Books by Kroese, Robert

Kroese, Robert. The Dawn of the Iron Dragon. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2018. ISBN 978-1-7220-2331-7.
This is the second volume in the Iron Dragon trilogy which began with The Dream of the Iron Dragon (August 2018). At the end of the first book, the crew of the Andrea Luhman stranded on Earth in the middle ages faced a seemingly impossible challenge. They, and their Viking allies, could save humanity from extinction in a war in the distant future only by building a space program capable of launching a craft into Earth orbit starting with an infrastructure based upon wooden ships and edged weapons. Further, given what these accidental time travellers, the first in history, had learned about the nature of travel to the past in their adventures to date, all of this must be done in the deepest secrecy and without altering the history to be written in the future. Recorded history, they discovered, cannot be changed, and hence any attempt to do something which would leave evidence of a medieval space program or intervention of advanced technology in the affairs of the time, would be doomed to failure. These constraints placed almost impossible demands upon what was already a formidable challenge.

From their ship's computer, the exiled spacemen had a close approximation to all of human knowledge, so they were rich in bits. But when it came to it: materials, infrastructure, tools, sources of energy and motive power, and everything else, they had almost nothing. Even the simplest rocket capable of achieving Earth orbit has tens to hundreds of thousands of parts, most requiring precision manufacture, stringent control of material quality, and rigorous testing. Consider a humble machine screw. In the 9th century A.D. there weren't any hardware stores. If you needed a screw, or ten thousand of them, to hold your rocket components together, you needed first to locate and mine the iron ore, then smelt the iron from the ore, refine it with high temperature and forced air (both of which require their own technologies, including machine screws) to achieve the desired carbon content, adding alloying metals such as nickel, chromium, cobalt, tungsten, and manganese, all of which have to be mined and refined first. Then the steel must be formed into the desired shape (requiring additional technologies), heat-treated, and then finally the threads must be cut into the blank, requiring machine tools made to sufficient precision that the screws will be interchangeable, with something to power the tools (all of which, of course, contain screws). And that's just a screw. Thinking about a turbopump, regeneratively cooled combustion chamber, hydraulically-actuated gimbal mechanism, gyroscopes and accelerometers, or any of the myriad other components of even the simplest launcher are apt to induce despair.

But the spacemen were survivors, and they knew that the entire future of the human species, driven in the future they had come from to near-extinction by the relentless Cho-ta'an, depended upon their getting off the Earth and delivering the planet-busting weapon which might turn the tide for their descendants centuries hence. While they needed just about everything, what they needed most was minds: human brainpower and the skills flowing from it to find and process the materials to build the machines to build the machines to build the machines which, after a decades-long process of recapitulating centuries of human technological progress, would enable them to accomplish their ambitious yet utterly essential mission.

People in the 9th century were just as intelligent as those today, but in most of the world literacy was rare and even more scarce was the acquired intellectual skill of thinking logically, breaking down a problem into its constituent parts, and the mental flexibility to learn and apply mind tools, such as algebra, trigonometry, calculus, Newton's and Kepler's laws, and a host of others which had yet to be discovered. These rare people were to be found in the emerging cities, where learning and the embryos of what would become the great universities of the later Middle Ages were developing. And so missions were dispatched to Constantinople, the greatest of these cities, and other centres of learning and innovation, to recruit not the famous figures recorded in history (whose disappearance into a secret project was inconsistent with that history, and hence impossible), but their promising young followers. These cities were cosmopolitan crossroads, dangerous but also sufficiently diverse that a Viking longboat showing up with people who barely spoke any known language would not attract undue attention. But the rulers of these cities appreciated the value of their learned people, and trying to attract them was perilous and could lead to hazards and misadventures.

On top of all of these challenges, a Cho-ta'an ship had followed the Andrea Luhman through the hyperspace gate and whatever had caused them to be thrown back in time, and a small contingent of the aliens had made it to Earth, bent on stopping the spacemen's getting off the planet at any cost. The situation was highly asymmetrical: while the spacemen had to accomplish a near-impossible task, the Cho-ta'an need only prevent them by any means possible. And being Cho-ta'an, if those means included loosing a doomsday plague to depopulate Europe, well, so be it. And the presence of the Cho-ta'an, wherever they might be hiding, redoubled the need for secrecy in every aspect of the Iron Dragon project.

Another contingent of the recruiting project finds itself in the much smaller West Francia city of Paris, just as Viking forces are massing for what history would record as the Siege of Paris in A.D. 885–886. In this epic raid, a force of tens of thousands (today estimated around 20,000, around half that claimed in the account by the monk Abbo Cernuus, who has been called “in a class of his own as an exaggerator”) of Vikings in hundreds (300, probably, 700 according to Abbo) of ships laid siege to a city defended by just two hundred Parisian men-at-arms. In this account, the spacemen, with foreknowledge of how it was going to come out, provide invaluable advice to Count Odo of Paris and Gozlin, the “fighting Bishop” of Paris, in defending their city as it was simultaneously ravaged by a plague (wonder where that came from?), and in persuading King Charles (“the Fat”) to come to the relief of the city. The epic battle for Paris, which ended not in triumph but rather a shameful deal, was a turning point in the history of France. The efforts of the spacemen, while critical and perhaps decisive, remained consistent with written history, at least that written by Abbo, who they encouraged in his proclivity for exaggeration.

Meanwhile, back at the secret base in Iceland, chosen to stay out of the tangles of European politics and out of the way of their nemesis Harald Fairhair, the first King of Norway, local rivalries intrude upon the desired isolation. It appears another, perhaps disastrous, siege may be in the offing, putting the entire project at risk. And with all of this, one of those knock-you-off-your-feet calamities the author is so fond of throwing at his characters befalls them, forcing yet another redefinition of their project and a breathtaking increase in its ambition and complexity, just as they have to contemplate making new and perilous alliances simply to survive.

The second volume of a trilogy is often the most challenging to write. In the first, everything is new, and the reader gets to meet the characters, the setting, and the challenges to be faced in the story. In the conclusion, everything is pulled together into a satisfying resolution. But in that one in the middle, it's mostly developing characters, plots, introducing new (often subordinate) characters, and generally moving things along—one risks readers' regarding it as “filler”. In this book, the author artfully avoids that risk by making a little-known but epic battle the centrepiece of the story, along with intrigue, a thorny ethical dilemma, and multiple plot threads playing out from Iceland to North Africa to the Dardanelles. You absolutely should read the first volume, The Dream of the Iron Dragon, before starting this one—although there is a one page summary of that book at the start, it isn't remotely adequate to bring you up to speed and avoid your repeatedly exclaiming “Who?”, “What?”, and “How?” as you enjoy this story.

When you finish this volume, the biggest question in your mind will probably be “How in the world is he going to wrap all of this up in just one more book?” The only way to find out is to pick up The Voyage of the Iron Dragon, which I will be reviewing here in due course. This saga (what else can you call an epic with Vikings and spaceships?) will be ranked among the very best of alternative history science fiction, and continues to demonstrate why independent science fiction is creating a new Golden Age for readers and rendering the legacy publishers of tedious “diversity” propaganda impotent and obsolete.

The Kindle edition is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

May 2019 Permalink

Kroese, Robert. The Dream of the Iron Dragon. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2018. ISBN 978-1-9837-2921-8.
The cover tells you all you need to know about this book: Vikings!—spaceships! What could go wrong? From the standpoint of a rip-roaring science fiction adventure, absolutely nothing: this masterpiece is further confirmation that we're living in a new Golden Age of science fiction, made possible by the intensely meritocratic world of independent publishing sweeping aside the politically-correct and social justice warrior converged legacy publishers and re-opening the doors of the genre to authors who spin yarns with heroic characters, challenging ideas, and red-blooded adventure just as in the works of the grandmasters of previous golden ages.

From the standpoint of the characters in this novel, a great many things go wrong, and there the story begins. In the twenty-third century, humans find themselves in a desperate struggle with the only other intelligent species they'd encountered, the Cho-ta'an. First contact was in 2125, when a human interstellar ship was destroyed by the Cho-ta'an while exploring the Tau Ceti system. Shortly thereafter, co-ordinated attacks began on human ships and settlements which indicated the Cho-ta'an possessed faster-than-light travel, which humans did not. Humans formed the Interstellar Defense League (IDL) to protect their interests and eventually discovered and captured a Cho-ta'an jumpgate, which allowed instantaneous travel across interstellar distances. The IDL was able to reverse-engineer the gate sufficiently to build their own copies, but did not understand how it worked—it was apparently based upon some kind of wormhole physics beyond their comprehension.

Humans fiercely defended their settlements, but inexorably the Cho-ta'an advanced, seemingly driven by an inflexible philosophy that the universe was theirs alone and any competition must be exterminated. All attempts at diplomacy failed. The Earth had been rendered uninhabitable and evacuated, and most human settlements destroyed or taken over by the Cho-ta'an. Humanity was losing the war and time was running out.

In desperation, the IDL set up an Exploratory Division whose mission was to seek new homes for humans sufficiently distant from Cho-ta'an space to buy time: avoiding extinction in the hope the new settlements would be able to develop technologies to defend themselves before the enemy discovered them and attacked. Survey ship Andrea Luhman was en route to the Finlan Cluster on such a mission when it received an enigmatic message which seemed to indicate there was intelligent life out in this distant region where no human or Cho-ta'an had been known to go.

A complex and tense encounter leaves the crew of this unarmed exploration ship in possession of a weapon which just might turn the tide for humanity and end the war. Unfortunately, as they start their return voyage with this precious cargo, a Cho-ta'an warship takes up pursuit, threatening to vaporise this last best hope for survival. In a desperate move, the crew of the Andrea Luhman decide to try something that had never been attempted before: thread the needle of the rarely used jumpgate to abandoned Earth at nearly a third of the speed of light while evading missiles fired by the pursuing warship. What could go wrong? Actually a great deal. Flash—darkness.

When they got the systems back on-line, it was clear they'd made it to the Sol system, but they picked up nothing on any radio frequency. Even though Earth had been abandoned, satellites remained and, in any case, the jumpgate beacon should be transmitting. On further investigation, they discovered the stars were wrong. Precision measurements of star positions correlated with known proper motion from the ship's vast database allowed calculation of the current date. And the answer? “March sixteen, 883 a.d.

The jumpgate beacon wasn't transmitting because the jumpgate hadn't been built yet and wouldn't be for over a millennium. Worse, a component of the ship's main drive had been destroyed in the jump and, with only auxiliary thrusters it would take more than 1500 years to get to the nearest jumpgate. They couldn't survive that long in stasis and, even if they did, they'd arrive two centuries too late to save humanity from the Cho-ta'an.

Desperate situations call for desperate measures, and this was about as desperate as can be imagined. While there was no hope of repairing the drive component on-board, it just might be possible to find, refine, and process the resources into a replacement on the Earth. It was decided to send the ship's only lander to an uninhabited, resource-rich portion of the Earth and, using its twenty-third century technology, build the required part. What could go wrong? But even though nobody on the crew was named Murphy he was, as usual, on board. After a fraught landing attempt in which a great many things go wrong, the landing party of four finds themselves wrecked in a snowfield in what today is southern Norway. Then the Vikings show up.

The crew of twenty-third century spacefarers have crashed in the Norway of Harald Fairhair, who was struggling to unite individual bands of Vikings into a kingdom under his rule. The people from the fallen silver sky ship must quickly decide with whom to ally themselves, how to communicate across a formidable language barrier and millennia of culture, whether they can or dare meddle with history, and how to survive and somehow save humanity in what is now their distant future.

There is adventure, strategy, pitched battles, technological puzzles, and courage and resourcefulness everywhere in this delightful narrative. You grasp just how hard life was in those days, how differently people viewed the world, and how little all of our accumulated knowledge is worth without the massive infrastructure we have built over the centuries as we have acquired it.

You will reach the end of this novel wanting more and you're in luck. Volume two of the trilogy, The Dawn of the Iron Dragon (Kindle edition), is now available and the conclusion, The Voyage of the Iron Dragon, is scheduled for publication in December, 2018. It's all I can do not to immediately devour the second volume starting right now.

The Kindle edition is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

August 2018 Permalink

Kroese, Robert. Messiah (Mammon vol. 2). Grand Rapids MI: St. Culain Press, 2022. ASIN B09GZM9YRC.
After the asteroid diversion and capture scheme chronicled in volume 1 of the Mammon trilogy, Titan (October 2021), seen as the last chance to rescue the U.S. and world economy from decades of profligate spending, borrowing, money printing, and looting of productive enterprise by a venal and corrupt political class, aborted due to industrial espionage and sabotage, an already dire economic situation implodes into exponentially accelerating inflation, across the board economic collapse, widespread shortages, breakdown of civil order, and cracks beginning to appear in political structures, with some U.S. states enforcing border controls and moving toward “soft secession”.

Billionaire Davis Christopher, who further increased his fortune by betting against the initial attempt to capture Mammon, has set up shop at the former OTRAG launch site in the Libyan desert, distant from the intrigue and kleptocratic schemes of the illegitimate Washington regime. In a chaotic and multipolar world, actors at all levels and around the globe vie for what they can get: the U.S. Treasury, now out to plunder cryptocurrency as its next source of funds; the Los Angeles Police Department, establishing itself as a regional rogue state; the Chinese Communist Party, which turns its envious eyes toward the wealth created by offshore paradise Utanau; the emerging Islamic State in Egypt and the Maghreb, consolidating its power after the collapse of regimes in North Africa, and providing some stability in the face of doomsday Salafist cult Al-Qiyamah, which sees the return of Mammon bringing Allah's well-deserved judgement on the world.

With these and many other threads running in parallel and interacting with one another in complicated and non-obvious ways, the story, told mostly through the eyes of characters we met in the first volume, and now confronted with a global collapse in progress, is gripping and illustrates the theme that runs though much of the author's work: that, when faced with existential global threats, the greatest challenges humanity must confront are often those created by the mischief of other humans, not exogenous peril. So it is here, with the asteroid inexorably approaching the Earth for its second pass, probability of impact jumping all around the scale as observations and calculations are refined, and multiple actors seeking their own desired outcomes from the event and to thwart the ambitions of rivals.

This is a masterful continuation of the story that began in the first volume, reaching a climax which is not a cliffhanger, but will leave you eagerly anticipating the conclusion in volume 3, Nemesis, scheduled for publication on July 28, 2022.

The Kindle edition of this book, like volume 1, is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

February 2022 Permalink

Kroese, Robert. Schrödinger's Gat. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2012. ISBN 978-1-4903-1821-9.
It was pure coincidence (or was it?) that caused me to pick up this book immediately after finishing Dean Radin's Real Magic (May 2018), but it is a perfect fictional companion to that work. Robert Kroese, whose Starship Grifters (February 2018) is the funniest science fiction novel I've read in the last several years, here delivers a tour de force grounded in quantum theory, multiple worlds, free will, the nature of consciousness, determinism versus uncertainty, the nature of genius, and the madness which can result from thinking too long and deeply about these enigmatic matters. This is a novel, not a work of philosophy or physics, and the story moves along smartly with interesting characters including a full-on villain and an off-stage…well, we're not really sure. In a postscript, the author explicitly lists the “cheats” he used to make the plot work but notes, “The remarkable thing about writing this book was how few liberties I actually had to take.”

The story is narrated by Paul Bayes (whose name should be a clue we're about to ponder what we can know in an uncertain world), who we meet as he is ready to take his life by jumping under a BART train at a Bay Area station. Paul considers himself a failure: failed crime writer, failed father whose wife divorced him and took the kids, and undistinguished high school English teacher with little hope of advancement. Perhaps contributing to his career problems, Paul is indecisive. Kill himself or just walk away—why not flip a coin? Paul's life is spared through the intervention of a mysterious woman who he impulsively follows on a madcap adventure which ends up averting a potential mass murder on San Francisco's Embarcadero. Only after, does he learn her name, Tali. She agrees to meet him for dinner the next day and explain everything.

Paul shows up at the restaurant, but Tali doesn't. Has he been stood up? He knows next to nothing about Tali—not even her last name, but after some time on the Internet following leads from their brief conversation the day before he discovers a curious book by a recently-retired Stanford physics professor titled Fate and Consciousness—hardly the topics you'd expect one with his background to expound upon. After reading some of the odd text, he decides to go to the source.

This launches Paul into an series of adventures which cause him to question the foundations of reality: to what extent do we really have free will, and how much is the mindless gears of determinism turning toward the inevitable? Why does the universe seem to “fight back” when we try to impose our will upon it? Is there a “force”, and can we detect disturbances in it and act upon them? (The technology described in the story is remarkably similar to the one to which I have contributed to developing and deploying off and on for the last twenty years.) If such a thing could be done, who might be willing to kill to obtain the power it would confer? Is the universe a passive player in the unfolding of the future, or an active and potentially ruthless agent?

All of these questions are explored in a compelling story with plenty of action as Paul grapples with the mysteries confronting him, incorporating prior discoveries into the emerging picture. This is an entertaining, rewarding, and thought-provoking read which, although entirely fiction, may not be any more weird than the universe we inhabit.

The Kindle edition is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

May 2018 Permalink

Kroese, Robert. Starship Grifters. Seattle: 47North, 2014. ISBN 978-1-4778-1848-0.
This is the funniest science fiction novel I have read in quite a while. Set in the year 3013, not long after galactic civilisation barely escaped an artificial intelligence apocalypse and banned fully self-aware robots, the story is related by Sasha, one of a small number of Self-Arresting near Sentient Heuristic Androids built to be useful without running the risk of their taking over. SASHA robots are equipped with an impossible-to-defeat watchdog module which causes a hard reboot whenever they are on the verge of having an original thought. The limitation of the design proved a serious handicap, and all of their manufacturers went bankrupt. Our narrator, Sasha, was bought at an auction by the protagonist, Rex Nihilo, for thirty-five credits in a lot of “ASSORTED MACHINE PARTS”. Sasha is Rex's assistant and sidekick.

Rex is an adventurer. Sasha says he “never had much of an interest in anything but self-preservation and the accumulation of wealth, the latter taking clear precedence over the former.” Sasha's built in limitations (in addition to the new idea watchdog, she is unable to tell a lie, but if humans should draw incorrect conclusions from incomplete information she provides them, well…) pose problems in Rex's assorted lines of work, most of which seem to involve scams, gambling, and contraband of various kinds. In fact, Rex seems to fit in very well with the universe he inhabits, which appears to be firmly grounded in Walker's Law: “Absent evidence to the contrary, assume everything is a scam”. Evidence appears almost totally absent, and the oppressive tyranny called the Galactic Malarchy, those who supply it, the rebels who oppose it, entrepreneurs like Rex working in the cracks, organised religions and cults, and just about everybody else, appear to be on the make or on the take, looking to grift everybody else for their own account. Cosmologists attribute this to the “Strong Misanthropic Principle, which asserts that the universe exists in order to screw with us.” Rex does his part, although he usually seems to veer between broke and dangerously in debt.

Perhaps that's due to his somewhat threadbare talent stack. As Shasha describes him, Rex doesn't have a head for numbers. Nor does he have much of a head for letters, and “Newtonian physics isn't really his strong suit either”. He is, however, occasionally lucky, or so it seems at first. In an absurdly high-stakes card game with weapons merchant Gavin Larviton, reputed to be one of the wealthiest men in the galaxy, Rex manages to win, almost honestly, not only Larviton's personal starship, but an entire planet, Schnufnaasik Six. After barely escaping a raid by Malarchian marines led by the dread and squeaky-voiced Lord Heinous Vlaak, Rex and Sasha set off in the ship Rex has won, the Flagrante Delicto, to survey the planetary prize.

It doesn't take Rex long to discover, not surprisingly, that he's been had, and that his financial situation is now far more dire than he'd previously been able to imagine. If any of the bounty hunters now on his trail should collar him, he could spend a near-eternity on the prison planet of Gulagatraz (the names are a delight in themselves). So, it's off the rebel base on the forest moon (which is actually a swamp; the swamp moon is all desert) to try to con the Frente Repugnante (all the other names were taken by rival splinter factions, so they ended up with “Revolting Front”, which was translated to Spanish to appear to Latino planets) into paying for a secret weapon which exists only in Rex's imagination.

Thus we embark upon a romp which has a laugh-out-loud line about every other page. This is comic science fiction in the vein of Keith Laumer's Retief stories. As with Laumer, Kroese achieves the perfect balance of laugh lines, plot development, interesting ideas, and recurring gags (there's a planet-destroying weapon called the “plasmatic entropy cannon” which the oft-inebriated Rex refers to variously as the “positronic endoscopy cannon”, “pulmonary embolism cannon”, “ponderosa alopecia cannon”, “propitious elderberry cannon”, and many other ways). There is a huge and satisfying reveal at the end—I kind of expected one was coming, but I'd have never guessed the details.

If reading this leaves you with an appetite for more Rex Nihilo, there is a prequel novella, The Chicolini Incident, and a sequel, Aye, Robot.

The Kindle edition is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

February 2018 Permalink

Kroese, Robert. Titan (Mammon vol. 1). Grand Rapids MI: St. Culain Press, 2021. ASIN B09DDHZ4R7.
With each successive work, science fiction author Robert Kroese is distinguishing himself not just as one of the most outstanding writers in the genre today, but also one of the most versatile. He seems to handily jump from laugh-out-loud satire worthy of Keith Laumer in novels like Starship Grifters (February 2018), cerebral quantum weirdness in Schrödinger's Gat (May 2018), to the meticulously researched alternative history time travel Iron Dragon epic (August 2018 et seq.). Now, in the Mammon trilogy, of which this is the first volume, he turns to the techno-economic-political thriller and, once again, triumphs, with a work worthy of Paul Erdman and Tom Clancy.

By 2036, profligate spending, exponentially growing debt, and indiscriminate money printing trying to paper over the abyss, has brought the United States to the brink of a cataclysmic financial reckoning. Both parties agree only on increasingly absurd stratagems to keep it from crashing down, and when entrepreneur Kade Kapur offers salvation in the form of a public-private partnership to exploit the wealth of the solar system by mining near-Earth asteroids (as the only way to keep grabby government from seizing his wealth), desperate politicians are quick to jump in the lifeboat.

But they are politicians, and in a continental scale empire in decline, populated by hundreds of millions of grifters and layabouts, where the “rule of law” means the rule of lawyers in dresses (judges) appointed by politicians, nothing can be taken for granted, as Kade discovers when he chooses to base his venture in the United States.

This is a compelling page turner and, once again, Kroese demonstrates how thorough is the research behind these yarns. He not only gets the economics of hyperinflation absolutely correct, but, in the best tradition of science fiction, “shows, not tells” the psychology which grips those experiencing it and how rapidly the thin veneer of civilisation can erode when money dies.

This novel ends at a point that will leave you eager to discover what happens next. Fortunately, we won't have all that long to wait: book two in the series, Messiah, will be published on February 28, 2022, and you can pre-order your copy today.

October 2021 Permalink

Kroese, Robert. The Voyage of the Iron Dragon. Grand Rapids MI: St. Culain Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-7982-3431-0.
This is the third and final volume in the Iron Dragon trilogy which began with The Dream of the Iron Dragon (August 2018) and continued in The Dawn of the Iron Dragon (May 2019). When reading a series of books I've discovered, I usually space them out to enjoy them over time, but the second book of this trilogy left its characters in such a dire pickle I just couldn't wait to see how the author managed to wrap up the story in just one more book and dove right in to the concluding volume. It is a satisfying end to the saga, albeit in some places seeming rushed compared to the more deliberate development of the story and characters in the first two books.

First of all, this note. Despite being published in three books, this is one huge, sprawling story which stretches over more than a thousand pages, decades of time, and locations as far-flung as Constantinople, Iceland, the Caribbean, and North America, and in addition to their cultures, we have human spacefarers from the future, Vikings, and an alien race called the Cho-ta'an bent on exterminating humans from the galaxy. You should read the three books in order: Dream, Dawn, and Voyage. If you start in the middle, despite the second and third volumes' having a brief summary of the story so far, you'll be completely lost as to who the characters are, what they're trying to do, and how they ended up pursuing the desperate and seemingly impossible task in which they are engaged (building an Earth-orbital manned spacecraft in the middle ages while leaving no historical traces of their activity which later generations of humans might find). “Read the whole thing,” in order. It's worth it.

With the devastating events which concluded the second volume, the spacemen are faced with an even more daunting challenge than that in which they were previously engaged, and with far less confidence of success in their mission of saving humanity in its war for survival against the Cho-ta'an more than 1500 years in their future. As this book begins, more than two decades have passed since the spacemen crashed on Earth. They have patiently been building up the infrastructure required to build their rocket, establishing mining, logging, materials processing, and manufacturing at a far-flung series of camps all linked together by Viking-built and -crewed oceangoing ships. Just as important as tools and materials is human capital: the spacemen have had to set up an ongoing programme to recruit, educate, and train the scientists, engineers, technicians, drafters, managers, and tradespeople of all kinds needed for a 20th century aerospace project, all in a time when only a tiny fraction of the population is literate, and they have reluctantly made peace with the Viking way of “recruiting” the people they need.

The difficulty of all of this is compounded by the need to operate in absolute secrecy. Experience has taught the spacemen that, having inadvertently travelled into Earth's past, history cannot be changed. Consequently, nothing they do can interfere in any way with the course of recorded human history because that would conflict with what actually happened and would therefore be doomed to failure. And in addition, some Cho-ta'an who landed on Earth may still be alive and bent on stopping their project. While they must work technological miracles to have a slim chance of saving humanity, the Cho-ta'an need only thwart them in any one of a multitude of ways to win. Their only hope is to disappear.

The story is one of dogged persistence, ingenuity in the face of formidable obstacles everywhere; dealing with adversaries as varied as Viking chieftains, the Vatican, Cho-ta'an aliens, and native American tribes; epic battles; disheartening setbacks; and inspiring triumphs. It is a heroic story on a grand scale, worthy of inclusion among the great epics of science fiction's earlier golden ages.

When it comes to twentieth century rocket engineering, there are a number of goofs and misconceptions in the story, almost all of which could have been remedied without any impact on the plot. Although they aren't precisely plot spoilers, I'll take them behind the curtain for space-nerd readers who wish to spot them for themselves without foreknowledge.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.  
  • In chapter 7, Alma says, “The Titan II rockets used liquid hydrogen for the upper stages, but they used kerosene for the first stage.” This is completely wrong. The Titan II was a two stage rocket and used the same hypergolic propellants (hydrazine fuel and dinitrogen tetroxide oxidiser) in both the first and second stages.
  • In chapter 30 it is claimed “While the first stage of a Titan II rocket could be powered by kerosene, the second and third stages needed a fuel with a higher specific impulse in order to reach escape velocity of 25,000 miles per hour.” Oh dear—let's take this point by point. First of all, the first stage of the Titan II was not and could not be powered by kerosene. It was designed for hypergolic fuels, and its turbopumps and lack of an igniter would not work with kerosene. As described below, the earlier Titan I used kerosene, but the Titan II was a major re-design which could not be adapted for kerosene. Second, the second stage of the Titan II used the same hypergolic propellant as the first stage, and this propellant had around the same specific impulse as kerosene and liquid oxygen. Third, the Titan II did not have a third stage at all. It delivered the Gemini spacecraft into orbit using the same two stage configuration as the ballistic missile. The Titan II was later adapted to use a third stage for unmanned space launch missions, but a third stage was never used in Project Gemini. Finally, the mission of the Iron Dragon, like that of the Titan II launching Gemini, was to place its payload in low Earth orbit with a velocity of around 17,500 miles per hour, not escape velocity of 25,000 miles per hour. Escape velocity would fling the payload into orbit around the Sun, not on an intercept course with the target in Earth orbit.
  • In chapter 45, it is stated that “Later versions of the Titan II rockets had used hypergolic fuels, simplifying their design.” This is incorrect: the Titan I rocket used liquid oxygen and kerosene (not liquid hydrogen), while the Titan II, a substantially different missile, used hypergolic propellants from inception. Basing the Iron Dragon's design upon the Titan II and then using liquid hydrogen and oxygen makes no sense at all and wouldn't work. Liquid hydrogen is much less dense than the hypergolic fuel used in the Titan II and would require a much larger fuel tank of entirely different design, incorporating insulation which was unnecessary on the Titan II. These changes would ripple all through the design, resulting in an entirely different rocket. In addition, the low density of liquid hydrogen would require an entirely different turbopump design and, not being hypergolic with liquid oxygen, would require a different pre-burner to drive the turbopumps.
  • A few sentences later, it is said that “Another difficult but relatively straightforward problem was making the propellant tanks strong enough to be pressurized to 5,000 psi but not so heavy they impeded the rocket's journey to space.” This isn't how tank pressurisation works in liquid fuelled rockets. Tanks are pressurised to increase structural rigidity and provide positive flow into the turbopumps, but pressures are modest. The pressure needed to force propellants into the combustion chamber comes from the boost imparted by the turbopumps, not propellant tank pressurisation. For example, in the Space Shuttle's External Tank, the flight pressure of the liquid hydrogen tank was between 32 and 34 psia, and the liquid oxygen tank 20 to 22 psig, vastly less than “5,000 psi”. A fuel tank capable of withstanding 5,000 psi would be far too heavy to ever get off the ground.
  • In chapter 46 we are told, “The Titan II had been adapted from the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile….” This is completely incorrect. In fact, the Titan I was developed as a backup to the Atlas in case the latter missile's innovative technologies such as the pressure-stabilised “balloon tanks” could not be made to work. The Atlas and Titan I were developed in parallel and, when the Atlas went into service first, the Titan I was quickly retired and replaced by the hypergolic fuelled Titan II, which provided more secure basing and rapid response to a launch order than the Atlas.
  • In chapter 50, when the Iron Dragon takes off, those viewing it “squinted against the blinding glare”. But liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen (as well as the hypergolic fuels used by the original Titan II) burn with a nearly invisible flame. Liquid oxygen and kerosene produce a brilliant flame, but these propellants were not used in this rocket.
  • And finally, it's not a matter of the text, but what's with that cover illustration, anyway? The rocket ascending in the background is clearly modelled on a Soviet/Russian R-7/Soyuz rocket, which is nothing like what the Iron Dragon is supposed to be. While Iron Dragon is described as a two stage rocket burning liquid hydrogen and oxygen, Soyuz is a LOX/kerosene rocket (and the illustration has the characteristic bright flame of those propellants), has four side boosters (clearly visible), and the spacecraft has a visible launch escape tower, which Gemini did not have and was never mentioned in connection with the Iron Dragon.

Fixing all of these results in the Iron Dragon's being a two stage (see the start of chapter 51) liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidiser rocket of essentially novel design, sharing little with the Titan II. The present-day rocket which most resembles it is the Delta IV, which in its baseline (“Medium”) configuration is a two stage LOX/hydrogen rocket with more than adequate payload capacity to place a Gemini capsule in low Earth orbit. Its first stage RS-68 engines were designed to reduce complexity and cost, and would be a suitable choice for a project having to start from scratch. Presumably the database which provided the specifications of the Titan II would also include the Delta IV, and adapting it to their requirements (which would be largely a matter of simplifying and derating the design in the interest of reliability and ease of manufacture) would be much easier than trying to transform the Titan II into a LOX/hydrogen launcher.

Spoilers end here.  

Despite the minor quibbles in the spoiler section (which do not detract in any way from enjoyment of the tale), this is a rollicking good adventure and satisfying conclusion to the Iron Dragon saga. It seemed to me that the last part of the story was somewhat rushed and could have easily occupied another full book, but the author promised us a trilogy and that's what he delivered, so fair enough. In terms of accomplishing the mission upon which the spacemen and their allies had laboured for half a century, essentially all of the action occurs in the last quarter of this final volume, starting in chapter 44. As usual nothing comes easy, and the project must face a harrowing challenge which might undo everything at the last moment, then confront the cold equations of orbital mechanics. The conclusion is surprising and, while definitively ending this tale, leaves the door open to further adventures set in this universe.

This series has been a pure delight from start to finish. It wasn't obvious to this reader at the outset that it would be possible to pull time travel, Vikings, and spaceships together into a story that worked, but the author has managed to do so, while maintaining historical authenticity about a neglected period in European history. It is particularly difficult to craft a time travel yarn in which it is impossible for the characters to change the recorded history of our world, but this is another challenge the author rises to and almost makes it look easy. Independent science fiction is where readers will find the heroes, interesting ideas, and adventure which brought them to science fiction in the first place, and Robert Kroese is establishing himself as a prolific grandmaster of this exciting new golden age.

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June 2019 Permalink