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Space Pirates!

by Mark Lardas

Piracy is one of mankind’s oldest activities. Outbreaks have been recorded since ancient times and occurred as late as this century. Piracy is also one of the oldest inspirations for storytellers. The Odyssey and Argonautica may not contain Treasure Island’s plotline, but both contain piracy, or at least piratical activity.

Not all forcible deprivation of property is robbery. Consider taxes you pay. When merchant captains have ships seized by someone under governmental authority, it is not piracy. It becomes piracy only when those seizing the ships—whether oceangoing, airborne or space-going—are individuals acting on their own behalf, not under color of law.

When Sir Francis Drake, John Paul Jones, and Rafael Semmes acted as government agents, they were not pirates, however piratical their actions seemed to their victims. But John Morgan, Edward Teach and Jean Lafitte acted on their own behalf. When they did, they were pirates.

Except when strong central governments exist, piracy and trade are often indistinguishable. Where laws against robbery are unenforceable, ship’s crews take what they can, trading only for what they cannot seize. For much of history, law ended at the coastline. Anything beyond your coast was fair game. Vikings, ancient Aegean Sea rovers, Cinque Port seamen, and many other sea peoples throughout history played by these rules. These sea robbers were pirates because their actions would have been illegal had they occurred in their homeports.

Piracy hurts trade. Over the centuries, trade became more important than the immediate returns available through piracy. Governments began to restrict piracy through an elaborate system of laws and constraints. They set up methods for civilians to act as armed agents of the government by issuing letters of marque and reprisal. Eventually those approaches became unworkable, and governments eliminated extra-governmental-sanctioned use of force entirely. But, just as piracy did not go away, privateering will almost certainly return at some point in the future.

Piracy began as armed robbery at sea, starting shortly after ships existed. Air piracy emerged in the 1960s with the first wave of skyjackings. When humans move into space, piracy will become a thing there. It took sixty years from the first flight of an aircraft until air piracy emerged. Humans have been traveling in space longer than that. So where are the space pirates?

Space piracy will arise when conditions are right. Piracy requires three elements: pirates, prizes, and ports.

Pirates are men used to violence, but who are also capable of operating pirate vessels or at least forcing cooperation from those operating their target vessels. The classic pirate is a sailor or warrior trained in warfare and desperate enough to use force. Piracy often flares up after wars end. Some unemployed soldiers and sailors, lacking a demand for their skills, go into business for themselves: as highwaymen on land, and as pirates at sea.

Prizes are things worth stealing. They may be ships. They may be the cargoes of the ships. They may be ransoms collected for those aboard the ship. Prizes must have value. Pirates gamble their lives through piracy. Unless the rewards exceed that risk, they either die or eventually find careers elsewhere.

Ports are places where pirates convert prizes into plunder. The value of a ship or its cargo does not matter if you cannot sell it, even when worth millions. Sailing-era pirates once captured a ship laden with silk. They could not sell the precious silk, so they used it to make sails. Without a port to sell it, its only value was as sailcloth.

All three factors were present after the wars of the Great Age of Sail. Air piracy emerged only after hijackers had safe places to take their airplanes. After World War I, despite unemployed, desperate sailors and thousands of ships carrying cargoes, there were no ports in which to sell prizes, and so no upsurge in piracy occurred.

Today’s potential space pirate can find a better job. Ports exist today where stolen goods could be sold (think Iran or North Korea), yet no argosies of valuable cargoes are returning from space. That will change. Change may already be in the process.

Of course, space piracy already exists—in fictional form. Just as pirate stories have entertained readers since ancient times, piracy is a staple of today’s science fiction.

In his novel Space Viking, H. Beam Piper had a character observe, “Practically everything that's happened on any of the inhabited planets happened on Terra before the first spaceship." That may be because science fiction borrows from history, but it will also be because Homo Sapiens Spatium will be the descendants of Homo Sapiens Terra. People will remain people.

Some of the best historically-compatible depictions of space piracy can be found on the pages of David Weber’s Honorverse stories. Piracy is woven into the background of the Honorverse. Edward Saganami, the Manticore Navy’s greatest hero, died fighting pirates. The novel Honor Among Enemies features Honor Harrington fighting pirates. Pirates and piracy make appearances in several stories, including The Shadow of Saganami, Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington, Promised Land and The Service of the Sword. Piracy permeates the Manticore Ascendant series.

How “realistic” is Honorverse piracy? Surprisingly so, especially as measured against historical precedent. Piracy is endemic in the Silesian Confederacy, a loose coalition of planetary governments, lacking a strong central government, and pops up throughout the Verge and remote systems outside those of the major star nations.

Pirates, prizes and ports exist throughout the Honorverse. Plenty of spacefarers, male and female, are trained to war. The Honorverse produces surpluses of these individuals. There are also plenty of prizes available. A starship represents a massive capital investment, even for wealthy planets. For an impoverished world, the value of an interstellar ship could exceed the gross planetary product. The value of a ship’s cargo is literally astronomical. Otherwise, why ship it between stars? What about ports? Thousands of planets are inhabited by humans and there are hundreds of thousands of occupied habitats: everything from asteroid mining camps to amusement parks in deep space.

Because of this breadth of opportunity, Weber’s worlds have examples of virtually every brand of piracy. The pirates encountered in Silesia are reminiscent of the New World pirates of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The economies of Britain’s North American colonies, short on specie and desperate for manufactured goods, were able to obtain both through the prizes pirates delivered. Colonial governors turned a blind eye on the activities of men like Edward Teach (Blackbeard), William Kidd, and “Black” Sam Bellamy, sometimes developing covert partnerships with pirates.

Similarly, systems in the Silesian Confederacy are short on capital and poor. Their planetary and star system leaders permit piracy—generally, but not always outside the territories they control—as a means of bringing hard currency and manufactured goods into their system. And to enrich the leaders. Pirates pay planetary leaders protection money and enter into partnership with local authorities. Silesian Coalition leaders keep piracy illegal even as they benefit from it. This allows them to shut down pirates who become too disruptive to trade.

Local leaders also provide pirates cover against star nations, such as Manticore, who fight piracy. In colonial North America, the British crown cracked down on pirates, sending crown ships to hunt them down, even when royal governors fostered piracy. The crown recalled governors who became too friendly to pirates. Similarly, Manticore protects its merchant marine within the Silesian Confederacy with Manticore warships, and is willing to destroy national warships of Confederation planets which too openly support pirates. Weber has similar examples of outbreaks of piracy throughout the Verge.

The only historically surprising thing about Silesian piracy is its duration. Most serious outbreaks of historical piracy last a relatively short period of time; ten to thirty years. The buccaneers of the Caribbean were active from 1650 through 1680. The Golden Age of Piracy, occurred after the War of Spanish Succession, running from 1716 to 1726. Piracy flaring up in 1816 following the Napoleonic Wars was squelched by 1830. In Silesia, piracy is endemic for at least four hundred years. The only comparable historical examples of century-long piracy on earth are the Barbary States. The Barbary pirates were openly state-sponsored, not freelance. Silesian systems openly supporting piracy in the manner of Barbary States would have been crushed by neighboring Manticore or the Andermani Empire.

The explanation is that, in the Honorverse, Silesia has misfortune of being in a piracy Goldilocks zone. Individual planets are not so rich that they seek to eliminate piracy, while other Silesian planets are so poor as to make piracy profitable. Piracy depends on trade. The Silesian Confederacy is rich enough to generate interstellar trade, yet no Silesian nation is rich enough to impose its will on its neighbors even if it wants to stop piracy. When a star nation begins acquiring wealth it becomes a target for its neighbors’ pirates. There are a lot of competing sovereignties, offering pirates a choice of shelters. This normally leads to a downward economic spiral, in which competing states eventually beggar each other through piracy. Very poor cultures cannot attract enough trade to make piracy (except on the lowest level) profitable. In the Honorverse, those star nations frequently lose the capability of maintaining interstellar spacecraft, losing the ability to even become pirates. Piracy dies away.

But the Silesian Confederation has two rich neighboring star nations, Manticore and the Andermani Empire, which seek out Silesian markets. This ensures a steady supply of potential prizes. Piracy and trade keeps Silesian planets from becoming too poor, so the cycle continues. At least until its neighbors get tired enough to put an end to the game. Rich cultures (such as nineteenth-century CE Great Britain or twentieth-century PD Manticore) make money through trade. Piracy inhibits trade, so those cultures eliminate piracy—as happens in the Honorverse in 1920 PD, when Manticore split the Silesian Coalition with the Andermani Empire.

There are other forms of piracy in the Honorverse, also with historical precedents. Following the Manchu conquest of China, surviving elements of the losing Ming government took to the sea. With no legitimate way to survive, they established floating states financed through piracy. They maintained fleets that numbered in the hundreds and lasted centuries. The Victorian Royal Navy suppressed these pirates, but some survived until shortly after World War II.

Following the overthrow of the Peoples’ Republic of Haven and its replacement with the old republic, remnants of Haven’s State Security Naval Forces attempt a similar brand of piracy. Fleeing the hangman’s noose or lifetime imprisonment, they take their ships a-roving in the Verge. They appear in several stories as individual freebooters. Others act in concert, hoping to gain enough wealth and combat strength to return to Haven and reinstitute the People’s Republic.

Where Honorverse piracy does not exist is as important as where it does. Piracy, at least under normal circumstances, does not occur within the core planets of the Solarian League, within the Republic of Haven, or inside established parts of the Star Kingdom/Empire of Manticore. This is consistent with historical precedent. These nations live on interstellar trade. Piracy reduces trade profits, and the cost of restraining piracy is far outweighed by increased trade revenue. Even the kleptocrats running the Solarian League’s bureaucracy find suppressing piracy more profitable than permitting it, at least in the League’s core planets. Protectorates are on their own, and protected only to the extent that they return revenue.

Weber’s Honorverse is not the only Baen Books series in which piracy plays an element, just one where it gets explored comprehensively. Piracy is in the background of Lois McMasters Bujold’s Vorkiosigan stories, more hinted at than the subject of stories. Rescuing hostages from pirates frames the opening of Memory, where Miles begins his transition from a military leader to an interstellar version of Lord Peter Wimsey. But piracy is a spice used sparingly by Bujold. Possibly it is because pirates offer too little challenge to Miles. Possibly this is because in Bujold’s future there is too little opportunity for large scale piracy to flourish. Its star nations, such as Barrayar and Cetaganda, tend to view pirates as good practice for their star fleets and quash them when they arise.

Someone else who often weaves piracy into his tales is David Drake. Space pirates provide background in Drake’s Royal Cinnabar Navy (RCN) series, featuring Cinnabar aristocrats Daniel Leary and Adele Mundy in a Jack Aubrey-Stephen Maturin relationship. Since the series is space opera in a society loosely based on Republican Rome and Georgian Britain, space piracy is bound to make an appearance.

Space piracy appears in the margins of that series’ universe. As might be expected, neither of the series’ two major star nations—the Republic of Cinnabar or the Alliance of Free States—tolerate piracy within their core space. Rather, it appears in regions where their power is thin, what Leary calls “the back of beyond.” Piracy remains endemic in these regions. As Drake has one of his characters reflect, “When a ship got far enough from civilized words, whether it was a pirate or a trader depended on its immediate circumstances”—much as it did on Earth throughout history.

Where piracy appears, the people live a Hobbesian nightmare. In these regions, life is a war of every man against every man, and matches Hobbes’s description of being solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. This is best illustrated in the two novels where piracy plays a significant role: Lieutenant Leary, Commanding and Though Hell Should Bar the Way.

In Lieutenant Leary, Commanding, Daniel Leary is sent to Strymon, a loyal, but distant Cinnabar ally. Strymon is close to a set of inhabited stellar systems known as the Selma Cluster. It is also known as the Pirate Cluster due to endemic piracy. Piracy is fostered by the primitiveness of the cluster’s planets, the poverty of its inhabitants, and the nearby interstellar trade routes, including those between Strymon and Cinnabar.

While Strymon inhibited piracy previous to Leary’s appearance, the Strymon government current when the novel starts has reduced antipiracy patrols, largely due to influence from Cinnabar shipping interests. This reduces competition for Cinnabar’s shippers. They buy immunity from the pirates, paying protection money, which regional shippers, including those from Strymon, cannot afford. More goods get shipped in Cinnabar spaceships, and fewer in Strymon bottoms, with Cinnabar shippers covering the extra costs by raising shipping rates. Strymon’s economy suffers, but not the profits of its leaders or Cinnabar interests.

It is the classic historical formula for piracy outbreaks. Conditions foster piracy while local authorities ignore its damage. It was the model followed by buccaneers of the Caribbean during the mid-1600s. The first buccaneers were impoverished: men who made a living drying beef to sell (they used frames called buccans, from which the name buccaneer came). Driven out of Hispaniola by the Spanish, they took to small boats capturing Spanish ships through boarding. They formed loose associations, led by the most powerful and successful captains like John Morgan and Francois L'Ollonais. Then they sold their captures in Jamaica and Tortuga, actions permitted by local officials profiting from the sales.

Drake follows this model in Lieutenant Leary, Commanding. There pirates operate from small 300-ton cutters, armed with baskets of rockets intended to immobilize their prey so they can be captured. Like the buccaneers, they operate under command of the most powerful and charismatic leader in loose confederations. Just like the buccaneers, they allow themselves to be recruited to fight in national wars (Cinnabar against the Alliance) and quickly abandon the alliance when it becomes unprofitable. It is a realistic depiction of the type of life the buccaneers led, and other pirates throughout the ages—from Roman-era Mediterranean pirates to the Sea Dyaks of the sixteenth- through nineteenth-century South China Sea.

Drake uses another model of piracy in Though Hell Should Bar the Way, that of the Barbary Pirates. The viewpoint character, a young Cinnabar spaceman named Roy Olfetrie, gets shanghaied off a ship commanded by Leary only to have the ship on which he was placed captured by pirates from ben Yusuf. Olfetrie has three choices: become a pirate himself, get ransomed by Cinnabar, or be sold as a slave. With no Cinnabar resident on ben Yusef and unwilling to turn his hand to piracy, Olfetrie is sold as a slave. He discovers a figurative beautiful princess, escapes with her, and takes part in a punitive raid on ben Yusuf.

Ben Yusuf has a society mirroring the Barbary States. As mentioned earlier, the Barbary Pirates were less traditional pirates than they were nation-states who made their living through piracy. They were small city-states scattered among the ports of North Africa: Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis, and Morocco. Their depredations were an extension of the religious wars fought in the Mediterranean between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries CE, although religion was more an excuse for piracy than a cause of it. Unlike most pirates, Barbary pirates were less interested in the cargoes they could steal than they were in collecting tribute and slaves.

Tribute came from nations that paid the Barbary States to spare their ships and ransoms paid to free the captives taken by these states. Nations with powerful navies often found it cheaper to pay an annual fee than to send a navy to deal with the pirates. The Barbary leaders carefully calibrated their demands to remain low enough that paying them off was cheaper than fighting them. As with the Selma Cluster pirates in Lieutenant Leary, Commanding, allowing Barbary pirates to prey on weaker nations’ shipping had the advantage of increasing goods shipped on the powerful nations’ vessels.

Beyond money, the Barbary pirates valued slaves. Their attitude was one of why work when through fighting you can force someone else to do your hard physical labor. That included forcing others to provide sexual pleasure. Eventually, though, the more powerful naval nations—led by the United States but imitated after the end of the Napoleonic Wars by Britain, France, and Spain—put an end to Barbary piracy.

Drake also featured a form of piracy in his Reaches trilogy. Originally published by Ace and reprinted by Baen in an omnibus edition, the three books in the series—Igniting the Reaches, Through the Breach, and Fireships—are loosely based on the exploits of Sir Francis Drake. David Drake intended it as light space opera, like the RNC series. It did not turn out that way. The stories are extremely hard-edged.

That is because Francis Drake and his times were hard-edged. Francis Drake was an outstanding and capable individual, but at his core he was a pirate. He had justification. He was a self-made man who rose from poverty to owning his own ship. Then he almost loses it—and his life—to what he viewed as Spanish treachery. He never forgave that. Francis Drake became a pirate because it was the best way for him to get revenge and get rich at the same time. He got both, as well as fame.

But piracy requires doing nasty things. Francis Drake was gentlemanly and chivalrous. After capturing Spanish treasure ship Nuestra Senora d la Concepción (better known to history as Cacafuego), he released the Spanish crew, rewarding them by allowing each common sailor to keep a fistful of silver coins—the equivalent of several years pay for a common sailor. (He could afford it. Golden Hind was so loaded with treasure cargo had to be reduced.) Yet he was ruthless when necessary, and often self-serving.

One of the delights of David Drake’s fiction is the way he weaves actual history into his tales. At the same time, he follows the logic of a historical setting with honesty as ruthless as anything done by his historical namesake. Historical pirates, even Francis Drake, and even when Francis Drake acted as an agent for his government, are essentially thieves. Theft is justifiable under extreme and limited circumstances. Pushed beyond certain limits piracy loses any nobility and becomes villainy.

In the RNC stories, the pirates are bad guys. The good guys may use them—as Leary did at Strymon—to further good ends. Then, as honor permits, they are abandoned (or abandon the good guys) once they are no longer needed. Either that, or, as in Though Hell Should Bar the Way, they are villains against which the heroes contend. In The Reaches, David Drake makes the pirates the good guys—and that required desperate circumstances, where there was no other choice than piracy. It is unsurprising that the series veered from its creator’s intention of light space opera.

Desperation of this sort drives Poul Andersen’s space piracy novel The Star Fox. In it, the Aleriona, a sentient, non-human, space-travelling race, conquer the human-inhabited planet New Europe. The Aleriona claim the inhabitants are all dead. The human World Federation of Earth, intent on peace at any price, accepts the Alerionan claim at face value. Accepting the human population has died means liberating them is impossible, and any punitive action against Aleriona is just vengeance. Earth can ignore the whole thing.

Gunnar Helm, a former Terran space naval officer, gets proof the inhabitants of New Europe are still alive and that the World Federation is ignoring this evidence. To draw attention to New Europe’s cause—and hopefully trigger a confrontation between Earth and Aleriona—Helm illegally arms a spaceship, the Fox II, and sets off as a pirate.

Helm has a letter of marque and reprisal, authorizing him on behalf of a government to seize spaceships of a power hostile to that government. Technically that makes Helm a privateer rather than a pirate. However, Andersen’s future includes the 1856 Treaty of Paris in its past. This treaty outlawed privateering. Helm’s letter is a legal fig leaf allowing him to argue what he is doing is not piracy. Helm knows he has become a pirate, but really does not care. His cause is just, which keeps him from becoming a villain.

The Star Fox is extremely realistic in its depiction of the use of letters of marque as a cover for piracy. During the 1820s, as Spanish colonies broke away from Spain, revolutionary governments issued letters of marque to owners of any armed ship who would support their cause. Pirates like the Lafitte brothers and Louis-Michel Aury accepted these commissions, but did not limit their seizures to ships owned by target nations. Possessing a letter of marque prevented the United States Navy or Royal Navy from seizing an armed ship as a pirate unless the ship was caught in the act of piracy.

The classic 1960s space piracy novel has to be H. Beam Piper’s Space Viking. Set at a point in Piper’s future history between the collapse of the Terran Federation and the rise of the Galactic Empire, it captures the Space Viking adventures of Lukas Trask.

The Space Vikings are raiders from the Sword Worlds, settled by the final holdouts of the Systems States Alliance, which rebelled against the Terran Federation. Refusing to surrender to the Federation at the collapse of the System States Alliance, its surviving naval ships departed known space and fled deep into uncharted space where they would not be found. The planets they settled are named after famous swords, many of them fictional, and they established a feudal society.

After centuries of isolation, a Sword World starship rediscovered a planet from the Terran Federation—returning to report the Old Federation had collapsed and devolved into barbarism. Like their namesakes, the Dark Age Vikings from Scandinavia, the Sword World Space Vikings make their living raiding decivilized planets of the Old Federation. It is their main industry. Much like Portugal in Earth’s Age of Exploration, so many Sword Worlders depart their homes for better opportunities that Sword World home society is getting debilitated.

The novel opens with Andre Dunnan shooting up Trask’s wedding, killing Trask’s bride and seriously wounding its hero, Lukas Trask. Dunnan then pirates the Space Viking starship his uncle (and Trask’s overlord) Duke Angus of Gram has been building to get Gram into the Space Viking business. Trask turns Space Viking to avenge his dead bride, intent on hunting down her killer. Trask finances the completion of a second ship as a means of tracking Dunnan down.

Trask is an unlikely Space Viking. At heart, Trask is a builder, not a destroyer. His first act as a Space Viking is to establish a base on Tanith, an Old Federation planet that devolved to the gunpowder and ox-cart level after the Big War. He spends the rest of the book re-civilizing Tanith. While he follows up by successfully and profitably raiding three planets, Trask then turns around and turns these planets into trading partners. He spends the rest of the novel, despite a satisfying abundance of shoot- ’em-up battles, abandoning piracy and building a civilization.

Trask’s behavior highlights an essential contradiction built into Space Viking. It is not a Viking saga recast in a science fiction setting. Nor does it really hold a parallel, except very loosely with the buccaneers of the West Indies, as a character in Piper’s story “The Edge of the Knife” imagines. Rather, it presents a highly improbable collision between technologies and societies.

The Sword World planets have tremendous technological advantages over the Old Federation planets they raid. The Sword Worlds have faster-than-light drive, nuclear power, and contragravity. The Old Federation planets they raid almost always lack at least two of those three technologies. Except for parity in military technology, Vikings and buccaneers lacked this type of technological advantage over their victims. Historically when there was the level of technological disparity seen in Space Viking, conquest and displacement resulted. Piracy and raiding occurs when the pirates are too weak to take over. The Spanish conquered the Aztecs and Incas. European settlers displaced the Indians of North America. Europeans (joined by Japan in Asia) colonized Africa, the Americas, Australia, and Asia. Robbery yielded part of the value of a territory. Conquest yielded all of it. Vikings established kingdoms in Britain, Scotland, Ireland, Normandy, and Sicily, but unless the Vikings assimilated into the population, those kingdoms did not last long due to their lack of overall technological advantage.

Some conquest occurs in Space Viking. Old Federation planets like Jagannath, Hoth, and Xochitl are ruled by Space Viking leaders. After 350 years of contact (when Space Viking begins) between the Sword Worlds and Old Federation, there should have been much more of it. If not that, much less raiding and a lot more trading. Trask demonstrates trade is a quick way to wealth. It grows the economic pie, while mere piracy is a zero-sum game. Sword World traders should have displaced Sword World raiders long before Trask arrived on the scene.

Space Viking’s historical weaknesses take little away from its entertainment value, however. Space Viking is an enormously entertaining story. Sometimes it is better to suspend your disbelief rather than spoil a good adventure tale.

The Pirates of Zan by Murray Leinster (originally published in Astounding Science Fiction as “The Pirates of Ersatz”) is another example of how a space piracy story can be historically unrealistic, yet enormously entertaining. The story’s hero, Bron Hoddan, left his home planet of Zan, a planet notorious for piracy, and becomes an electrical engineer. He becomes a good one, too good.

His brilliant innovations threaten the status quo of the stultifyingly perfect society of Walden, so he gets framed for murder. Fleeing Walden for the feudalistic planet Darth, Hoddan becomes a reluctant hero, saving maiden fair through utterly practical engineering. Then he encounters a set of swindled colonists, which he decides to help out. This, of course, requires help from his pirate relatives on Zan.

The novel is fast-paced, entertaining and funny as hell. Hoddan is an improbable combination of hapless and clever—Hank Hill mixed with MacGyver. His naiveté leads him into jams only his ingenuity can get him out of.

In The Pirates of Zan, Leinster flips everything. Most boys want to run away from home to become pirates. Bron Hoddan runs away from being a pirate to become an engineer. The pirates are the good guys, and the galactic government is devoted to disrupting the status quo on planets when things become too static, even when that stasis is pleasant.

The pirates of Zan are as realistic as the pirates of Penzance. Piracy does not pay in the Leinster universe. The pirates have to hide anything they capture and cannot use it lest the authorities execute them. So they risk their lives acquiring loot they cannot use. They would be better off abandoning piracy, and using their native cleverness to acquire wealth honestly. Moreover, they know this.

The inaccuracy does not matter. The Pirates of Zan is farce, not drama. The logical inconsistencies are what make the novel fun. And that may be the real lesson in all of this. Fiction is supposed to entertain. If a story is unentertaining, it is not worth reading. Fiction can inform as well as entertain. All of the stories I cite in this piece manage to do both. But the lessons of Space Viking and The Pirates of Zan have less to do with piracy than with the human condition.

Even in the tales written by Weber, Bujold, Drake and Andersen, where space piracy is accurately depicted, the stories are not primarily about piracy. They are about people in challenging situations, where some of those situations are created by space piracy. And they are all, first and foremost, entertaining reads.

Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, amateur historian and model-maker, lives in League City, Texas. He graduated from the University of Michigan with a BS in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, and spent most of the next thirty years as a space navigator and a software engineer on the Shuttle program. He is also the author of over 30 published books, all focusing on history, with 21 related to maritime and naval history. Find his website at marklardas.com.

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