Dorsai! is and was conceived as a self-standing novel. Because of the strength of its conception, however, it has become the foundation of one of science fiction’s most ambitious and far-ranging constructs, the Childe Cycle. The Cycle is a vast structure, spanning a millennium from the historical 14th century to a fictional future in which the triune aspects of humanity will be united again in a form both superhuman and super-humane.

Much of the Cycle remains to be written still today, more than thirty years after the original publication of Dorsai!, but the pieces of the interlocking whole continue to appear—each excellent in its own right It is a tribute to the structure of the original novel that the conception shown here in microcosm remains valid despite the weight of detail accreting in the later novels.

I’ve discussed Dorsai! as paradigm: for fiction writers in general, for military professionals, and for Dickson himself in his later work. None of the above could have touched me when I first read the novel at age 15. (Well, I read The Genetic General; which is not quite the same thing, but almost.)

What struck me and caused me to reread the novel a number of times was that this is one heck of a good story. It’s a model of clean prose, seamless structure, and fast action, hi this too, Dorsai! is a paradigm— for other writers. But that doesn’t have to matter to readers, whether first-timers or (like me the other day) for the umpteenth time.

Dive in and have fun!
     David Drake, Chatham Country, NC

CADET

The boy was odd.

This much he knew for himself. This much he had heard his seniors—his mother, his father, his uncles, the officers at the Academy —mention to each other, nodding their heads confidentially, not once but many times during his short eighteen years of life, leading up to this day. Now, apart, wandering the empty rec fields in the long, amber twilight before returning to his home and the graduation supper awaiting him there, he admitted to the oddness—whether truly in himself, or only in what others thought of him.

“An odd boy,” he had overheard the Commandant at the Academy saying once to the Mathematics Officer, “you never know which way he’ll jump.”