"Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 01 - Dorsai!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

for reasons of perceived honor rather than pragmatic need) and let him waste
his strength against your fortifications—until you move out and leave him with
a useless shell.

These are the sorts of campaigns that Donal Graeme, the hero of DORSAI!,
fights. Anyone who has had the fortune to be involved in the other sort of war
will wish that more real-life officers had considered the responsibilities of
command as clearly as Dickson did.

DORSAI! is and was conceived as a self-standing novel. Because of the strength
of its conception, however, it has become the foundation of one of science
fiction's most ambitious and far-ranging constructs, the Childe Cycle. The
Cycle is a vast structure, spanning a millennium from the historical 14th
century to a fictional future in which the triune aspects of humanity will be
united again in a form both superhuman and super-humane.

Much of the Cycle remains to be written still today, more than thirty years
after the original publication of DORSAI!, but the pieces of the interlocking
whole continue to appear—each excellent in its own right It is a tribute to
the structure of the original novel that the conception shown here in
microcosm remains valid despite the weight of detail accreting in the later
novels.

I've discussed DORSAI! as paradigm: for fiction writers in general, for
military professionals, and for

viiB

• Introduction

Dickson himself in his later work. None of the above could have touched me
when I first read the novel at age 15. (Well, I read THE GENETIC GENERAL;
which is not quite the same thing, but almost.)

What struck me and caused me to reread the novel a number of times was mat
this is one heck of a good story. It's a model of clean prose, seamless
structure, and fast action, hi this too, DQRSAI! is a paradigm— for other
writers. But that doesn't have to matter to readers, whether first-timers or
(like me the other day) for the umpteenth time.

Dive in and have fun!

David Drake Chatham Country, NC

viii

CADET

The boy was odd.