INTRODUCTION
by Jerry E. Pournelle
Janissaries wasn't supposed to be a series. It wasn't even supposed to be a whole novel.
A long time ago Tom Doherty and Jim Baen, then of Ace Books, got the notion for a series of "massively illustrated" works of about 45,000 words, a length technically known as novella.
It was a good idea. The novella is often the right length for a science fiction story. If it's shorter, the author may have to stint on either the science or the characterizations. The problem is that there aren't many places to publish works of that length. Magazines don't want them, because magazine editors want a lot of names and stories on the title page, and a novella takes up more room than three novelettes and two short stories. Books don't want them because they're too short. The illustrations were supposed to take care of that problem.
I was supposed to lead off the series, but I had a lot of other things going. I don't remember who did the very first one, but Larry Niven did The Magic Goes Away and The Patchwork Girl before I got started. By then Ace was getting anxious to have a book. "The illustrations take a while," they explained. "Please, can't you tell us what you're working on?" But I didn't have any notion.
Meanwhile, I was commissioned to do a series of articles on UFOs. I did interviews with senior officials of NICAP (which is a private organization despite its name: National Investigating Commission on Aerial Phenomena, and has a number of members I respect); the late Professor J. Allan Hynek, who began as a complete skeptic and ended as a tentative believer; some of the former project officers of Blue Book, etc. Blue Book, incidentally, was the USAF investigation of UFO reports. The Air Force never wanted the job, and the post of Blue Book project officer was a "George job": "Let George do it," George being the most junior officer available. . . .
I didn't come to any conclusions. It is certain that men have been hanged after appeals to the Supreme Court of the U.S. on worse evidence than we have for the existence of flying saucers. On the other hand, we don't have any wreckage and bodies (and to the best of my knowledge, which is pretty good but not perfect, all the rumors that we do have are only rumors). We don't have any repeatable experiments or communications with extraterrestrials.
We also have some pretty good explanations for some of the most dramatic of the saucer sightings. For example, for the better part of three years people in South America saw some very strange aerial phenomena which no one could explain. The skeptics came out with the usual gup about "mass hysteria," although the observers were quite respectable and reliable: the kind of people juries would believe in a murder case; and there were a lot of them. But since no one could explain what was happening, it just had to be delusions—until finally some indisputable photographs were obtained.
The phenomena were real, all right. What was happening was that the Soviet Union was launching rockets that took them in a path over Argentina and Chile, and just at that point the not-quite-orbital rockets jettisoned fuel in some kind of military experiment. The Soviets didn't want anyone to know what they were doing, and so the local Soviet KGB agents encouraged people to believe they were seeing "flying saucers." Eventually the real story came out (from French Intelligence, as I recall).
The point is that while the phenomena sighted were quite real—people really were seeing Unidentified Flying Objects—the explanation, while dramatic, didn't involve flying saucers or aliens.
About that time Isaac Asimov wrote a column in which he stated that flying saucers were impossible on logical grounds. His argument was that they couldn't come from the solar system; NASA/JPL probes have visited all the planets, and there's no place the saucer people could live. They therefore must come across interstellar distances, and that's very nearly impossible. Assume that it is possible: the people capable of doing it will be so immensely powerful that they can't be seen unless they want to be.
They clearly don't want to be seen, since they don't land on the White House lawn, or in Red Square, or on Lake Geneva, and announce their presence; yet we do see them, sometimes. Clearly they're not so incompetent as all that. Therefore they don't exist. There's no possible explanation of those facts.
Now Isaac has long been a friend, and I admire him greatly, but he is heavily into "debunking," and that did seem a pretty specious argument. Surely, I thought, there must be some logical explanation—and once I began to think about it, several such explanations suggested themselves.
The simplest is the "Cal Tech" hypothesis. Assume that some galactic university is studying primitive cultures, of which we are a prime example. They don't want to contaminate the sample, so they forbid any contact with the natives, and usually they're successful in enforcing that regulation. However, their study group includes students. Bright students.
The Pasadena Police Department cancels all leaves on the night after final examinations at the California Institute of Technology. The techies have been known to do amazing things to amuse, startle, and generally irritate the citizens of their home town of Pasadena.
Surely students at Galactic U. wouldn't be all that different. . . .
Anyway, that was one possible explanation, and once I thought of that, others suggested themselves. Suppose the Galactics had a use for Earth people, possibly even as slaves. It would take some ingenuity to explain slavery in an interstellar civilization. Maybe some other use? And so forth.
Eventually I got the picture of a Galactic society not a lot different from ours. Some of the citizens want to be rich. Others want prestige. There are bureaucrats—indeed, given the trends of this civilization, the more advanced the technology, the more likely it is to be run by bureaucrats. Surely that's a plausible hypothesis? There will be traders. Smugglers. Gun runners. Drug smugglers . . .
About this time the story began to take shape. Captain Rick Galloway, contract soldier with the CIA, is trapped in Africa with a small command. His group is surrounded by Cubans, and is doomed. No one can save them. In a word, a group made to order to be kidnapped by interstellar brigands who want to recruit some fighting men. Only why in the world would the Galactics—even a semi-criminal group of Galactics—want soldiers? Well, in order to make some other primitive people do something. After all, the Galactics don't want to live on a primitive world. What might they want?
And so forth. Eventually the world of Tran took shape in my mind; and the instant that it did, I saw Tylara do Tamaerthon, descended from Celtic warriors and Greek mercenaries, raven haired, blue eyed, tall, strong willed, a twenty-year-old widow in command of a county. She sat at a council table in a high-ceilinged hall with smoke-stained banners hanging from the rafters and listened as her knights told of the coming invasion of her lands and what they must do.
I wrote some scenes involving Rick Galloway in Africa, and Tylara's first battles on Tran; and when Jim Baen, then editor for Ace, was visiting me here, he saw them. "This would make a terrific illustrated novella," said Jim.
"Deal," said I, little knowing what I had started; and a few weeks later I began to write Janissaries as a work of some 45,000 words. Since Ace was in a hurry to get the book, I sent in portions as I wrote them.
After I reached 60,000 words Ace called. "Stop! Please!" they said.
"But the story's not finished," I protested.
"We can't do any more in one volume. Wind it up and we'll do a second book."
I agreed.
I have now written three books in the Janissaries series, and foresee at least two more.
When Rick Galloway escaped a Cuban firing squad by climbing aboard a flying saucer, he didn't board it alone. The others included Lieutenant Parsons, who soon mutinied against Rick; Sergeant Major Elliot, a soldier's soldier who didn't care who commanded so long as the outfit did its job properly; Larry Warner, an intellectual who should never have volunteered for the CIA's expedition into Africa; and many others.
One of those others was Private Paul Nelson, veteran and wanderer.
This is his story.
—Jerry E. Pournelle