lightningstar519 wrote:Looking forward to the prequel to In Fury Born. Maybe it could show us how the Raiders got started as well as the Terran Empire?
Given the context of "the story of the Terran Empire and the House of Murphy" - which is all we have - then that presumably means it covers this period:
...Which explained why the Rishathan Sphere's diplomacy had played upon the lingering tensions between the rival Terran League and Terran Federation with such skill and persistence. It had taken them a century of careful work, but in the end, they'd managed to produce the League Wars, which had lasted from 2450 until 2510, and killed more human beings than the combined military and civilian death tolls of every other war in the recorded history of the human race put together.
Those sixty years of vicious, deadly warfare had turned the Federation into the Terran Empire, under Emperor Terrence I of the House of Murphy. They had also led to the League's utter military and economic exhaustion . . . at which point its Rishathan "friends and neighbors" had launched the First Human-Rish War with a devastating assault into its rear areas. Their victim had been taken totally by surprise, and in barely eight years, the Sphere had conquered virtually the entire League.
Unfortunately for the Rish, whose plans had succeeded up to that point with a perfection which would have turned Machiavelli green with envy, the Terran Empire had proved a much tougher proposition. Especially because the time the Sphere was forced to spend digesting its territorial conquests in the League following HRW-I gave Terrence I time to put his own house in order and reorganize, rebuild, and expand his navy.
The Second Human-Rish War had lasted fourteen years, not eight. And despite its war weariness and the political chaos which the six decades of the League Wars had produced, the Empire had been solidly united behind its charismatic new Emperor. Besides, by that time humanity had figured out who was really responsible for those sixty horrendous years of death and destruction. By the end of HRW-II, the Empire had taken two-thirds of the old League's star systems away from the Rish and driven the Sphere to the brink of total military defeat. Under the Treaty of Leviathan, which had formally ended the war, the Rishathan Sphere had been required to return to its pre-HRW-I borders, and the remaining third of the old League which had not already been incorporated into the Empire had found itself at least nominally independent—the so-called "Rogue Worlds" which served as a buffer zone between the two interstellar great powers and belonged to neither.
Interesting that it's another Found-A-Kingdom prequel akin in some ways to House of Steel. I would in many ways have preferred a sequel - what the Rish do when they find out about the Furies - because it's such a dramatic shift in the nature of the universe.
I'm still hugely looking forward to it. Path of the Fury was the first book of RFC's I read, well before I was aware of Honor Harrington (and as you can gather from the title, at the point when it was a single story instead of 'bundled' into In Fury Born).
It's a great universe, and I'm excited to see more of it!
