A Desert Called Peace by Tom Kratman

Five centuries after settlement, Terra Nova, Earth's sole interstellar colony, has ended up remarkably like 21st century Earth - socially, culturally and politically.  When Salafi madmen bent on a new jihad kill Patrick Hennessey's wife and children in a cowardly attack, they create an enemy that will show even less mercy than they do. 

A retired military officer from a wealthy family background, Hennessy raises a mercenary army from the decrepit remains of a military in a failing state and wages a personal crusade on terrorists, their allies and supporters, wherever they are and whoever they might be.  They rapidly prove themselves to be more ruthless (using torture, assassination and intimidation) and more effective than any other country, despite their limited resources and relatively small numbers.

A Desert Called Peace, like many of Kratman's stories, is primarily a dystopian novel based on current events.  Closely paralleling the historical aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks, Kratman explores the nature of war and terrorism as well as recent events and provides, through Hennessy's actions a guide to how he thinks the war on terror ought to have been fought, and where those efforts have come up short in the real world.

The book, the first in a growing series, can be found here for free.  If you enjoy it, please support the author and buy the rest - Carnifex, The Lotus Eaters, and The Amazon Legion.

Schlock at Baen Books

The first for print editions of Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler, the famed and long running web comic, is now available in electronic format at Baen Books.

If you're a fan of the comic, please support Howard's work and buy some copies here.

1632 by Eric Flint

1632 is the initial alternate history novel in the best-selling Ring of Fire series written by Eric Flint and published by Baen Books.

The premise involves the small fictional town of Grantville, West Virginia, its power plant and immediate environs are displaced in space-time, through a side effect of a mysterious alien civilization.  The town and its 3000 inhabitants are sent back from April 2000 to May of 1631, from North America to central Germany, in an alternate Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years' War.

Grantville, led by Mike Stearns, president of the local chapter of the Miner’s Union, must cope with the town's dislocation, the surrounding raging war, language barriers, and numerous social and political issues, including class conflict, witchcraft, feminism, the reformation and the counter-reformation, among many other factors.  One complication is a compounding of the food shortage when the town is flooded by refugees from the war.  The locals experience a culture shock when exposed to the mores of contemporary American society, including modern dress, sexual liberation, and boisterous American-style politics.

Grantville struggles to survive while trying to maintain technology sundered from twenty-first century resources and manages to establish itself locally by forming the nascent New United States of Europe with several local.  With an alliance with Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, the Confederated Principalities of Europe is crated and some measure of security for Grantville's up-timer and down-timer populations.


The flagship novel kicked off a collaborative writing effort that has involved hundreds of contributors and dozens of authors.  Fans are encouraged to contribute to the series though an online message board known as Baen's Bar.  The author also worked with other established authors to develop new stories and plot lines for further novels which are also published in the two Ring of Fire anthologies.  The entire Grantville Gazette and large portions of the Ring of Fire anthology, are paid, fan-written works, and have directly contributed material to the main novels.


You can download Eric Flint's 1632 and its direct sequel 1633 for free here and here.  If you enjoy it, please support the author and Baen's Books by buying hard copies of these books, or the rest of the series.

Spots the Space Marine by M.C.A. Hogarth

Described as "Pollyanna meets Starship Troopers", this web serial by M.C.A. Hogarth is written in a screenplay-like style, with occasional artwork.  In it Spots, a 30-something female Marine, is called out of retirement to join the war against the crabs.  But shattered morale is the least of her company's problems, and their survival may hinge on an unlikely friendship forged between an alien weapons designer and a mother-turned-warrior...

New episodes are posted every Tuesday and Thursday, here.  Each episode is crowd-sponsored at a price of $10, a portion of which is donated to charities benefiting active duty and wounded soldiers.

Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler

Schlock Mercenary is a comedic webcomic written and drawn by Howard Tayler.  It follows the tribulations of a star-travelling mercenary company in a satiric, mildly dystopian 31st-century space opera setting.  Since its debut on June 12, 2000 the comic has updated daily, begun to support its author, and been nominated for three Hugo Awards.

The story primarily centers on Captain Kaff Tagon and his mercenary crew, Tagon's Toughs.  Notable members of the crew include Munitions Commander and resident mad scientist Kevyn Andreyasn; title character Sergeant Schlock, who is a carbosilicate amorph with no easily definable limbs, organs, or moral compass; Petey, a former artificial intelligence and now Fleetmind and pseudo-God; and the wry AI and former boyband, Ennesby.

You can find it here and buy hard copies of the comic here.

The Crusade by Dark Icon

Jason Brooks finds himself unwittingly thrust into the eternal struggle between good and evil after trying to save a dying stranger.  He is now a Crusader, gifted by the Forces of Light with impressive abilities, including the capacity to sense the evil in people’s souls – to literally see their sins, a supernatural skill with firearms, and an advisor, in the form of the ghost of the man he watched die, the last Crusader.  Now he must face, fight and kill the forces of Evil – monsters and demons alike, or they will come for him.

The Crusade by Dark Icon is a "guns and demons" action/horror serial, available here for free.  There are currently 47 issues written in an episodic format, reminiscent of a comic book series or a TV show.  This is just one of Dark Icon’s great works, it’s just a shame that he hasn’t continued or concluded it.

The Excalibur Alternative by David Weber

The story begins with the abduction of a 14th-century English army by aliens of the Galactic Federation.  The aliens are bound by a Galactic Federation law that states that advanced weapons cannot be used on primitive worlds, so they have taken the English to serve as mercenaries on planets where only low-tech weaponry is legal.

As the plot progresses, the English army continues to fight for the aliens, until the Baron in charge of the English is approached by a dragon-like alien, an another race under the heel of the Guild Aliens.  It reveals to the Baron how the Galactic Federation was originally started over one hundred fifty thousand years ago by 3 races, with membership of the council requiring development of a form of FTL drive.  Over the course of their long history, they strayed from its values - when it discovers new races it invades them so it can freeze their technological development and force them into protectorate status.

The dragon-like creature says that all the other races are different than humanity due to their development rate – they demonstrated 1000 years of progression in a 200 year period.

The Baron, with the dragon-creature’s help, eventually succeed in a mutiny and take over the ship, but they decide that they cannot go back to Earth because the Federation would be sure to follow them.

The story then moves forward to the 22nd century, on Earth, now under a single government, where humanity has become capable of building vast ships in space and has developed an FTL drive.  However, the Federation considers humanity’s fast development a threat to its stability and has dispatched a fleet to wipe them from the universe.

As the massive Federation battleships are about to destroy the comparably small human ships, even bigger spaceships appear and destroy the Federation ships easily.  The rescuers of Earth are the Avalon Empire, the civilization founded by the English who have grown in numbers and, using the technology found on the captured Guild ship, have advanced far beyond the Federation.  For centuries they have prepared and lay in hiding so could return at the moment of Earth's greatest need.

The English reveal themselves to Earth and offer an alliance to take on the Federation, but the fight will be far from easy.

The Exclaiber Alternative and other works by David Weber can be found at Baen Books and here.  It is one of several novels based on the premise of David Drake's 1986 novel Ranks of Bronze.  The novel is also based on the short story "Sir George and the Dragon", which appeared in the 2001 anthology Foreign Legions.

Darkside by S.K.S. Perry

“James Decker just won’t stay dead.  Slain while rescuing a young woman from a would-be rapist, he finds himself in a pseudo-life, caught between two realities, belonging to neither.

“Haunted by the ghosts of his father and grandfather, he learns that the woman he rescued is in fact an Innocent, the physical embodiment of hope.  As it turns out, seeing dead people is the least of James' worries.  It's the trolls, goblins, vampires, and other assorted creepy-crawlies that make being dead a living nightmare.

“When a Madness Demon kidnaps the Innocent to sacrifice at the Blood Moon ritual, it's up to James and an odd assortment of Otherworld companions to rescue her.  If they fail, humanity will be without hope for the next thousand years.


“To succeed, James must first battle his own inner demons, and come to grips with who and what he has become.  After all, when you're dead, wishing you were is kind of counter-productive.”

Darkside by S.K.S. Perry is a funny and action filled fantasy novel, with bits of supernatural horror.  It is available here for free in html, and available as a Kindle download for 99 cents at Amazon.  It's sequel, on the other hand, Darkside: Waking the Dead is only available for sale at Amazon as a Kindle download for $5.74.

Magestic by Geoff Wolak

Geoff Wolak’s Magestic is a memorable and lengthy (approx 3,000 book pages long - 12 novels worth) political thriller, with a healthy dose of sci-fi, action and humor.  It centers on the story of a time traveler sent back from the future to 1985 to try and save the world.  A series of disasters await the world, with a calamitous high point in 2025.  The world needing to take a different course - wars need to be prevented, certain politicians discredited before taking office.  But the traveler spends most of his time and energy building up a medical rescue charity, torn between helping the needy, and fighting those that he knows risk the future of mankind.

The first novel in the Magestic series is available in 18 parts here for free.  Only the first 8 parts of the sequel is available for free, here.  The complete novel is available for $3, paid via paypal.

March Upcountry Series

The Empire of Man series, starting with March Upcountry, continued to March to the Sea and March to the Stars, and concluded in We Few, is a collaborative work between David Weber and John Ringo. It combines elements of space opera and military science fiction, while the villains are a spoof on modern-day extreme environmentalists.


The series tells the story of Prince Roger MacClintock, the spoiled son of the Empress of the galaxy-spanning Empire of Man, third and last in line to the throne and generally regarded as a juvenile, spoiled useless fop. When he is sent to a backwater planet to show the flag at a native ceremony, in part a means to keep him occupied and isolated from real politics, he goes sulkily and reluctantly.


Midway through the voyage, the ship that he is traveling on is sabotaged by a mind-controlled crewmember, sending the spaceship adrift to Marduk, a primitive world only nominally a part of the Empire of Man. There things rapidly get worse, for the spaceport has been betrayed to the disturbing Saints, a star nation of religious zealots who make an obsession of ecological purity, and one of their warships in the system. The crew of the ship sacrifice themselves as a decoy so that Prince Roger and his Marine bodyguards, the Bronze Barbarians, can take their shuttles to the surface unobserved.


Now Prince Roger and his bodyguard unit must fight their way across half a hostile planet toward an enemy held spaceport and make their way back to civilization, forging alliances with or declaring war on a succession of Mardukan polities from hunter-gatherers to early gunpowder civilizations. In the process Prince Roger learns a lot about himself and what it means to be a leader, and the Bronze Barbarians learn that there is more than meets the eye to their charge and grow to respect him.


Making it finally back into space, with the survivors of his bodyguard, as well as a sizeable force of Mardukan allies, Prince Roger finds that he will not be welcomed home. He is believed dead, and leader of the coup attempt in which his brother and sister and their children had been killed, obviously so as to clear his path to the throne.


Slipping back onto Earth, where they discover that the Empress of Man, Roger’s estranged mother, is being mind-controlled by a group of high-ranking traitors, including Roger's own father, Roger and his surviving marine guards and allies must somehow assault the heavily-defended palace to rescue the Empress and wrench control of the throne from the usurpers without first being destroyed by the imperial armed forces.


This series and other work by David Weber can be found at Baen Books or here for free.