Reccommend some historical/fantasy military campaign fiction?

I was recently thinking about the Paksanarrion/Gird novels by Elizabeth Moon and realized that my favorite parts were the mercenary campaigns Paks went on and the campaign portions of the Gird book. I don’t know that those are the best examples of the genre, but I’m interested in reading some more fiction centered around the military campaign. I don’t expect it to not have any character growth or person-to-person drama but I don’t want six adventurers hiking around slaying goblins and dragons for 350 pages either.

I say “fantasy” only because I don’t want a nonfiction account of the Crusades or something but I don’t need fireballs, magic swords and giants (I appreciated the first Paks novel being rather magic-lite). I’m not completely invested in the time period if you think there’s some simply fantastic novel set in another period but it is the one I’m initially angling for.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

Are you aware that Ms. Moon has a new series that’s a sequel to The Deed of Paksenarrion? The first book, Oath of Fealty, came out last year; the next book, Kings of the North, is due out in March.

The Temeraire series by Naomi Novik is about the Napoleonic Wars, but including dragons. It is mostly about the dragon Temeraire, but the military side of things is quite prominent in some of the novels.

I personally got bored with the series very quickly, but others seem to love it, so it’s probably worth a look.

Have you heard of the Belisarius books by David Drake and Eric Flint?

Technically an alternate history, based upon time travel creating a threatened world empire from the Mawla Empire in India, it’s a really fun read, and I think interesting, too.

The first books in the series are available online for free at Baen’s Free Library, here and here, if you want to give it a chance.

AAAAGGGHHH! Must put on my amazon.com wish list!

S.M. Stirling seems to know his military stuff and does the most vivid battle-scenes I’ve ever read. In particular I recommend The General series. If you want swords-only battles, check out the Emberverse series.

Jerry Pournelle does good military SF if you can get past his often astonishing RW politics. See The Prince. (Co-authored in part by Stirling.)

When I say “RW politics”: The story of the Helots’ rebellion on Sparta is, as Pournelle states in the foreword, a study of Maoist low-intensity conflict from the POV of the state, i.e., how to defeat it. The Helots’ casus belli is that on the planet Sparta, they have no votes – Sparta having an elaborate constitution designed by political scientists, so complex that even the heir to the throne once remarks, “I’d hate to have to explain how it works,” but one feature is that citizenship must be earned, by admission to a “phratry” and militia service, among other things; it is effectively impossible for first- or second-generation immigrants, of whom there are vast numbers. Notably – and quite preposterously, in light of the real-life history of struggles for franchise expansion – the Helots do not seem to have any actual grievance or suffer any socioeconomic disabilities just because of their exclusion from political participation. In any case, they are portrayed as Pure Evil – their leaders are cynical and amoral and power-mad, and all their followers are dupes and brutes. In the climax, there is a massive street-battle in the capital, in which the middle-class shopkeepers join forces with the elite and slaughter the lumpenprole Helots almost to the last man. The Middle and the High united against the Low in an utterly victorious war-to-the-knife. The pages of that scene fairly drip with Pournelle’s liberated semen.

I hadn’t gotten around to picking it up yet but, since the tone of the trilogy shifted away from the mercenary thing to Paks’ personal journey after the first book, I didn’t expect it to be what I was looking for here. Still plan on reading it, mind you.

The Helots were dumped on Sparta, and all other colonized worlds by the bureau of colonization, they were used to getting a stipend on earth for doing nothing, and were quite put out with the spartans for expecting them to actually work.

As well, the helots were being used as cats paws by various earth factions that wanted sparta politically remodeled. Pure evil, perhaps but usually most leaders of popular liberation fronts have to be a bit over the top, when promotion is only a bullet shot away. Any sane person would have probably worked with the existing spartan political machine.

Declan

I second those, some of my favorite popcorn reading [you know, you want to be amused, but want something familiar]

The other Pournelle series I’d recommend would be Janissaries. Basic idea is that a group of American soldiers about to be killed while supporting an undeclared CIA operation in Africa are kidnapped by aliens and transported to a another (primitive - medievilish) world with instructions to take over an area and grow drugs for their alien paymasters. Lots of politics and military campaigns - gives Pournelle the chance to mix up military periods. So bowmen verses Byzantine cavalry verses knights in armour verses nomadic horsemen and so on!

Good fun but only three books in the series. The forth book was planned but has never made progress so it ends abruptly.

Should say that *The Prince *fits within a wider set of stories about the Codominium and Falkenberg’s Legion.

S M Stirling’s Emberverse and The General series have been mentioned but for military campaign fiction I would suggest the *Island in a Sea of Time *series. Alien Space Bats transport the island of Nantucket from 1998 to the Bronze age so the plucky islanders have to fight to survive. Starting with only the weapons they can manufacture with the tools they have but developing “new” weapons as their capabilities and resources increase.

Another vote for the Belisarius series. Great stuff, I’ve re-read it more than once.

Paksenarrion is actually a secondary character in this one. It does involve a fair amount of campaigning by the mercenaries.

I don’t know if it is quite waht you are looking for, but the Lost Regiment series by William Forstchen is fun. A Civil War regiment is transported to the Planet of Peoples from All Parts of Time, and they have to organize the locals and break the power of the eeevil alien overlords, while instilling Yankee can-do know-how and respect for life.

But nothing in the story so much as suggests that they even believed getting the vote might change that in any way. It was not even part of their leaders’ rhetoric, which never seemed to say much beyond, “Universal suffrage!”

The Earth factions might have thought that. Pournelle takes us far enough into Skully’s mind to leave no doubt as to who was using whom. Nobody ever used Skully.

Turtledove’s Misplaced Legion series might be of interest. A Roman legion gets transported to an analogue of Byzantium.

This may not be exactly what you have in mind, but there is a terrific book about a mercenary army. The war that they were hired to fight was lost, and their general was betrayed and murdered, leaving them trapped deep in hostile territory. They were forced to fight their way out to safety. The story is written from the POV of one of the leaders during the march, and was written by one of the great stylists of the age. The book is available for free on the Internet: The March Up Country

Seconding the General series. It was plotted by David Drake, and is post-apocalyptic sci-fi based on the historical battles Belisarius actually fought. As opposed to the Belisarius series, also plotted by Drake but which is an alternate-history involving Belisarius himself, but none of his actual battles. I prefer the former, but thats mostly because Eric Flint’s writing style gets tiresomely self-congratulating after a while. Both series protagonists have near-omniscient sci-fi-esque advisors, but are otherwise period-appropriate technology.

Thanks for the recommendations so far. Bookmarking this thread so I can refer back to it soon.

OtakuLoki, free books to try. Woo! I knew about the Baen library but never really explored it.

ASH: A Secret History, by Mary Gentle. I think in the States it was broken up into a series of some sort, no idea how many books. It follows a mercenary company in the early renaissance, looks like fantasy, but (depending on your definitions) is actually science fiction. And has a very odd frame-story that you can mostly ignore. It was towards the “brutal” end of what I can tolerate in my fiction, but that sounds like a plus from the OPs perspective.

Never read Turtledove for an exciting war-story. His style is so clotted and repetitious and tedious and omigod-when-is-this-gonna-END?! that what you get instead is a realistic war-story (that being what war is like to a soldier).