The Mercenary
10 best books like The Mercenary (Jerry Pournelle): Ranks of Bronze, Bolo, Oath of Fealty, Tactics of Mistake, Cataract, Search the Sky, The Deluge Drivers, The Regiment, Uller Uprising, The Helmsman
| Author | David Drake |
| ISBN | 0671318330 |
The guilds of star-travelling merchants had strict rules to prevent their technology from falling into the hands of the natives of planets they were exploiting: military operations had to be carried out with weaponry no more complex than swords and bows. That was no handicap to the merchant princes,...
| Author | Keith Laumer |
| ISBN | 0425075591 |
Bolo. Originally developed as far back as the 1980's by the Bolo Division of General Motors, these great artillery machines took on awareness in later designs and gradually began to replace man in that most human of endeavors: War.
But let Bolo speak for itself. In the action-packed Annals of the...
| Author | Larry Niven |
| ISBN | 0671532278 |
In the near future, Los Angeles is an all but uninhabitable war zone, racked by crime, violence, pollution and poverty. But above the blighted city, a Utopia has arisen: Todos Santos, a thousand-foot high single-structured city, designed to used state-of-the-art technology to create a completely...
| Author | Gordon R. Dickson |
| ISBN | 0812545311 |
It's obvious that Cletus Graeme--limping, mild-mannered scholarly--doesn't belong on a battling field, but instead at a desk working on his fourth book on battle strategy and tactics. But Bakhalla has more battlefields than libraries, and Graeme sees his small force of Dorsai--soldiers of fortune--as...
| Author | Tara K. Harper |
| ISBN | 0345380525 |
On Risthmus, the Landing Pact was law: felines were off limits. And for ten years Tsia, the rogue guide, had tried to honor that Pact and ignore the irresistible pull of her forbidden link to the cats.
For ten years, she had hidden among the mercenaries. But now her latest mission was going awry....
| Author | Frederik Pohl |
| ISBN | 0345016602 |
Quite a decent piece of SF satire, set (roughly) in the same universe as
The Marching Morons
. I liked the planet with the gerontocracy. The hero gets to participate in an election: they wheel out the candidates, all of whom are over 100 and with tubes coming out of their noses. With great fanfare of trumpets,...
| Author | Alan Dean Foster |
| ISBN | 0345333306 |
It looked as if Ethan Fortune was stuck on the icy world of Tran-ky-ky, never to enjoy the warm comforts of civilization again. But when the scientists at the outpost of Brass Monkey detected an odd atmospheric phenomenon, things began to heat up.
Only the great icerigger Slanderscree could make...
| Author | John Dalmas |
| ISBN | 0671720651 |
The planet Tyss has only one resource: soldiers. But they are very good soldiers. And once a regiment is formed, it never recruits again; as its members fall in battle, it simply grows smaller to become a battalion, a company, a platoon, a squad . . . and then there are none. But before the last man of this...
| Author | H. Beam Piper |
| ISBN | 0441842925 |
"ZNIDD SUDDABIT!" So the Ulleran challenge begins, with the rantings of a prophet and a seemingly incidental street riot. Only when a dose of poison lands in the governor-general's whiskey does it become clear that the "geeks" have had it up to their double-lidded eyeballs with the imperialist Terran...
| Author | Bill Baldwin |
| ISBN | 1587521504 |
One of the few survivors of a League sneak attack on his poor and miserable homeworld of Carescria. Wilf Brim sets out to settle the score. Were it not for the attrition from the war that followed, Wilf would never have escaped his lower-class status and been accepted into the Academy. Now, freshly graduated,...
| Author | S.M. Stirling |
| ISBN | 0671720376 |
Somehow I've managed not to come across this series before - probably largely because I've never much enjoyed any of Drake's works I've tried. And I've always been conflicted about Stirling: I like a lot of his concepts, and the emphasis on battle descriptions is right up my street, but they are almost...
| Author | William C. Dietz |
| ISBN | 0441009816 |
Look, I've read books by Distz that I like greatly...
This ain't one.
Just so you know this book is really nothing but a long screed on racism. If we humans can be racist why then aliens can also be racist. Thus we take an idea that has often worked and made a good story (aliens invade Earth...
Better to Beg Forgiveness
| Author | Michael Z. Williamson |
| ISBN | 1416555080 |
Celadon, a poor nation on a poor planet, engaged in civil war and a haven for every type of villainy in space, is ripe for cleanup. The military could pacify it handily, but it would take a statesman to fix it.But some statesmen have ethics, which politicians and megacorps find inconvenient. President...
