Setting
In the late 23rd century, humanity has settled fifteen younger worlds around nine stars, including Earth's solar system. Although Old Earth remains populated by the traditional variety of "full-spectrum" people, the younger worlds have developed "splinter" cultures, taking very divergent paths and developing specialized cultures. Most notable of these are: the Exotics, philosophers, mystics and psychologists; the Friendlies, puritan faith-holders who supplement the meager production of their rocky worlds by hiring out as mercenaries; and the Dorsai, true professional soldiers, highly skilled and expertly trained. Other worlds have specialized in different ways, in the sciences, mining, agriculture or commerce.
The primary medium of interplanetary trade is in personal service contracts. The worlds are divided into the "loose" worlds, where individuals maintain some control over their contracts, and the "tight" worlds, where personal contracts may be bought and sold regardless of the wishes of the individual worker.
The title refers to a hymn sung by soldiers of the Friendly worlds. The first lines are "Soldier, ask not, now or ever, where to war your banners go".
Plot summary
Tam Olyn is an ambitious, vain, angry young man. Orphaned at a young age, and raised by a nihilist uncle, he cares little for others, with the possible exception of his younger sister, Eileen. Following his graduation from school, he is ready to launch his career as a journalist among the stars.
In a prelude to the main events of the novel, he and Eileen visit the Final Encyclopedia, a centuries-long project to try to collect and catalog all knowledge. While standing at the center of the index room, Tam is identified as a one-in-a-billion person who can actually hear the voices of humanity while there. The dying director of the Encyclopedia wants him to stay on and succeed him, but an Exotic, Padma from the planet Mara, reads him as having no identity with others, no empathy, no soul. He cannot help the Encyclopedia.
His sister has become engaged to Jamethon Black, a young mercenary from the Friendly world of Harmony. Despite the fact that Black seems a very decent young man, Tam callously manipulates his sister into breaking the engagement.
Shortly, he leaves Earth, beginning his profession as a newsman. In the following five years, he advances in his profession, while his sister emigrates to Cassida, and marries a young engineer there.
While covering a war on New Earth, he finds his sister's husband, who has been drafted, and attempts to keep him out of harm's way by using him as an assistant. The plan backfires. His brother-in-law, along with several other prisoners, is slaughtered by a fanatic Friendly soldier, in violation of the laws of war. Despite the fanatic's execution for his war crime, Tam chooses to blame the entire Friendly culture, and sets out to destroy them.
Unfortunately, Tam has the ability to analyze people and situations, and manipulate them expertly. Padma observes his actions, and tries to put a brake on his behavior, but he will not be stopped. By manipulating events, he creates a situation for the Friendlies that may result in their destruction as a viable culture.
In the culmination of events, he arrives to cover a war on the planet of St. Marie, a small agrarian world in the same system as Mara and Kultis, the Exotic planets. (At this point, the novella's narrative commences). On one side are the mercenary forces hired by the Exotics, led by the identical Dorsai twin brothers, Ian and Kensie Graeme. The twins, who appear in a number of other stories, are opposites in every way. Kensie is warm, friendly, loved by all, and a great leader of men. Ian is cold as ice, analytical, and a great tactician. He is respected and feared.
On the other side are a group of Friendlies who had been misled into supporting an abortive local revolution. The Friendlies are led by Jamethon Black, whose engagement Tam had broken years earlier. The Friendlies are hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered. Tam has manipulated the situation so that not only will the Friendlies lose, but their ability to hire out their soldiers will be crippled, possibly leading to the end of their viability as a culture. He believes he can link the Friendlies to assassins hired locally, against all the accepted rules of war. He tries to recruit Kensie Graeme in a scheme to expose this, but Kensie refuses and insists on prosecuting the campaign his own way.
Padma is also on St. Marie. He continues to try to dissuade Tam from his quest. He explains that people from the Splinter cultures are not insane fanatics as Tam sees them, but rather a new kind of human where all the components of the human spirit are unified in a single direction. He gives Tam a copy of a secret communication between Jamethon's superiors that appears to abandon hope of them winning, and leave them to be destroyed, and further to conceal this from the troops. Tam shows this to Jamethon, who interprets it a completely different way based on his faith.
The result is a shootout between Kensie Graeme, Jamethon and a few of his lieutenants at a parley meeting in a field, with Tam as a witness. Kensie kills all the attackers despite being outnumbered and surprised, since he was expecting to discuss surrender. This leaves the Friendly forces leaderless, giving them no option but to lay down their arms.
In the end, he is thwarted only by the faith of Black, and the honor and courage of the Graeme brothers, despite the incredible cost to them. The best qualities of the splinter cultures defeat the worst qualities of Tam Olyn. Padma tells Tam that his attempt to sway Jamethon actually solved his dilemma. By rejecting what he saw as the Devil's Choice of surrendering to save his own life, Jamethon saw a way to end the conflict by sacrificing himself in a futile attempt to assassinate a vastly superior Dorsai officer. Padma gave Tam the secret document knowing that this would be the outcome.
As Padma explains to him, had Tam succeeded, not only would a necessary component of the human spirit have been lost, but the entire balance of power among the worlds would have been horribly upset. Eventually, Padma manages to break through his shell, allowing Tam to grow into more of a human being, and take his place at the Final Encyclopedia. Tam, for his part, realizes that his lust for revenge was partly to cover his shame over his fear and cowardice on New Earth.
A key event in the aftermath, barely mentioned in this book, is the assassination of Kensie Graeme by agents of the original rebellion, and the manner in which his brother's honor prevents the bloodbath which could have resulted at the hands of Kensie's angry troops. These events occur after Tam has left the planet. The story is told in great detail in the short story, Brothers. Padma tells Tam that his intervention has resulted in Ian Graeme transforming into an individual of unknown potential for the future. In the third novel of the trilogy, Dorsai! , Ian is instrumental in leading the invasion and conquest of William of Ceta's home planet.
Foundation and Earth is a science fiction novel by American writer Isaac Asimov, the fifth novel of the Foundation series and chronologically the last in the series. It was published in 1986, four years after the first sequel to the Foundation trilogy, which is titled Foundation's Edge.
Gordon Rupert Dickson was a Canadian-American science fiction writer. He was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2000.
Military science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction and military fiction that depicts the use of science fiction technology, including spaceships and weapons, for military purposes and usually principal characters who are members of a military organization, usually during a war; occurring sometimes in outer space or on a different planet or planets. It exists in a range of media, including literature, comics, film, television and video games.
The Childe Cycle is an unfinished series of science fiction novels by Canadian writer Gordon R. Dickson. The name Childe Cycle is an allusion to "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", a poem by Robert Browning, which provided inspiration for elements in the work. The series is sometimes referred to as the Dorsai series, after the Dorsai people who are central to it. The related short stories and novellas all center on the Dorsai, primarily members of the Graeme and Morgan families.
Planet of Adventure is a series of four science fiction novels by Jack Vance, published between 1968 and 1970. The novels relate the adventures of the scout Adam Reith, the sole survivor of an Earth ship investigating a signal from the distant planet Tschai.
Planetary romance is a subgenre of science fiction in which the bulk of the action consists of adventures on one or more exotic alien planets, characterized by distinctive physical and cultural backgrounds. Some planetary romances take place against the background of a future culture where travel between worlds by spaceship is commonplace; others, particularly the earliest examples of the genre, do not, and invoke flying carpets, astral projection, or other methods of getting between planets. In either case, it is the planetside adventures which are the focus of the story, not the mode of travel.
The Word for World Is Forest is a science fiction novella by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, first published in the United States in 1972 as a part of the anthology Again, Dangerous Visions, and published as a separate book in 1976 by Berkley Books. It is part of Le Guin's Hainish Cycle.
First contact is a common science fiction theme about the first meeting between humans and extraterrestrial life, or of any sentient species' first encounter with another one, given they are from different planets or natural satellites. The theme allows writers to explore such topics such as xenophobia, transcendentalism, and basic linguistics by adapting the anthropological topic of first contact to extraterrestrial cultures.
The Prince is a science fiction compilation by Jerry Pournelle and S. M. Stirling. It is part of the CoDominium future history series. The Prince is a compilation of four previously published novels: Falkenberg's Legion, Prince of Mercenaries, Go Tell The Spartans, and Prince of Sparta. Of the original novels, the first two were written by Pournelle alone; the last two were cowritten with Stirling. Pages 174–176 of the printed edition are new to the compilation. The Prince was published by Baen Books in hardcover (ISBN 0-7434-3556-7) in September 2002.
Tactics of Mistake is a science fiction novel by American writer Gordon R. Dickson, first published as a serial in Analog in 1970–1971. It is part of Dickson's Childe Cycle series, in which mankind has reached the stars and divided into specialized splinter groups. The fourth book written, it is chronologically the second book of the cycle, occurring roughly a century after Necromancer, and a century before Dorsai!. The primary character, Cletus Grahame, is the ancestor of the key characters in later works: the twins, Ian and Kensie Graeme, and their nephew, Donal Graeme.
The planetary systems of stars other than the Sun and the Solar System are a staple element in many works of the science fiction genre.
Dorsai! is the first published book of the incomplete Childe Cycle series of science fiction novels by American writer Gordon R. Dickson. Later books are set both before and after the events in Dorsai!.
Janissaries are an American series of military and political-based science fiction novels are set in an interstellar confederation of races, in which humans are a slave race entrusted with military affairs and law enforcement. They were written by Jerry Pournelle, with Roland J. Green co-authoring the second two books.
Like piracy, the mercenary ethos resonates with idealized adventure, mystery, and danger, and appears frequently in popular culture. Many are called adventurers, filibusters, soldiers of fortune, gunslingers, gunrunners, ronin, and knights errant.
The complete bibliography of Gordon R. Dickson.
The Viagens Interplanetarias series is a sequence of science fiction stories by L. Sprague de Camp, begun in the late 1940s and written under the influence of contemporary space opera and sword and planet stories, particularly Edgar Rice Burroughs's Martian novels. Set in the future in the 21st and 22nd centuries, the series is named for the quasi-public Terran agency portrayed as monopolizing interstellar travel, the Brazilian-dominated Viagens Interplanetarias. It is also known as the Krishna series, as the majority of the stories belong to a sequence set on a fictional planet of that name. While de Camp started out as a science fiction writer and his early reputation was based on his short stories in the genre, the Viagens tales represent his only extended science fiction series.
In the Courts of the Crimson Kings is a 2008 alternate history science fiction novel by American writer S. M. Stirling.
Amanda Morgan is a science fiction novella by American writer Gordon R. Dickson, first published in The Spirit of Dorsai in 1979 and later included in The Dorsai Companion in June 1986. The story is set in 2185 on the Dorsai, a key planet and Splinter Culture of Dickson's future history known as the Childe Cycle. "Amanda Morgan" is a perspective piece expanding and illuminating the crisis of the novel Tactics of Mistake, in which the planet known as The Dorsai is attacked for the sake of defeating Cletus Grahame. Amanda Morgan, also known as the first Amanda, leads the resistance in Grahame's home district. The theme of the story may be understood as: Moral strength is more important than physical strength in the struggle for identity.
The Final Encyclopedia is a science fiction book by Gordon R. Dickson published in 1984. It is part of the Childe Cycle series. The Final Encyclopedia transitions from the militaristic action-adventure of the earlier books in the Childe Cycle to a philosophical commentary on the evolution of humankind.
