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Introduction:
But Why on Earth Belisarius?

Jim Baen and I were professional associates from 1974, when he bought two stories in the Hammer's Slammers series, till his death in 2006. Our friendship was far more important than our business connections.

We didn't meet very often, maybe only twenty times during that whole period. We spent a lot of time on the phone, though, and that's where each of the various jogs leading to the Belisarius series occurred.

Mostly the calls involved Jim bouncing some new enthusiasm off me, and me responding in various ways. Not infrequently my response was to gush information because Jim had pushed a button of my own.

In the 1980s Jim discovered BH Liddell Hart, who wrote books advocating a strategy of indirection rather than frontal assault. I don't think it would be unjust to boil Liddell Hart's thesis down to the concept that instead of attacking an enemy, you should capture some relatively undefended position which the enemy must have. This forces the enemy to attack you, giving you the advantages of defending a position which you will have prepared before he arrives.

This is one of the things that looks obvious but isn't easy to achieve in the real world. (Compare the infallible method of making money in the stock market: buy low, sell high.)

In fact to the military mind it isn't even obvious. I recall a course I took during my intelligence training, taught (I'm sure) according to a rigid US Army curriculum. The instructor asked us to name two great generals of the American Civil War. I immediately said, "Grant and Sherman."

According to the Army, I should've said, "Lee and Jackson." Those two Confederate generals were tacticians of the highest caliber, but neither demonstrated a speck of strategic sense. (Given that the course was being taught during the Vietnam War, I can see why the Army wouldn't be concerned about an absence of strategy. I fear that what's going on in Iraq implies that the curriculum remains the same today.)

Liddell Hart (whom I'd read in high school) does discuss Grant and Sherman favorably, but he considered the Byzantine general Belisarius to be the most skilled proponent of the Strategy of Indirection. Jim became fascinated by Belisarius and wanted a series of novels demonstrating the merits of the indirect approach.

We've got very good information about Belisarius because Procopius of Caesarea, a bureaucrat on his staff, wrote full accounts of the wars of his day. In the course of them the generals of the Emperor Justinian not only blocked further Persian inroads but also reconquered North Africa and Italy, which had been lost to Germanic invaders. The process involved a number of generals, but Belisarius was then and now accepted as the greatest of them.

I had read Procopius when I was researching my first novel, which was set in the 6th century ad. For the new project I bought my own set of Procopius and made a précis of the entire Histories of the Wars. (After the General series came out I was occasionally asked, "Have you read Procopius' Secret History?" I never answered, "Yes, you twit," but I was tempted. I've even read The Buildings, though I won't pretend its contents have had a lot of effect on my fiction.)

With the précis in front of me, it was easy to turn the life of Belisarius into plots for what became the General series. We—I can't tell you at this point whether it was Jim's idea or mine—moved it to a distant planet where technology was at a roughly mid 19th century level following the collapse of interstellar government. The Belisarius analog is guided by a supercomputer which survived the collapse.

The series worked. Jim decided he wanted a series of similar books set in other cultures. I wrote these plots (as the General Follow-on series in my own notation). This wasn't as good an idea (and some of it was a downright bad idea, but that's another matter).

I thought the follow-ons would be the end of it, but many of Jim's interests remained with him for his whole life. One afternoon in 1996 while he and I were chatting, he commented that what he'd like to see was a series in which the historical Belisarius had a supercomputer aiding him the way I'd postulated his analog in the General series did.

I thought for a moment and said I could make that work. A three-book series seemed about right to me. He agreed. So I started checking things I'd need for the background.

The next day Jim called me back: his idea had been a bad one. The real Belisarius had been so much better than any of his contemporaries that there would be no significant benefit in giving him a supercomputer.

I laughed and told Jim his job had been to come up with the idea. I was the writer, so I would handle the details. I wouldn't have agreed to the notion if I hadn't already seen the obvious solution to the problem: the bad guys had to have a supercomputer also. He should now go away and let me get on with my job.

Which he did. The book you're holding now is the first part of the result.

Dave Drake
david-drake.com

 

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