The Heretic-eARC

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David Drake’s legendary Raj Whitehall/The General series, stunningly reborn! In a world of muskets, bows and arrows, and reptile riding nomads, a young warrior fights against a totalitarian computer devoted to stasis.David Drake’s legendary Raj Whitehall series, stunningly reborn! Humanity settled the stars, only to fall into a catastrophic collapse.  On one planet, a single artificial intelligence, a computer program known as Center, found a military genius of grit and daring in Raj Whitehall, and the Galactic Republic rose again.But many dark planets remain—planets such as Duisberg.  Here, a single river cuts through a vast continental desert and a culture not unlike that of New Kingdom Egypt has developed.  But this is an Egyptian social structure armed with flintlocks and blunderbusses and caught in a never ending cycle of nomadic invasion and repulsion.  Behind it all is the planetary controlling A.I. known to the locals as Zentrum.  For Zentrum, keeping the Land in stasis is all.  Individual life and freedom are distinctly secondary considerations.But then a capsule falls from the sky.  It contains the forbidden metal, plastic, and circuit boards that Zentrum hates.  Even worse, within those circuits, secretly stowed away, are uploaded versions of Raj and Center.What Raj and Center need now is a hero to break the Land’s stasis and lead Duisberg back from the galactic dark ages.  Enter Abel Dashian.  The son of a local military commander, he is a brilliant and courageous young man who has lost his mother to a simple bacterial infection.  He is a young man who will dare anything to avenge his mother’s death and bring about change.He is the Heretic.About the Raj Whitehall series:“[T]old with knowledge of military tactics and hardware, and vividly described action. . .devotees of military SF should enjoy themselves.”—Publishers Weekly“[A] thoroughly engrossing military sf series . .  . superb battle scenes, ingenious weaponry and tactics, homages to Kipling, and many other goodies. High fun.”—Booklist* *About David Drake:“[P]rose as cold and hard s the metal alloy of a tank … rivals Crane and Remarque …” –Chicago Sun-Times“Drake couldn’t write a bad action scene at gunpoint.” –Booklist About Tony Daniel:“[D]azzling stuff.”–New York Times Book Review“[His work] teems with vivid characters and surprising action.”–Publishers Weekly (starred review)“Daniel proves that the Golden Age of science fiction is right here and now.”–Greg Bear “[A] large cast of utterly graspable humans, mostly military and political folks, of all ranks and capacities and temperments. Daniel has a keen eye for the kinds of in extremis thinking and behavior that such a wartime situation would engender. . . .Following in the footsteps of Poul Anderson and Greg Bear. . .”—Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine on Daniel's Guardian of NightAbout the AuthorThe Army took David Drake from Duke Law School and sent him on a motorized tour of Viet Nam and Cambodia with the 11th Cav, the Blackhorse. He learned new skills, saw interesting sights, and met exotic people who hadn't run fast enough to get away.  Dave returned to become Chapel Hill's Assistant Town Attorney and to try to put his life back together through fiction making sense of his Army experiences.  Dave describes war from where he saw it: the loader's hatch of a tank in Cambodia. His military experience, combined with his formal education in history and Latin, has made him one of the foremost writers of realistic action SF and fantasy. His books include the genre-defining and bestselling Hammer’s Slammers series, the RCN series including What Distant Deeps, In the Stormy Red Sky, The Way to Glory, and many more. His bestselling Hammer's Slammers series is credited with creating the genre of modern Military SF. He often wishes he had a less interesting background.  Dave lives with his family in rural North Carolina.Tony Daniel is the author of five science fiction books, the latest of which is Guardian of Night, as well as an award-winning short story collection, The Robot’s Twilight Companion.  He is Hugo finalist for his story “Life on the Moon,” which also won the Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award. Daniel’s short fiction has been much anthologized and has been collected in multiple year’s best compilations.  Daniel has also cowritten screenplays for SyFy Channel horror movies, and during the early 2000s was the writer and director of numerous audio dramas for critically-acclaimed SCIFI.COM’s Seeing Ear Theatre. Born in Alabama, Daniel has lived in St. Louis, Los Angeles, Seattle, Prague, and New York City.  He now lives in Wake Forest, North Carolina with his wife and two children.