Saturday Updates

Fans will recall that our snow blower conked out during last week's blizzard. We're supposed to get 6 inches Sunday night [If you just paused and read that first, -Ed]. After leaving messages with three different outfits that repair small engines on site and not hearing back from any of them, we said 'what the hell' we'll take a look. Our diesel mechanic cousin in Kentucky thought the sparkplug was dead....he was right! We put a new sparkplug in and the snow blower started right up on the first yank.

So we finished Jerry Pournelle's Mamelukes last night, the finale to his Janissaries series. Pournelle died in 2017 before he completed Mamelukes. David Weber helped finish it, as did retired naval officer Philip Pournelle, which really shows in the MS. We give Mamelukes' 4/5 and hats off to Philip for adding some really interesting parts. Oh, and for all you grognards out there who like to review our books and point out the occasional typo, we found some in Mamelukes. So get fucked. It's incredibly reassuring. If we enjoyed Mamelukes so much, why not find some other fiction to read?

A piece we wrote about heavy metal has been accepted to an online magazine. We will link when available. That's two new things we're publishing in this year. Watch out Maxim, we may not have time for Inforos [Are you sure that's wise given his kompromot on you?-Ed]

This blog predicts Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers will defeat the Kansas City Chiefs in a close game with a final score that's something like 34-31. We think Tampa's defensive line will be the difference maker.

With all this snow we haven't been able to go walking.

We've listened to a few Spanish lessons. So far so good, we guess.

On to the things.

We slug away and slug away some more on The Great Nuclear War of 1975's Falkland's chapter. We can see the end though. We think. We'll be adding more Brit stuff. The rest of the MS is good. 

We are reading through The Great Salvation of 1976*. Right now we're shoring up the opening chapter. Given the way the Brit parts are working in 75, we may do something similar about another nation in 76. Ideas welcome.

We are confident final drafts of both will be completed by 1 March.

No action on World War 1990: The Final Storm. Right now there's just no there there.

We think we'll work on the Substack thing this weekend. 

*Thank you Confederate Contingent

Thirty Years, Literally

Some time ago some grognard took to this blog's updates page and criticized our not writing a third Israel Strikes novel to wrap up the saga.

[It's a saga now, is it?-Ed]

We are People of the Book, after all...Anyway we told this tosser to sod off and noted that we've been waiting 30 years for Jerry Pournelle to finish Janisarries and then he died.

Well, well, well...lookie here...Pournelle's estate finally finished up the concluding novel. People, we give you Mamelukes.

Briefly, in 1979 aliens kidnap a bunch of CIA Mercs in Angola and drop them on a Medieval planet so they can grow drugs for them. It's basically Game of Thrones meets a bunch of guys running around Game of Thrones with rifles and machineguns.

We'll have to root around our book boxes and find the original novels. This gives us the excuse we need to purge our old sci fi and fantasy collection. 

No, we're not writing a third Israel Strikes novel.

Pournelle is Baaaaaack!

OMG! OMG!

After thirty(30) thirty(!) years it's finally here!

Nut graph, as the J-school losers say, aliens kidnap CIA mercs and dump them on a medieval planet. The result is fun high-adventure.

Jerry Pournelle died a few years ago, we talked about him here. Do click over and read the Steve Sailer link.

We read him and his partner Larry Niven in high school and college. Lets just say he had a big influence on us. The Janisaries series was among the first real books we ever read. Now we're going to have to dig them out of the basement and re-read them. It's been a long time.

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.