Those of you not already familiar with Jerry Pournelle's Janissary series are in luck. The entire earlier series — the first book, Janissaries was released in 1979 — is still available, at least on Kindle, and Baen is looking to rerelease the original books as well as releasing this one sometime next year.
I was in my late twenties when Janissaries appeared, and I loved it. Still do. The initial concept — a bunch of CIA volunteers/mercenaries fighting the Cubans in Angola being shanghaied by a flying saucer just before they get overrun and sent off to grow drugs for an alien cartel on a planet in a trinary system and a 600-year cycle of wildly erratic weather — would have been enough to tickle my fancy all by itself. But it was also an intelligent examination of what a group of perhaps 50 twentieth century individuals could accomplish on a world where the alien cartel used "skyfire" to bomb their lackeys back to the Stone Age after each 600-year growing season. And it was an examination of the moral responsibilities of the (often seriously flawed) individuals in question. One of my favorite observations from the first book is that morality can be a survival tool.
There haven't been any new books in the series in the last 20 years or so, although Jerry always had a strong notion of where he wanted the series to go if he ever got back to it. Unfortunately, he's gone now, but before he died he completed the first half of the manuscript for his final novel, and he left extensive notes for where he was thinking about going in the second half. In particular, he left a very specific statement of the theme of the work, which we have tried very hard to honor.
I was deeply honored and very pleased when Toni Weisskopff invited me to be one of the authors — along with Jerry's son, Philip — who completed the novel. I think it is a strong book, I hope it is one of which Jerry would approve, and I think there is the distinct possibility that it will serve as the launch platform for a resumption of the original series.
It isn't often that a writer has the opportunity to help complete the final work of someone who was one of his own iconic authors when he was younger. It's been a challenging assignment, because we needed to stay true to Jerry's vision and not step on anything he had done.
With Philip's approval, I will be posting snippets here on the Forum. There is still one point in the novel that needs to be thoroughly nailed down, but it is a relatively minor point and will not affect the way that the rest of the book works out.
In addition to the snippets from the current book, I sort of envision this forum as an opportunity for others, like me, who read the books long ago (and for those of you who haven't already read them but find yourselves enticed into doing so), to discuss the original books and how well they have/have not aged over the years.
As I say, the first half of this book is almost entirely Jerry. There were a couple of points where hooks were needed for something that happened later in the story and they had to be added, and there were several places where Jerry had continuity issues that he would undoubtedly have smoothed out himself in the final edit process.
Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy it even half as much as I enjoyed working on it.
