S. M. Stirling

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Stephen Michael Stirling is a Canadian-American science fiction and fantasy author.

Stirling was born in Metz, France on September 30, 1953 to an English mother and Canadian father. He has lived in several countries and currently resides in New Mexico in the United States with his wife Jan.

His novels are generally conflict driven and often describe military situations and militaristic cultures. Aside from the military, adventure & exploration focus of his books, he often describes societies with cultural values significantly different from modern western views, especially with a more liberal attitude to sexuality (lesbian characters often figure), in a sympathetic or at least neutral way. One of his recurring topics is the influence of the culture on an individual's outlook and values, with a particular emphasis that most people and societies consider themselves to be (mostly) moral.

In the past he has frequently collaborated with other authors, including David Drake, Jerry Pournelle and Anne McCaffrey.

Stirling is probably best-known for his Draka series of alternate history novels and the more recent Island in the Sea of Time time travel/alternate history and Dies the Fire trilogies. His novels Go Tell The Spartans and Prince of Sparta are set in Jerry Pournelle's "CoDominium" future history.

Stirling, along with Eric Flint, was tuckerized as a Secret Service agent in John Birmingham's alternate history WWII novel Weapons of Choice (2004).

Stirling often posts to Usenet and to blog comments, often with the handle "joatsimeon".[1] (One of his books, The City Who Fought, has characters named Joat and Simeon.)

Contents

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] The Lords of Creation

What if Mars and Venus really were inhabitable and inhabited, as in many SF stories from the early sixties and before? In this series Mars and Venus were terraformed a long time ago and "seeded" with Earth life, including several different human species. On Earth everything is the same until the start of space exploration, but then the Cold War turns into a real space race... The Sky People is set on Venus, In the Halls of the Crimson Kings on Mars.

  • The Sky People (11-2006)
  • In the Halls of the Crimson Kings (2008)

[edit] Nantucket series

In Island in the Sea of Time the island of Nantucket is transported by an unknown phenomenon (called "The Event" in the series) back in time into the Bronze Age circa 1250s BC (corresponding to the late Heroic Age of Greek mythology). The trilogy describes the conflict between the different factions of the island's population — some trying to dominate the world for their own benefit, others trying to better it, while most just want to survive, work hard, and claw their way back to something approaching their pre-Event way of life. As the series progresses, it becomes clear to Nantucket's scaled-down Government that sitting back and reinventing isolationism will only profit those renegades who, under the leadership of ex-Coast Guard lieutenant William Walker, have fled the island to live like gods amongst the Bronze Age peoples of Europe and the Middle East. Walker - who, unfortunately, is as smart as he is callous - exploits the 'magic' of gunpowder, iron-forging, and the spinning-jenny to build up an empire of his own, one that will inevitably conquer the entire world unless the people of Nantucket build an army, a navy, and a set of foreign alliances of their own and take the fight to Walker.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

By the end of the third book, Nantucket is the dominant member of a sizable and expanding network of allies, rather reminiscent of the British Empire (though Britain itself is here but one of Nantucket's protectorates and a source of "warrior tribes" to be enrolled as mercenaries in its armies), and the Nantucketars ("Eagle-People", "Islanders", "Nan-Tukh-Tar", etc) seem well on their way to re-enacting their Manifest Destiny three thousand years early.

Nantucket has 'Outport' colonies spanning the globe, with bases in the Caribbean, Argentina, the Azores, South Africa, Zanzibar, Madagascar, Mauritius, Bombay, etc; basically anywhere there is a nice harbour situated close to existing or future trading routes, the Republic is on the scene. The Alban Alliance rules the British Isles, where Walker initially tried to carve out his empire, and are a close ally, a source of labour and military recruits, and, as its people absorb more of the New Learning, look like being at the heart of a very early Industrial Revolution. Babylon and the Hittite Empire are also allies, though how long that will last now that they have arms industries of their own is anyone's guess, even with an Islander military officer married to Babylon's ambitious young king. At the end of the third book they are already laying plans for carving up the Caucasus and Persia between them.

Other major powers are Achaea (Greece), which was the location of Walker's second - and much more successful - attempt at empire-building, but which is now ruled by King Odikweus (Odysseus/Ulysses of Iliad and Odyssey fame), and Tartessos, an Iberian city-state which gained greatly from its new King's decade-long alliance with Walker's Meizon Achaea, and which managed to survive unsuccessfully challenging Nantucket for control of the Oceans. Minor powers include Egypt, which gained some basic New Learning from one of Walker's lieutenants who was a fanatical - and naive - Afrocentrist who was shocked to discover that the "Black Egyptians" were not truly black. Meroe, a region in east-central Africa where the same lieutenant escaped to with the intention of giving the Negro population a leg up before armed Caucasians started arriving in numbers might also become a significant player. There also appears to be a threat growing out in Central Asia where Walker's lone surviving heir and a convoy of mostly Achaean rejectionists have chosen to carve out a new empire far, far away from the reach of Islander naval power.

[edit] The Emberverse series

Dies the Fire (2004) shows the effects of The Event on the rest of the planet, the world Nantucket left behind — a world where electricity, guns, combustion engines, and steam power no longer work. The series mostly focuses on the Willamette Valley in Oregon. After surviving the immediate disaster, the primary theme of this series is the conflict between a neo-feudal dictatorship created by a sociopathic history professor and the free communities of the valley, most notably the wiccan Clan Mackenzie and the Bearkillers, led by a former Marine.

  • Dies the Fire (2004-07-01)
  • The Protector's War (2005-09-06)
  • A Meeting at Corvallis (2006 Sep/Oct)

A second trilogy is planned, set 25 years after the Change.

  • The Sunrise Lands (2007)
  • The Scourge of God (2008)
  • The Sword of the Lady (2009)

[edit] Fifth Millennium series

These are a collection of post-holocaust fantasy novels, in which civilization was destroyed (probably by a nuclear war) in something near our present time and new civilizations have grown to take their place. The novels are set in about the year AD 5000. There are elements of magic or psionics present, but they are fairly low powered, while technology is approximately at the level of the historical middle ages. Two additional novels in this series (Lion's Heart and Lion's Soul both by Karen Wehrstein) overlap these novels but were not authored or co-authored by Stirling. Shadow's Daughter by Shirley Meier is also part of the series.

  • Snowbrother (1985)
  • The Sharpest Edge (1986) (with Shirley Meier) (Later re-written and expanded as Saber and Shadow)
  • The Cage (1989) (with Shirley Meier)
  • Shadow's Son (1991) (with Shirley Meier and Karen Wehrstein)
  • Saber and Shadow (1992) (with Shirley Meier)
    • Shadows Daughter related novel (by Shirley Meier)
    • Lion's Heart related novel (by Karen Wehrstein)
    • Lion's Soul related novel (by Karen Wehrstein)

[edit] Draka series

Main article: The Domination
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The Draka novels postulate a dystopian slave-holding militaristic (white) African empire founded by American Loyalists who escaped to South Africa after the American Revolution rather than to Canada (as in our history). They were later joined by French Royalist emigres, Icelandic refugees, and demobbed veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, then by tens of thousands of defeated Confederates after the American Civil War. Stirling provides a timeline for its historical development through the 19th and 20th centuries, first as the Crown Colony of Drakia (for Francis Drake), gradually breaking away from British control to become the Domination of the Draka. The Draka culture is remarkable for combining a strictly race- and class-based hierarchical society with near-complete gender-equality (including female soldiers in integrated military units in combat roles). Compared to current western society, nudity and sexuality are much less taboo among Draka.

As a result of the intense manpower pressures stemming from their Conquest of Africa through the 19th century, all Draka are liable for service in the military/security forces, and the Draka-only Citizen Force is by far the deadliest and most advanced military machine on the planet. But there are never enough Draka (only 30 million or so at the start of WW2) to go around, and the bulk of the Domination's Armed Forces are made up on Jannisary Legions recruited from the Serf population. The Citizen Force provides the elite cutting edge, while the Jannisaries are the cannon fodder.

The first three books chronicle the Draka expansion. The conquest of the Middle-East, Central Asia, half of China and a chunk of the Balkans in the First World War means that, by then, the Draka have long since shifted from treating Blacks as slaves (Serfs, in the novels) to treating everybody but themselves as slaves. Up to the outbreak of WWII, the European part of the alternate history is pretty much unchanged - which some critics found improbable, with Europeans giving all their attention to the fight between Fascism and Communism while such a major threat to everybody lurks at the wings. WWII culminates with the Drakas' invasion and conquest of Europe, the making of all Europeans without exception into chattel slaves sold in newly-erected slave markets, and the killing by prolonged and excruciating torture of anybody who tries to resist in any way whatsoever. From there it leads into a cold war/covert war scenario where they face off against an American-led 'Alliance for Democracy'. The final book (The Stone Dogs) takes this war into space (and thereby into Science Fiction), and describes the final, apocalyptic nuclear battle between the two antagonist factions.

  • Marching Through Georgia (1988)
  • Under the Yoke (1989)
  • The Stone Dogs (1990)
  • Drakon (1995) (Alternate Earth scenario, Drakas try to invade our world)
  • The Domination (2000) (Omnibus edition of first 3 works) ISBN 0-671-57794-8
  • Drakas! (2000) (Anthology edited by Stirling)

[edit] General series

Main article: The General series

These are a retelling of the life of Belisarius, set on a colony planet with roughly late 19th century technology. These novels are currently available in omnibus editions. (2005).

with David Drake

  • The Forge (1991)
  • The Hammer (1992)
  • The Anvil (1993)
  • The Steel (1993)
  • The Sword (1995)
  • The Chosen (1996)
  • The Reformer (1999)

[edit] Falkenberg's Legion series

Note that earlier volumes in this series, starting with The Mercenary, were solely the work of Jerry Pournelle. These form part of the larger "CoDominium" series, that also includes The Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand by Pournelle and Larry Niven. (In 2002, all the Falkenberg books, including these two, were published in a single volume, The Prince.)

with Jerry Pournelle

  • Go Tell the Spartans (1991)
  • Prince of Sparta (1993)

[edit] Flight Engineer series

with James Doohan

  • The Rising (1996)
  • The Privateer (1999)
  • The Independent Command (2000)

[edit] Terminator 2 series

  • T2: Infiltrator (2001)
  • T2: Rising Storm (2002)
  • T2: The Future War (2003)

[edit] Other Novels

belonging to series by other authors

not part of any series

[edit] External links

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