dominant culture is one brought straight from ancient Rome, force may be the only way.
Author
Dr Jerry Eugene Pournelle was an American science fiction writer, engineer, essayist, and journalist, who contributed for many years to the computer magazine Byte, and from 1998 until his death maintained his own website and blog. From the beginning, Pournelle's work centered around strong military themes. Several books describe the fictional mercenary infantry force known as Falkenberg's Legion. There are strong parallels between these stories and the Childe Cycle mercenary stories by Gordon R. Dickson, as well as Heinlein's Starship Troopers, although Pournelle's work takes far fewer technological leaps than either of these. Pournelle spent years working in the aerospace industry, including at Boeing, on projects including studying heat tolerance for astronauts and their spacesuits. This side of his career also found him working on projections related to military tactics and probabilities. One report in which he had a hand became a basis for the Strategic Defense Initiative, the missile defense system proposed by President Ronald Reagan. A study he edited in 1964 involved projecting Air Force missile technology needs for 1975. Dr. Pournelle would always tell would-be writers seeking advice that the key to becoming an author was to write—a lot. “And finish what you write,” he added in a 2003 interview. “Don’t join a writers’ club and sit around having coffee reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it.” Pournelle served as President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1973.
