The second of the Draka series.The Eurasian War is over. Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire have been defeated. With the exception of the British Isles Europe belongs to the Domination. Now it is the turn of the Europeans to be experience life as serfs under the heel of the Domination. Now it is their turn to be Under the Yoke.

A generation has passed since The Change that rendered technology inoperable around the world, and western Oregon has finally achieved a degree of peace. But a new threat has risen in Paradise Valley, Wyoming. A man known as The Prophet presides over the Church Universal and Triumphant, teaching his followers to continue God's work by destroying the remnants of technological civilization they encounter-and those who dare use them. Rudi Mackenzie, son and heir of the mystic Juniper, must journey with seven friends across a continent in chaos to the Sunrise Lands to solve the riddle of what destroyed a civilization. And as the friends journey farther into the interior, enemies may be within their own band as well as outside it...

In his novels of the Change, New York Times bestselling author S.M. Stirling presents “a devastated, mystical world that will appeal to fans of traditional fantasy as well as post-apocalyptic SF.” Continuing their quest that began in The Golden Princess*, two future rulers of a world without technology risk their lives seeking a fabled blade…  Reiko, Empress of Japan, has allied herself with Princess Órlaith, heir to the High Kingdom of Montival, to find the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, the Grass-Cutting Sword, a legendary treasure of an ancient dynasty that confers valor and victory to its bearer. Órlaith understands all too well the power it signifies. Her own inherited blade, the Sword of the Lady, was both a burden and a danger to her father, Rudi Mackenzie, as it failed to save the king from being assassinated. But the fabled sword lies deep within the Valley of Death, and the search will be far from easy. And war is building, in Montival and far beyond. As Órlaith and Reiko encounter danger and wonder, Órlaith’s mother, Queen Mathilda, believes her daughter’s alliance and quest has endangered the entire realm. There are factions both within and without Montival whose loyalty died with the king and whispers of treachery and war grow ever louder. And the Malevolence that underlies the enemy will bend all its forces to destroy them. *Publishers Weekly (starred review)

S. M. Stirling’s Novels of the Change are a “truly original combination of postapocalyptic sci-fi and military-oriented medieval fantasy”* about a future where mysterious Powers removed advanced technology, and humanity rebuilds society. However, this new world is not always a peaceful one.... The spirit of troubadour Prince John, the brother of Crown Princess Órlaith, has fallen captive to the power of the Yellow Raja and his servant, the Pallid Mask. Prince John’s motley band of friends and followers—headed by Captain Pip of Townsville and Deor Godulfson—must lead a quest through realms of shadow and dreams to rescue Prince John from a threat far worse than death. Meanwhile, across the sea, Japanese Empress Reiko and Órlaith, heir to the High Kingdom of Montival, muster their kingdoms for war, making common cause with the reborn Kingdom of Hawaii. But more than weapons or even the dark magic of the sorcerers of Pyongyang threaten them; Órlaith's lover, Alan Thurston, might be more than he appears. From the tropical waters off Hilo and Pearl Harbor, to the jungles and lost cities of the Ceram Sea, a game will be played where the fate of the world is at stake.

Amazon.com ReviewIt's about time! No more scouring used-book stores for tattered copies to replace the ones you loaned your friends: the first two installments of S.M. Stirling's superlative military-SF/alternate-history Draka trilogy are back in print, bound along with the third installment in hardcover. The only downside to this collection--which spans Marching Through Georgia, Under the Yoke, and The Stone Dogs--is the disappointing omission of the helpful maps, glossary, and so on that appeared in the original editions. But as some consolation, we at least get a bit of new backstory for the pseudo-sequel to Stone Dogs, Drakon, in the form of a prologue and a few interspersed paragraphs bookending each title.The Draka series (dubbed The Domination in this collection) still requires a strong stomach--you'll find no shortage of blood and bullets or sex and violence here. But it's prudish to argue with Stirling's choices. A skilled writer and rigorous thinker, he's spun a compelling--not to mention plausible and well-researched--alternate history for earth: in this timeline, the Loyalists losers in the American Revolution set up shop in South Africa and then proceed to subjugate and industrialize the continent, eventually exporting their brutal system of slavery and conquest through WWI, WWII, and beyond to cover the better part of the globe. Page-turning, blood-pumping, realistic, and masterfully written combat SF, The Domination is part of the genre's canon. --Paul HughesProduct DescriptionOriginally published as three separate volumes, S.M. Stirling's masterly alternate history tells of the rise to power of the Domination of the Draka and its long struggle with the American-led Alliance for Democracy. Beginning in the rich subcontinent of South Africa, the people calling themselves the Draka - disaffected refugees from the American Revolution - first forged an empire of inconceivable wealth and savagery, founded on conquest and slavery. Spanning the whole of the African continent, the Great War of the early twentieth century gave it much of Asia as well. Then in the Eurasian War, Germany and the Soviet Union exhausted one another and the Draka stepped in, leaving the Domination triumphant from the English Channel to the China Sea. Only America and its allies stands between the Draka and their dream of an enslaved planet. By the 1990s the Draka commanded the stuff of life itself, mastering biotechnology until they could create new species at will - and transform themselves into the Master Race of their savage dreams. Meanwhile the Alliance for Democracy travelled another path, into the mysteries of the physical universe and the knowledge to be gained there. The final confrontation would settle which was the more powerful ...or it would leave the earth a lifeless rock on which nothing human remained but bones.

From Publishers WeeklyMilitary SF author Stirling provides fast-moving combat between well-matched, smart opponents in this excellent sequel to last year's T2: Infiltrator, in which Sarah Connor, her teenaged son, John, and their new ally, Dieter von Rossbach, defeated the female cyborg sent back in time by evil computer Skynet, but didn't know that she'd left her two cloned sisters ready to take up the job of protecting Skynet. Now John and Dieter are on the run in South America, Sarah is recovering from serious wounds and the cute young Terminators are learning to exploit their superhuman abilities. Complications multiply deliciously as the author cuts rapidly from one vivid scene to another. The movie-like technique lets readers watch intelligent people following incomplete information into terrible mistakes. Accepting human limitations but stretching his own potential, John becomes more the tough, confident leader of the Terminator movies. Around John, Stirling efficiently gathers a large cast which changes frequently, since most characters don't survive long in the presence of a Terminator. Sly humor spices the nonstop action until it climaxes at a secret Antarctic scientific-military base, where John and Dieter confront one Terminator. Meanwhile, the other cyborg killer is on the trail of still-recuperating Sarah at Dieter's Paraguay ranch. Anyone who liked the Terminator movies will love this book. In fact, it's exciting enough to win new fans for the franchise. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From BooklistThe highly competent Stirling is now extrapolating moviemaker James Cameron's Terminator concepts into a full-blown alternate future. In the second installment of the project, Sarah Connor is considered mad, bad, and dangerous to know by those who don't know the menace of Skynet, the computer-mind that rules the future and dispatches Terminators and Infiltrators to protect itself from Sarah's son, John Connor, who is growing older and more capable as well as falling in love. The Connors and Dieter von Rossbach, who, curiously enough, resembles a certain movie star from Austria, are quite capable of holding the fort until the advent of two Infiltrators, both female in appearance. The little band of resistance fighters now has to recruit new allies and then carry the fight to the enemy. They do, though at high cost, on the way offering a feast of technical ingenuity, wry wit, offbeat characterization, and furious, convincing action. A felicitous wedding of a visually oriented writer to soundly conceived sf-movie concepts. Roland GreenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

The second novel in an alternate history series where Teddy Roosevelt is president once more right before WWI breaks out, and on his side is the Black Chamber, a secret spy network watching America's back. After foiling a German plot to devastate America's coastal cities from Boston to Galveston, crack Black Chamber agent Luz O'Malley and budding technical genius Ciara Whelan go to California to recuperate. But their well-deserved rest is cut short by the discovery of a diabolical new weapon that could give the German Imperial Navy command of the North Sea. Luz and Ciara must go deep undercover and travel across a world at war, and live under false identities in Berlin itself to ferret out the project's secrets. Close on their trail is the dangerous German agent codenamed Imperial Sword, who is determined to get his revenge, and a band of assault-rifle equipped stormtroopers, led by the murderously efficient killer Ernst Röhm. From knife-and-pistol...

The Stone Dogs is the third of four books of S.M. Stirling's alternate history series, The Domination. During the cold war between the Alliance and the Domination, Frederic and Marya work for the OSS as spies and assassins. During the Draka conquest of India, Marya Lefarge is taken prisoner. She becomes a serf to Yolande Ingolfsson, who after torturing her repeatedly with a neural weapon, forces her to become a "brooder" (i.e. a surrogate mother) for her offspring, Gwendolyn. Yolande also swears vengeance on Fred Lefarge after he kills her lover, Myfanwy Venders, during the Indian Incident. As both superpowers expand into space, they prepare different doomsday weapons. The Alliance's weapon is a computer virus ("comp plague") secretly planted in Draka military computers by spies; the Draka's is a biological virus called the Stone Dogs that causes infected personnel to go insane. Yolande discovers Marya, who has contacted the OSS, planting the comp-plague and allows her to escape with knowledge of the Stone Dogs. This forces her uncle, Archon Eric von Shrakenberg, to use the weapon prematurely. The Draka win the resulting conflict; however, their incomplete victory leads to Eric negotiating an arrangement whereupon the Alliance is allowed to launch its generation ship "The New America" and the remaining Alliance survivors in space are granted limited Draka citizenship.

Amazon.com ReviewYou've got to feel sorry for Sarah Connor. Try as she might, she just can't seem to finish off Cyberdyne Systems--the eventual progenitor of the malevolent super-AI Skynet--with any sort of finality, despite blowing up their headquarters in Terminator 2. And every time she turns around, there's yet another pesky Terminator who has just beamed back through time to finish off her son John, who (as we all know) is humanity's only hope in the machine-controlled future.Skynet and its minions chalk this up to the persistence of "several alternative world-lines" coexisting in "a state of quantum superimposition." But how's this for an explanation: it's fun to watch Sarah, John, and company run from, then run to, then ultimately beat up on Terminators, and as long as there's an interested audience, Skynet will keep sniffing out these devilish little temporal loopholes.Military-SF juggernaut S.M. Stirling takes the helm in a "fully authorized" new series that picks up where T2 left off: mom and son are on the lam in Paraguay, lying low and running a shady trucking company. Then a retired spook moves in next door, a burly Austrian type who--get this--looks just like Arnold Schwarze... um, the 800 Series Model 101. The harried John and mom, paranoid by necessity, suspect something's afoot and soon find themselves embroiled in yet another adventure involving this mysterious new stranger, the old family of Miles Dyson (the Cyberdyne scientist who took it in the kisser in T2), and a super-sexy I-950 whom Skynet has sent back in time to set things straight.Now realize that just because this sequel is "official" and "fully authorized" doesn't necessarily mean that the story lines will jibe with the T3 movie--assuming it ever comes out. But, of course, any discrepancies can just be blamed on yet another temporal anomaly. --Paul HughesFrom Publishers WeeklyBased on the world created in the motion picture written by James Cameron and William Wisher, this superior franchise fiction is the next best thing to Terminator 3. Stirling (Against the Tide of Years, etc.) is a skillful writer of action SF who has studied both the first Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) carefully. He gets the details right, and he's also thought about how, after two failures, the evil master computer of the future would modify the robots it sends back in time to kill its nemesis before he grows up. The new Terminator is female, mechanically and genetically enhanced but able to masquerade as a normal woman. She interacts with and attempts to manipulate a large cast of characters that includes, naturally, Sarah Conner and her now-teenaged son, John. Mother and son imagine they're safely hidden in Paraguay, their anti-machine crusade over, until they are noticed by a retired secret agent who happens to be a double for the nasty Arnold Schwarzenegger/first Terminator. When he innocently discovers who they are, the new Terminator also finds out and sends mechanical assassins after them. And the novel, which has been moving along steadily and efficiently, shifts into high gear. Stirling structures the plot well, and the action builds to a gripping climax which doesn't really conclude much, since this series obviously is intended to run many more books. If they're done this well, it will be an enjoyable ride. (May 8)Forecast: Robots from the future won't be able to stop this sequel to the $204-million domestic grossing T2 film from charging up genre bestseller charts.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

The Stone Dogs is the third of four books of S.M. Stirling's alternate history series, The Domination. During the cold war between the Alliance and the Domination, Frederic and Marya work for the OSS as spies and assassins. During the Draka conquest of India, Marya Lefarge is taken prisoner. She becomes a serf to Yolande Ingolfsson, who after torturing her repeatedly with a neural weapon, forces her to become a "brooder" (i.e. a surrogate mother) for her offspring, Gwendolyn. Yolande also swears vengeance on Fred Lefarge after he kills her lover, Myfanwy Venders, during the Indian Incident. As both superpowers expand into space, they prepare different doomsday weapons. The Alliance's weapon is a computer virus ("comp plague") secretly planted in Draka military computers by spies; the Draka's is a biological virus called the Stone Dogs that causes infected personnel to go insane. Yolande discovers Marya, who has contacted the OSS, planting the comp-plague and allows her to escape with knowledge of the Stone Dogs. This forces her uncle, Archon Eric von Shrakenberg, to use the weapon prematurely. The Draka win the resulting conflict; however, their incomplete victory leads to Eric negotiating an arrangement whereupon the Alliance is allowed to launch its generation ship "The New America" and the remaining Alliance survivors in space are granted limited Draka citizenship.

The third novel in a World War I alternate history series where America's greatest weapon against Germany is Black Chamber secret agent Luz O'Malley and technical genius Ciara Whelan. Only they can protect America's best hope of winning the war.The Great War is at a stalemate, and the only thing stopping Germany from striking America is the threat of the United States using their own Annihilation Gas against them. But America's supply is quickly decaying and the Central Powers know it. A plant is under construction in the remote highlands of Mexico so that America can make their own supply. President Teddy Roosevelt assigns crack agent Luz O'Malley and her technical genius Ciara Whelan to watch over the plant operating under cover identities.But German agent Horst von Duckler has escaped from the POW camp in El Paso, and he's heading in the same direction—bent on revenge against Luz, and sabotage that will deprive America of its deterrent and kill tens of...

The pulse-pounding return of Conan, the most iconic fantasy hero in popular culture, with a brand-new standalone novel by New York Times bestselling author S.M. Stirling, tied directly to the famous tales written by the legendary Robert E. Howard.Conan the Barbarian, the world’s most famous fantasy hero, returns in an all-new novel tied directly to the famous works by his legendary creator, Robert E. Howard. Set early in his life, Conan has left his northern homeland to cut a bloody swath across the legendary Hyborian Age. A mercenary, a soldier, a thief, and a pirate, he faces conquering armies, malicious sorcerers, and monstrous creatures—against which he wields only the sword held in his powerful grasp. A superstar of novels, short fiction, comics, video games, films, and an upcoming Netflix series, his adventures have inspired many of the most popular authors of the 20th and 21st centuries. This is the first in a...