Ave! Ave! Pournelle Imperator!

With the passing of Jerry Pournelle we find ourselves thinking about his books. In our youth we found greta comfort in them.

First among these is the Janissaries saga. Here aliens rescue CIA mercs from Angola and plop them down on a planet full of medieval humans. The mercs quickly become embroiled in the local power struggle.

Did I mention that these 50 or so mercs have all their weapons and ammo?

Needless to say the 'starmen' as the locals call them quickly set themselves up as lords.

We were always intrigued by the notion of modern soldiers armed with modern weapons going up against larger medieval armies.

There's lots of subplots in Janissaries and if the reader is curious they should just buy the damn books.

Now the aliens have been transporting humans to this planet for millennia so they can grow drugs for them. Pournelle cleverly uses this to give us a world with Romans, Mycenaean Greeks, Franks, Mongols, etc.

Lest the new starman overlords get too comfy, every few hundred years the aliens nuke the planet to keep the humans from advancing, so we have glass fields, large craters and legends about dragons melting castles and whatnot. Once our mercs realize this they concoct a plan to preserve themselves once the aliens inevitably attack. One of the sub themes of Janissaries is the mercs efforts to spread human knowledge; hygiene, printing presses, paper, etc.

Well done Mr. Pournelle and thank you.