John Dalmas: books currently in print

The Second Coming

I’d like to think this will be my "biggest book" so far; certainly the timing is right, and it has been the most challenging and time consuming. Most of my other books are action-adventure stories, mostly well-leavened with ideas and often seasoned with a degree of sprituality. Most have been military, or have at least had substantial military content. By contrast, The Second Coming looks at what it might be like if a Second Coming actually happened in our time. Adventure, in the usual sense, plays no part in it, and the action is largely by individuals acting alone or with a few others.

I not only had to teach myself to write this kind of story, I had to make my messiah and his message plausible to skeptical readers. As a result, the story went through more than twice my usual four drafts.

The proposed cover copy describes it about as well as it can be described. Here ‘tis:

There is a Hindu belief that when humanity slides into decay, threatening us all with a return to barbarism, God comes among us as human, to jump-start us.

Two thousand years ago the Roman Empire ruled western civilization. It improved engineering, administration, even the law, and provided relative peace. But it was not only powerful, it was corrupt, brutal, and greedy. Thus the Infinite Soul incarnated among a semitic people suited by location and monotheism to the needs of humankind and its future.

Now, two thousand years later, we're ripe for a second coming. But this is the media age...and the time of the terrorist. Thus instead of a Nazarene carpenter, the vessel of the Infinite Soul is a black Canadian cybernetics genius. And instead of fishermen, shepherds and laborers, he surrounds himself with management mavens, media consultants, security specialists...

And unavoidably enemies, because what he says is not what the zealots want to hear. For we are not born to escape, but to evolve, by taking responsibility for our condition.

This is not a harsh story, despite conspiracies, hatred and violence. It is rich in characters, beautiful and ugly, described with compassion and humor. It is largely through them that Dalmas tells this story of love, reluctance, anger...and the Infinite Soul.

For excerpts, click on The Second Coming

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The Helverti Invasion

The Helverti Invasion is a sequel to The Lizard War, published in 1989 by Baen Books. Liz sold very well; in fact, reorders continue sufficient that it remains in print at this writing. Jim Baen had several times nudged me for a sequel, and I’d declined for what I considered good reasons. Mainly, it seemed to me that what made it stand out was the personality of Luis Raoul DenUyl, the intelligent, intuitive and very gutsy but very naive country-boy here. I’d ended the story with him being chosen for an academy, from which he was certain to emerge a very different young man. A couple of years back, Jim jotted a brief message on the back of the annual office Christmas card: “I’m still waiting for a sequel to The Lizard War.” This time I revisited my thinking, and decided to do it.

The result is a sequel in which Luis is no longer ignorant and naive, but his basic personality is unchanged. He’s simply a lot smarter and more confident. Those who read The Lizard War will meet other old friends as well, but the adversaries, situations and predicaments are new.

The Helverti Invasion is well introduced by the proposed cover copy:

For excerpts, click on The Helverti Invasion.

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Otherwhens, Otherwheres: favorite tales by John Dalmas

This book is the most recent, February 2003. A collection of short fiction, all its stories have been published before, in magazines or theme anthologies. But theme anthologies tend to be short-lived, while with magazines, when an issue appears, the previous issue disappears. Authors often wish their short fiction, those usually short-lived children of their muse, could have a new life. But in today’s world, for good economic reasons, conventional publishers are generally unwilling to publish collections of short fiction by living authors.

There is, however, a way around that: the POD (print on demand) publishers. There are two main kinds of POD publishers: (1) those whom you pay to print your book; they often provide a service for an honest fee, but some others can be classified as pirañas. And (2) those who pay you for the right to print your book. This category also consists of two sorts: those with contracts from Hell (get yourself informed on contracts!), and those with pretty much ethical contracts.

RAP Books provided an ethical contract, and in my limited experience has been a good outfit with which to do business. Performance, of course, is the final proof—allowing for the problems of a new company using new technology and a new business concept, trying to make a sustainable, productive place for itself within a distribution and retailing system evolved to meet the requirements and characteristics of conventional publishers.

But back to the book. The eight stories are quite diverse. Four are short stories, four are novelets. Five are science fiction, one is high fantasy, and two are murder mysteries. Their only common features are the author, their new publisher, and residence within the same pair of covers. So I’ve given each a brief introduction, telling a bit about how the story came to be, or how it came to be published—something providing insights into writing and publishing.

For excerpts from the book, click on Otherwhens.

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The Puppet Master

A breakthrough in basic physics has catapulted technology decades ahead in a few years. Life in general has become very different, and criminals have found new ways to steal and murder and cover their tracks. Which hasn’t made life easier for private investigator Martti Seppanen, in a Los Angeles that Philip Marlowe would barely recognize.

Murder is still murder, but the weapon may be a bioengineered disease, and the murderer may be someone who can manipulate other people mentally. The victim may even be someone whose legal status as a human is in limbo, or whose existence is a government secret. But when Martti is on the case, it gets solved, with legwork, with muscle, and sometimes with the help of some unusual friends, one of them much more than a friend.

This book contains three very different stories—a novella, a novel, and a novelet—about the streetwise Martti, who is not a cynic, but whose humanity doesn’t blunt his clear-eyed realism. While on another level it looks at the underside of technological advance, and of good intentions. Including the intentions of a guru.

I'll post excerpts from The Puppet Master when I've had time to prepare them.

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Soldiers

This novel was on the Locus and Waldenbooks science fiction best seller lists.

Centuries earlier, humankind had emerged from the century-long Time of Troubles believing that anything is better than war. The long peace that followed has strengthened that conviction. Besides, who is there to fight? Humankind has outgrown both war and large-scale zealotry, and a millennium of SETI has failed to discover another advanced technology in the galaxy.

Then, in the fringe of the Commonwealth of Human Worlds, the unthinkable arrives: 16,000 warships from somewhere. And every inhabited planet found by that armada is quickly wiped clean of human life. Humankind will either arm and learn again to be soldiers, and with speed that seems impossible, or our species will join the dinosaurs.

Here is a vivid tapestry describing the war through the experiences of various soldiers: human and alien, ranks and commanders. Including "the Peace Front," which, ironically, holds most of humankind’s remaining zealots. It’s a story rich in violence, but also in love and humanity, with memorable characters.

At another level, it looks at the dynamics—the pluses and minuses—of zealotry, and the values of recognizing reality, in its broadest sense, as an interwoven tapestry.

I'll post excerpts from Soldiers when I've had time to prepare them.

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SERIES

I've written several series: the Regiment Series, the Farside Series, the Yngling Series, and the Higuchian Series.

The Regiment Series

The Regiment series consists of five novels beginning with The Regiment, continuing through The White Regiment, The Kalif’s War and the Regiment’s War, ending with 1999’s The Three-Cornered War. They are five separate stories, but together they constitute a single overarching history.

At the beginning of May 2004, Baen is releasing The Regiment: A Trilogy—a hardcover Baen megabook—some 400- thousand words worth of action and ideas. It may be in the stores when you read this. The three novels are The Regiment, The White Regiment, and The Regiment's War.

The Regiment

The first and most successful of the series, The Regiment benefited from a marvelously apt, and terse cover blurb (written not by me but by publisher Jim Baen): "The planet Kettle has only one resource, soldiers, but they are very good soldiers." And from excellent, wrap-around cover art by David Mattingly. In fact, Jim Baen said the reason for such a brief blurb was to give the cover art maximum display. Below is a brief introduction to the Commonwealth.

The roots of the Commonwealth of Human Worlds run deep. Some 21 thousand years earlier, a war "to end all wars" destroyed or depopulated scores of inhabited planets...the death throes of a human empire vast and corrupt. Meanwhile a fleet of merchant ships had fled, carrying a variety of refugees to search for a human-habitable world beyond the limits of explored space. And while traveling through the nowhereness of hyperspace, the war-traumatized refugee command council developed a broad strategy to avoid future high-tech wars. As the core of that strategy, they developed what they would name "The Sacrament"—powerful psychological programming to be enforced on everyone, including their progenies "forever."

But the refugee fleet included a ship whose people refused to accept The Sacrament. These, regarded as potentially dangerous, were off-loaded on a barely habitable world of high gravity and high temperatures, poor in water and in natural resources generally. Its people named it Tyss and themselves the Tysswa, or T’swa, and survived and evolved there without The Sacrament.

Eventually, most of the refugees settled on a planet they named Iryala. Over the subsequent millennia, the Iryalans flourished, and spread to many other worlds, gradually forming an empire. Which, after many ups and downs, became the Commonwealth. Ups and downs because despite The Sacrament, wars still happened. They were simply limited to the surface of single worlds, using prescribed, low-tech weaponry as enforced by the government on Iryala, the imperial planet. But nowhere was The Sacrament abandoned. The programming was too deep and too powerful.

In time their explorations rediscovered Tyss and it’s relatively primitive people, who during the intervening millennia they’d forgotten entirely.

The T’swa are an enigma, and have not been accepted into the Commonwealth. Despite their services—for states and factions on the Commonwealth’s associate and trade worlds hire T’swa mercenaries to help fight their low-tech wars. And even from beyond the fringe of Commonwealth space, T’swa mental technology has begun quietly and inconspicuously to infect the worlds of the Sacrament. This "infection" and some of its results are the theme of the novel.

Actually the initial concept of the novel was borrowed from medieval Sudanese archery regiments in the service of whoever was sultan of Egypt. Once formed, a Sudanese regiment was never reinforced. As men were lost, it got smaller, became a battalion, then a company, till finally the survivors were disbanded and retired. But as soon as I began to create the cultural origins and traits of the T’swa, that first concept became subordinate.

As the story began taking form, it found its center in an idea, the Matrix of T’sel, part of T’swa philosophy providing a way of looking at the universe, and an approach to living. And most important of all, to the story, The Regiment featured the T’swa—the people of Oven—whose culture was the living expression of the Matrix of Tsel, and the soul of the T’swa warrior regiments. (The cover blurb confused Oven with Kettle, but it’s a marvelous blurb nonetheless.)

And if the Matrix of Tsel became the central idea, and if a rebellion on Kettle provided the action, T’swa mental/spiritual disciplines and their quiet inroads into the Commonwealth provided the plot. Covert inroads, because they’re incompatible with The Sacrament.

As our story begins, the low-tech but fierce rebellion on Kettle has become a bleeding ulcer for the Commonwealth. And because Kettle is very hot, for the first time ever, the Commonwealth itself hires T’swa mercenary regiments. The fighting is covered by the government-controlled media through several reporters, two of whom stumble onto puzzling aspects of the conflict, and put on their investigative reporter hats.

I'll post excerpts from The Regiment when I've had time to prepare them.

The White Regiment

Jim Baen had asked for a sequel to The Regiment. It seemed like a good idea to me, but I had no idea what that story might be. I mentioned this to a friend (Hi, Bosun Bill!), and he said he’d like to see a T’swa regiment in training—something like that— commenting that Gordon Dickson, in one of his Dorsai novels, had shown a science-fictional elite force being trained.

That pulled my trigger, and I began writing. The trainees would be Iryalans (Iryala being the imperial world, so to speak), and their training cadre would be T’swa veterans from disbanded regimental remnants. The "Technite War" on Kettle , 30 years earlier, and the superb performance of T’swa mercenaries there, have inspired the government to create an elite regiment of homegrown youths. (In The Regiment, mentioned above.)

Given the limiting social dynamics of Iryalan culture, the youths most suitable warrior material are rebellious troublemakers, innate warriors ill-suited to Iryalan society— adolescents, because the T’swa believe in starting young, and the planned training is for six years. The first part of this novel follows their progress from insubordination and turbulence to responsibility and self-discipline, at the hands of the T’swa veterans, and of Ostrak operators using heretical methods derived from T’swa principles.

But after a single year the training program gets shelved—because a military expedition from the ancient human home sector arrives in the Commonwealth’s far fringe, and takes over a defenseless and largely unsettled resource world. And the regiment of teenagers finds itself in combat against a much larger force of Klestroni invaders.

But the contest is not so uneven as it seems. In fact, back on Iryala their T’swa cadre had already dubbed them "the White T’swa."

Meanwhile the white regiment has a one-woman intelligence section, also T'swa derived, which the Klestroni can’t begin to match.

I'll post excerpts from The White Regiment when I've had time to prepare them.

The Kalif’s War

All the Regiment Series except The Kalif’s War sold very well, and all but The Kalif’s War have abundant action. The Kalif’s War is primarily political. In fact the original title was simply The Kalif. It’s a character-driven story, with political and religious intrigues that climax in an abortive mutiny against the Kalif, who is also emperor.

If you've read, or read about, Machiavelli's The Prince, I suspect you'll enjoy The Kalif's War.

Along with the following novel in the series, The Regiment’s War (see below), The Kalif’s War is a very useful bridge between the second story—The White Regiment—and the fifth and final story, The Three-Cornered War. It portrays the Kalif, his young bride, his empire, their strengths and limitations, and the events leading to Book Five. A war story, it seems to me, would have suited neither the job nor the Karghanik culture. What I did do was give it a coherent, believable culture, powerful characters, political and military intrigues, and conflicts between the kalif—a charismatic, Machiavellian reformer—and his various opponents.

I'll post excerpts from The Kalif’s War when I've had time to prepare them.

The Regiment’s War

The Regiment’s War begins with the delayed graduation of Iryala’s White Regiment. For after successfully driving the invader off the captured planet, the trainees had been returned to their training program, much of it on Tyss itself. And promptly on graduation, the Commonwealth government hires them out in a war on the associate world of Maragor, to help defend Smolen, a small republic, against Komars, a larger, much wealthier and more populous neighboring kingdom ruled by Engwar, an acquisitive and psychotic king. Engwar's much larger army is repeatedly out-guessed, out-maneuvered, out-fought and generally embarrassed by the short Iryalan regiment (which of course continues to shrink). Then Engwar imports two T’swa regiments, which are quite another matter. But wars create internal pressures, which the young Iryalan colonel works cleverly, and the question becomes whether Engwar's two T’swa regiments can save him.

This story includes lots of low-tech warfare in various situations, with severe supply problems, innovative logistical solutions, and extreme weather, seen from points of view on both sides.

I'll post excerpts from The Regiment's War when I've had time to prepare them.

The Three-Cornered War

The Three-Cornered War began its sales performance briskly, reaching the Locus best seller list as the final book of a successful series. The following description has been adapted from the cover blurb.

A huge invasion fleet, the Karghanik Armada, is only a year away from the Commonwealth, with conquest on the mind of its command admiral—conquest of the Confederation. And there is a third player. Between the regions of the galaxy separating the two forces is a third empire, a reptilian life-form that was attacked without provocation by an earlier Karghanik incursion—a life form that makes no distinction between one group of humans and another. And it's determined to eliminate this dangerous ape species from the galaxy once and for all.

The Karghanik Caliphate and the lizardlike aliens each thinks it has the element of surprise. But the Commonwealth has an intelligence office trained in the mental arts of T’swa adepts. And the Office of Special Projects, and Colonel Romlar, have...not exactly a plan, but a strategy with a limited array of elements to plug in as necessary. The situation is rife with deadly risks, and there is no room for stumbling.

As usual in war, luck will be important, and also as usual, skill can make the breaks more helpful. Both are important. As are patience and persistence, in creating, recognizing, and seizing opportunities. But serious inferiority in strength can negate all the others.

I'll post excerpts from The Three-Cornered War when I have time to prepare them.

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The Farside Series

There is also a story behind the Farside series, this one rooted in a science fiction convention. In 1993, Seattle was hosting WesterCon, a large west-wide convention that moves from city to city. The fabled Jon Gustafson, father of SF conventions in the Inland Northwest, was to publish the slick convention souvenir program book. Never someone to leave things till the last minute, Jon asked me some months in advance if I’d provide a short story. Under 2,500 words. This was a good promotional opportunity, so naturally I agreed. And because there was lots of time and I was heavily engrossed in a book project, I set it aside "till later."

And of course I forgot. A few weeks before the con, Jon phoned. "John," he said, "I don’t have your story yet."

"Wha..." Then it hit me. "Geez, Jon, I completely forgot. Is two weeks soon enough?"

"Two weeks will be fine." He didn't sound at all surprised.

"I’ll get on it right away."

I did, too. It would be an alternate-world fantasy clothed as science fiction. Something really different. Starting with a big Hoosier farmboy around 1930—as far back as I could trust memory to guide me on how things were then. With no notion of the story beyond that, I created a file and began to write: "None of my family knew where Aunt Varia really came from. Evansville, we figured—that’s what she’d let on. Uncle Will had met her at Salem, at the Washington County Fair...."

Two hours later I picked up the phone and dialled. "Jon, about that short story—it’s turning into a novel. Will a first chapter do?"

It would. The 2,500-word short story turned out to be the 400,000-word Far Side trilogy: The Lion of Farside, The Bavarian Gate, and The Lion Returns, three very different and harrowing novels, rich in characters (some quite bizarre), abundant action, and some lovely love stories. The stories take place in rural and ethnic communities, hobo jungles, freight trains, a logging camp, the Great Depression and World War 2, that many readers have found worthwhile. And of course in the cross-dimensional settings of Yuulith and Hithmearc. They begin with—

The Lion of Farside

The Macurdy family had farmed in southern Indiana for generations, and Curtis Macurdy would have been content to continue the tradition with his exotic and beautiful bride Varia. But the marriage had brought him more than a wife. He now has in-laws. Far-away in-laws, but not far enough. For Varia is from Yuulith, a magical world separated from Earth by a dimensional barrier that can sometimes be penetrated. And when the Sisterhood orders her return to Yuulith, she refuses. So one day Curtis comes home to find her gone, abducted.

That was the Sisterhood’s first big mistake, one that would shake them to their roots—and eventually prove their salvation. (That's right: salvation.) Because Curtis tracks them— follows them through the Oz gate into a series of dangers and adventures. As for Varia...the Sisterhood had punishment on their mind, not of Curtis—the gate would take care of him—but of the rebellious sister. They’d make an example of her.

But Varia is not easily broken, and the gate, and the world of Yuulith, fail to destroy Curtis Macurdy. Furthermore, the youthful and unassuming farmer proves an innate strategic genius of the highest order, who becomes the formidable warlord Makurdi.

For excerpts from the book, click on Lion of Farside.

The Bavarian Gate

A year after his decisive military victory at Ternass, Curtis Macurdy returns through the Oz Gate to our side—"Farside" in the parlance of Yuulith. For he has lost his wife, and though victorious in war, considers himself defeated. Arriving back at his parent’s farm, he learns that a representative of the Sisterhood has been there seeking him, bringing with her two Tigers, elite killers. He can stay and wait for them to return, but for his parents' sake, it seems best to leave, go somewhere where the Sisterhood can't find him.

It is the bottom of the Great Depression, so he rides freight trains to Oregon, where he gets a job in a logging camp. After saving the county sheriff, Fritzi Preuss, from a psychotic logger with a gun—the man kills a deputy—Curtis is hired to replace the deputy, and soon afterward marries Fritzi’s daughter. Curtis and Mary enjoy seven happy years, living with her widowed father while Mary takes care of the house and her crippled grandmother, Klara, who’d come late to America and knows effectively no English. German is the language of the house. Klara becomes Curtis's mentor, teaching him her Baltic German dialect, and insisting on what she considers proper pronunciation. And his instruction goes well beyond kitchen German. As Klara can no longer see well enough to read, he often reads to her from the German-American newspaper.

Meanwhile from time to time he has occasion to heal people, using mental/spiritual skills opened to him by his first wife Varia, and expanded in Yuulith by his healer/guardian there. But he’s uncomfortable with them, fearing to draw attention. He already suspects that, like the Sisters, he is not aging, and worries about what that might mean, here on "Farside.".

Mary is the only one on Farside who knows anything of his past.

Two months after Pearl Harbor, Curtis enlists in the army, is trained as a parachute infantryman, and sent to the 503rd Parachute Infantry Battalion in England as a replacement. Now he experiments with other possibilities than healing, especially the power of not being noticed, a sort of invisibility.

The following November, the battalion, redesignated the 509th, takes part in the invasion of Algeria. In charge of a patrol dropped to rescue allied personnel from a plane crash in German-held territory, Curtis saves an injured OSS officer, Captain Von Lutzow, by covering them both with his invisibility spell. Afterward he lights the captain’s cigarette with his fingertip.

Later, with the defeat of the Afrika Korps, the battalion is attached to the newly arrived 82nd Airborne Division, training for the invasion of Italy or Sicily or Greece or southern France...rumors are rife. Curtis is injured in an accident, and after a series of weird incidents, ends up in the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which jumps in the seriously screwed up but successful invasion of Sicily. In the process, Curtis is severely wounded, and flown to England for recovery and rehab. Meanwhile the OSS officer, Captain Von Lutzow, traces him, and uses Curtis’s proficiency in German to get him transferred to the OSS—the organization which after the war will give rise to both the CIA and the Special Forces. The OSS wants to insert someone into Reichsführer Himmler’s Occult Bureau, which is thought to be working on the development of occult operatives, in conjunction with supposed foreigners of some sort.

Macurdy is successfully inserted into the top secret activity in an old mansion in Bavaria, where he discovers how foreign those foreigners are. They call themselves Voitusotar, and they’d come to Bavaria through a gate much like the Oz Gate, from a place named Hithmearc. And they are more dangerous than either the Nazis or the Allies imagine. Beyond that, he becomes something of a protogé to the leader of the Voitik mission, known to the Germans as Kronprinz Kurqosz.

And of course it is up to Macurdy to deal with the situation, with Vonnie Von Lutzow his only ally. And even Vonnie can’t be told what it’s about. To tell anyone is to risk being locked up as insane. So it becomes his own private war within a war.

For excerpts from the book, click on The Bavarian Gate.

The Lion Returns

At the end of World War 2, Macurdy returns to Oregon, his wife Mary, and his job with the sheriff’s department. He’s 41 years old, and looks 25. His youthful looks had been commented on before the war. Now they bring him notoriety, mostly unpleasant because of a new Lutheran pastor, who’s convinced that Curtis is in league with Satan. Then Mary and their baby daughter die when their pickup crashes, and Macurdy goes into a grim dark mood that shows no sign of dissipating. He decides to return to the Oz Gate, and to Yuulith, where his peculiarities aren’t so peculiar.

Back in Yuulith, he quickly contacts old allies, notably Vulkan, a bodhisattva in the form of a giant wild boar. And his old enemy-become-ally, Sarkia, the dynast of the Sisterhood.

Meanwhile a high Ylvin seer, and Vulkan, sense a threat to Yuulith by a danger from across the ocean, the eastern sea, by...the Voitusotar, the species Curtis had confounded in Bavaria. In ancient times, the Voitusotar had been the nemesis of the ylver. In fact the ylver had fled Hithmearc, long centuries past, to escape destruction at Voitik hands, something the Voitusotar have never forgiven.

Now the ylver are the most advanced and civilized race in Yuulith, and Curtis has connections with them. Centuries earlier the ylver had spawned the Sisterhood, and through them he bears ylvin genes, the ultimate source of his small powers. It was an ylvin noble whom Varia, under duress, had wed and learned to love, and to whom she'd born sons. And it was an ylvin army that Curtis, as the warlord Makurdi, had defeated at Ternass.

The body of this story tells of Macurdy’s efforts to gather a disparate alliance against the Voitusotar—an alliance of ylver, humans, dwarves, the Sisterhood, and the great ravens. But for all his strategic genius and the military efforts of his allies, he can only bleed and slow the invaders, not defeat them. At the end, the defenders must face Kurqosz’s sorceries, which are far more potent than anything known by Macurdy, the ylver, or the Sisterhood.

For excerpts from the book, click on The Lion Returns.

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The Yngling Series

The four-book Yngling series grew from my first novel, The Yngling. When I wrote it, I was utterly green at writing novels, which is a very different process from writing short stories for the monthly college magazine. As I wrote earlier in this website, I’d begun reading what seemed to me a very poor sword and sorcery novel, and decided to see if I could write a better one.

The Yngling is a quest novel requiring minimal plotting. It began on a barbaric "post plague" Earth, and featured Nils Järnhand, a neoviking youth (Swedish yngling) who killed the murderer of a kinsman, and was exiled to prevent a blood feud. He became a legend among his own people and in parts of trans-Baltic Europe as well, with much adventuring in the process. When I’d finished it, I sent it off to Gahd himself, John W. Campbell, jr., for more than thirty years the editor of Astounding-cum-Analog. Sent it off thinking the formidable father of modern science fiction was unlikely to read far enough to discover it wasn’t straight sword and sorcery. I was wrong. He bought it, serializing it in October and November 1969—and hired Frank Kelly Freas to do the cover and interior art! I was in heaven! The first installment earned the highest reader rating for 20 issues. The second installment ranked first in its issue, but not by an outstanding margin.

Campbell asked for sequels, and bought a prequel and a sequel, two novelets, but in my ignorance, I didn’t get around to a follow-up novel for a while. Meanwhile Pyramid Books bought the paperback rights to The Yngling. Finally I sent off the follow-up novel, Homecoming, to Campbell, who about then died. His successor, Ben Bova, who liked angst in his heroes, began recreating Analog. Homecoming did not please him.

By that time writing had become burdensome. I had teenagers at home, my job required a lot of travel and extra hours (even weekends)—and I was in the grip of "the dreaded mid-life crisis!" So I pretty much quit writing fiction until I went to Hollywood (see The Evolution of a Science Fiction Author).

When I did begin writing novels again, they sold at once, and Tor Books bought the rights to The Yngling, too. They'd reverted to me when the book went out of print. At the same time Tor also bought the sequel, Homecoming, which became my first novel to earn out the advance on royalties. Both were favorably reviewed. Later, Jim Baen asked for two more: The Yngling and the Circle of Power (another quest novel), and The Yngling in Yamato (a more complex novel). He also bought a package which he published as The Orc Wars, containing The Yngling, Homecoming, and the two Analog novelets.

I'll post excerpts from the Yngling series when I have them prepared.

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The Higuchian Series

There are two books in this series: The Lizard War and The Helverti Invasion.

I'll post excerpts from the Higuchian series when I have them prepared.

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