Some Recommended Independent MilSF (Part I)

There is one piece of advice that is given to all writers, one that I have given myself when asked for a tip, and it is quite simply to read! To read anything and everything that you can get your hands on, and especially to remain current in your genre. I’m going to be the first to admit that I have been terrible at this lately, and that I have fallen way behind on my reading queue, one way or another, but I’ve been making a determined effort lately to catch up on the milSF that has built up on my Kindle, and certainly it has been well worth doing. (Yes, this one is a review post.) There are three series - well, one of them damn well should be a series, and I understand there are more books coming - that I’m going to talk about today, but the short version, if you want, is that I recommend all of them. And this is the first of an indeterminate series of posts along these lines, with another already planned.

Space Carrier Avalon (Glynn Stewart)

I often start working on a book and discard the first few chapters, largely because of the maxim that if writing something is boring, reading something will be as well. My thesis is that it is best to open with a bang, to open with action, and I think that Glynn has the exact same approach. The book opens strong, very strong, and has plenty of twists just in the first few chapters. I’m not going to give you any spoilers, but suffice to say that I was hooked right from the start, and that I stayed well and truly hooked. (And in case you read this, Glynn, the Alamo reference made my smile for several chapters!)

I don’t really have any criticisms, here. It ticked all of my boxes, with fast-paced action and interesting characters, a well-developed universe that didn’t make itself too intrusive, lots of twist and turns and an ending I didn’t see coming. The technology was internally-consistent, and I loved the technological progression displayed, the contrast between different-generation fighters. Anyone following fighter development at the moment will know that too-darned well! About my only problem was that there isn’t another book out yet, but I understand that one is planned for next year, and from what I have seen this one has been quite a hit - deservedly so - and so I rather hope that he might move this up a bit. I’ll certainly be reading it as soon as it is on sale.

The Laredo War (Peter Grant)

I screwed up here, a little, in that this is a spin-off from another series that I haven’t yet read, the Maxwell Saga. (I mean to amend that in the near future, so expect that to be reviewed on here soon.) This one is space- and ground-warfare, as well as action/adventure/intrigue, so I’m probably pretty close in on its target audience. I got strong vibes of a Heinlein story from this one, especially in its early stages, ‘Free Men’, specifically. Which is a very good thing, actually, as that’s one I often go back to. This is the story of a resistance movement, fighting to overthrow the invading force that has conquered its planet, and in two books...well, I presume/hope that there is a third in the pipeline, because although it is complete in those two books, there are still plenty of places to go, and quite a few plot threads still hanging.

Good characters, good story, good setting, which does a great trick of expanding outwards from a small point seamlessly, an excellent way of introducing new readers. (Which is one way of saying that I felt no lack from having not read the earlier series in this universe.) The writer manages the difficult feat of setting up a pretty damn nasty enemy, whilst introducing POV characters from the enemy perspective that you aren’t repelled by. (Without resorting to the ‘democratic resistance’ concept.) I’m certainly looking forward to the next book in the series, and to reading the other series in this universe.

Kurgan War (Richard Turner) 

Three books in this series so far, though right now I’ve only read the first two - principally because the third only came out a few days ago. Needless to say, it’s high on my list. This one is more of a ground-pounder point of view, though with space warfare elements, and as well as handling combat extremely well - with as good a ‘Stalingrad in Space’ vibe as I have ever seen in the first book - it also touches strongly on themes of treachery and extremism. I won’t go into any details on that, of course; you’ll have to read the book. (Damn, a no-spoilers policy really makes reviewing difficult.)

The characters are engaging, the plots interesting and intricate, and the action moves quickly. Which really is a common factor in all of these reviews, but I’ll get to that in a minute. I’d guess (though for all I know it ties up in the third book) that it has a long run in prospect, and certainly there is plenty of room for that. There’s an interesting treble-act in the three main characters, and it cuts right to the heart of the plot, with a strong sense of realism. There is an element of bildungsroman in this, handled well, as it needs to be. Too often that can be a crutch, but not here - instead, it develops organically. Needless to say, recommended.

Thoughts 

Yes, you get some of my ramblings here. All of these works have in common that they get what action/adventure means. that it means that you need to have action - but not repetitive action. That doesn’t mean ‘big explosions’ every chapter, but it means that something happens to the characters. It can be a battle, an argument, a discovery, a twist, a surprise, anything like that, but the critical element is to keep the story moving, and to cut the meandering to a minimum. Worldbuilding at its best comes from within the story, rather than being dropped down - no, “As you know, Professor…” These have fast, detailed plots, with plenty of room for strong characters to show their stuff. (Strong as in ‘strong cheese’, with lots of flavour, rather than ‘lots of strength/combat skill’. Too often people don’t know the difference.)

Did I really just use cheese as an analogy for storytelling? I think I’ve put you through enough. Links to the three series are in the cover illustrations above. And more reviews in the next post. Probably not cheese, though.

Predicting the Future

There’s always another project buzzing around in my head, always a new series. Something I’ve been planning for a while has been to try another science-fiction series, and I’ve been struggling for ages to come up with something that wouldn’t be too similar to the adventures of the Battlecruiser Alamo - and given that I intentionally designed the setting to be able to accommodate a wide variety of stories, that has proven rather difficult. Nevertheless, I’m actually beginning to make some progress now, and as a result, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking…

Something that sparked this off was a story I saw on the news a few days ago, about an apartment in New York that had sold for $100 million - a large part of which was based on the view of Central Park. (I admit I was slightly underwhelmed, though the idea of spending that sort of money on an apartment boggles my mind.) What it did tell me was that one of my beliefs for the future is going to come to pass.

We’re going to colonize space. And soon.

Privately-operated orbital spaceflight is coming by the end of the decade. Sooner, if Congress gets its act together. (So, the end of the decade it is, then.) That’s going to unlock a hell of a lot of possibilities, notably the Commercial Space Station. Right now, in orbit, there are prototype modules floating around, and at the moment the primary hold-up is the lack of a means to get there. Very soon, that’s going to be solved. I’d guess that the first commercial space station will follow the first commercial launch within twenty-four months - after all, there has to be somewhere to go to!

Initially, we’re talking tourism. Spend a week in orbit for millions of dollars. That won’t last long. If someone is willing to spend $100 million on an apartment in New York, someone will be willing to spend the same amount of money on an apartment on a space station - and there will be people willing to buy it. Octogenarians hoping for a better quality of life, places where you don’t have to pay tax (has anyone worked out how that’s going to work, incidentally? Who owns a commercial space station? Be interesting if the first Commercial Space Station flies a flag of convenience…) ex-dictators seeking sanctuary…

Science-fiction? Today, but not tomorrow - and I almost mean that in a literal sense. All of this implies a significant infrastructure, of course, and that will follow immediately. Cooks, cleaners, hell, escorts. How many hotels have permanent residents? I can see that happening on the first commercial space hotel, and I can see soon after facilities where that is permanent. (Did I mention security? Where might be a safer place for a billionaire’s kids to grow up than a space station with rotational gravity?) Hell, don’t rule out prestige!

One of the key problems with the exploitation of space has been the lack of a maguffin, for want of a better word, but we’re getting to the point that it is now right there. The ability to have a self-contained world that is secure, protected, and tax-free. (I don’t think the IRS can afford its own space shuttles.) The cost will be accessible only to billionaires - at first - but that will change quite quickly. We’re not far away from true spaceplanes, and that takes the cost down by an order of magnitude. Cost savings from bigger orders of launchers, manufacturing larger numbers of station modules - the price will go down quite quickly.

Looking forward fifty years, I can see a surprising interest in space. Stations in LEO serving the asteroid mining companies, research (Harvard has an endowment of $36 billion-plus. Twenty years from now a space station will cost a tenth of that - and make its money back by selling access rights to companies and small universities. Someone will do it.) Others simply for habitation - people who don’t want to go back to high-gravity. It doesn’t even have to be zero-gravity. Rotating space stations are a lot easier at Martian or Lunar gravity - enough to work with, to mitigate problems, without exposing the residents to any problems zero-gravity poses.

The Space Age has not yet begun, not yet. We’re totally dependent - don’t make any mistake on that - on the orbital satellite constellations. Without the comsats, we’d have a disaster, to say nothing of GPS, weather satellites, a thousand others. (I’ve another theory on that - I think that Clarke’s notion of three big stations in GEO could happen yet. Makes a lot less space junk than the current system, and man-tended facilities could solve a lot of problems, especially if they are servicing a lot of satellites.) Nevertheless, we’re only on the fringe of things at the moment

For me, the tipping point will be the spaceplane. Or at least a truly reusable launch system, something you can run like an airline. The heavy booster is going to be with us for a long time yet, but the ability to book a flight into space is going to make all the difference. You aren’t cut off from Earth if you can be back home in a week. Or a day. That’s coming, at long last - even if Skylon isn’t it, it’s pointing the way. Shuttle was an idea a couple of generations ahead of its time.

Glorious days ahead, then. Unless you are an SF writer worried that the future is about to leave his books behind, of course!

Searching for Alexander the Great...

First of all, a quick status report concerning Alamo; I’m a few days away from starting the next book in the series, ‘Not In My Name’, which should be on sale somewhere around the middle of September. I now have titles for the next two books in the series, ‘Cage of Gold’ and ‘Minstrel Boy’, which will be on sale in November and January respectively. I won’t give any more details on that here, but you can look at the wonder that is the cover of ‘Not In My Name’ above; Keith has done his usual amazing job. These four books - including ‘Aces High’ - will be opening up for the eight books to follow, and the arc through to book twenty-four is firming up now in my head. And there will be aliens this time. Promise. (Yes, they are in the setting, but they’ve been referenced pretty rarely.)

A good part of my attention is now concentrating on my Hellenistic research. Here the lessons that I learned while working on the Crusades come strongly into play - for I am able to break all of this down into a series of stages. The first one is quite simple - reading. I’ve got a large stack of books to go through, about half of which are new to me, and I’m working my way through them fairly methodically. The goal here is essentially to familiarize myself with the territory in a reasonably informal way - no notes, nothing like that, just reading around the subject to try and get it into my head. I expect that this will last into September.

Then comes the big part. I’ve got to break down the campaigns of Alexander the Great, using the primary sources as my basis (and at this point, I’ll flag how unbelievably wonderful the Landmark edition of Arrian is, hell, all four of them are excellent) into books. Probably about sixteen of them, working out, basically, what goes where. And who. Minor spoiler alert - these series starts with the accession of Alexander to the throne (though there is potential room for a few sequels, I suppose) and will conclude sometime after his death. I think.

Once I’ve built the skeleton, I then must flesh it out, which means working out the point-of-view characters, producing profiles of the major figures in the story, which does not necessarily mean the major figures of the period, though some will likely coincide, and working out their arcs, at least roughly. (Naturally, actual history is canon for this, hence the need to profile each one.) Who goes where, what POVs I need to cover various events, that sort of thing. I’m making serious progress on this already - to an extent, some of this will run concurrently.

Then I start thinking about the first book, then and only then, and can work out the details I need to pick up for it. I do not work well with outlines for books - this I know. To an extent, an epic saga like this one is going to require one, but it isn’t quite as bad as it sounds. Each book will need to do certain things to fit in with the story of the whole. Represent battles, campaigns, sieges, murders, intrigues. Some of that will be required by the actual events of history, others will be required for the arcs of the individual characters - it will vary, but though it sounds like a lot, on the page it will likely not amount to more than a dozen bullet points per book, which I can then expand to make the plot of each individual book. As the series continues, the scope will widen, but the mercy is that the growth is somewhat controlled.

I’ve got it easy in one respect - there aren’t really any dull moments in this campaign! There might be problems if I was sticking solely to the perspective of Alexander himself, but I have the ability to move other pieces around to where the action is. There’s always a rebellion going on somewhere, a campaign, a plot, a conspiracy, and using maybe half a dozen POV characters I have the ability to move around where I want. A substantial advantage. Another advantage is that my major sources are excellent. Arrian, Curtius, Herodotus, the tripod on which all of this rests. (Yes, I know Herodotus wrote a century earlier, but he’s a great source for the peoples, cultures and their histories.) There are Landmark Editions of Arrian and Herodotus, which promise to be a great help.

I’ve raved about those often enough that I probably ought to expand on them. Essentially, these are incredibly well-annotated translations of the original texts, complete with maps and extensive appendices going into greater detail. If you want a one-book history of Alexander the Great, the Landmark Arrian would actually be an excellent starting point. (For a non-primary version, go with Freeman’s Alexander the Great. And while you are at it, read his Julius Caesar as well.) The best part is that they aren’t even that expensive; my Landmark Arrian only cost £12, not much more than my Penguin and Oxford translations. Frankly, if it wasn’t for this and another book, I wouldn’t be contemplating this project at all. Reading that is what gave me the idea.

That other book, you ask? Well, under normal circumstances I would face the daunting task of having to detail out all the personalities in Arrian, Curtius, Plutarch, et cetera, and that would promise to be a hell of a job. Could take years. Fortunately, a great scholar named Waldemar Heckel has already done it with his ‘Who’s Who in the Age of Alexander the Great’, which reduces the preparation time for this from years to months. It really is that good. (There’s a companion volume on the ‘Marshals of Alexander’s Empire’, also of great value.)

My timeframe on this is subject to considerable extension. As a best-case, September to outline the whole series, work out what goes where, making sure that each book has enough plot (because I have a tendency to compress when I’m writing - what I think going in is 80k often would end up at 50k if I didn’t throw in more plot twists) as well as a decent beginning and an end. Right now I’m contemplating sixteen books, but that’s just a working concept. Until I sit down and actually go through everything, I won’t even have a rough idea - and all of that might well change later on, depending on how writing the books for real goes.

That done, I then...write another Alamo, number 15, in October - I’m sticking with my ‘every other month’ for Alamo books through this whole process, never fear. Then, if all is going really well, in November I outline and write the first Alexander book, which I am calling ‘Shadow of Olympus’ as a working title. I would want to have a couple of these in the drawer before the first one comes out, which would mean the first book released in February. (Which, I know, would mean I would actually do twelve books in 2016. That was the goal for this year, but it hasn’t worked out that way - though I am on course for eight, which isn’t bad.)

I’ve been looking for my ‘second series’ for a long time, as readers of this blog will know. On a couple of occasions, the books that were to lead to that have even made it into print - witness Spitfire Station and Swords of the Damned, but in both cases they only made it to their ‘pilots’. (Though Spitfire Station and its cast are now integrated to the point that it might as well be titled ‘Battlecruiser Alamo 5a’. The next Alamo is essentially a sequel to ‘Triple-Cross’.) I’m hoping that this will be the one. I suppose rationally I ought to be seeking out a fantasy series, but I just haven’t got one in my head, and it isn’t for lack of looking. Not one that I’m happy with, anyway. Never say never, but for a big, sprawling epic...Alexander is it. It’s got the lot. And that’s the appeal. Though I won’t deny that trying to get this down on paper is going to be daunting!

Considering a Setting...

It’s been a long time since I’ve played in an RPG; well over a year, in fact, I think it might be nearer two. I’m beginning - slowly - to get the itch again, and am increasingly tempted to act on it and see about setting up a campaign. The first step, naturally, will be the setting, and given that I have a week off, I think this is as good a time as any to start getting to work on it. It will be science-fiction - which anyone reading this blog should not be that surprised by - and use a system I love but have never had the chance to use called ‘Stars Without Number’, which...for those of you who know anything about Sci-Fi RPGs, I think of this one as Traveller done right. Otherwise, think Firefly.

Which rather gets to the nub of what I want to do. A crew on a rag-tag ship having adventures in deep space. The adventures of the Millennium Falcon before those whiny Rebels turned up, basically - so smuggling, bounty hunting, all sorts of fun things like that. With some long-dead alien races lying around as a source of strange artefacts and weird technologies, which I always find to be a lot of fun, and something the game supports really well. The Ur-concept of Stars Without Number boils down to ‘Dark Ages of the Galactic Empire’ - space was ruled by the ‘Terran Mandate’, but two hundred years ago a strange psychic event, the ‘Scream’, brought interstellar civilization crashing down, essentially destroying Earth and the Mandate. Now the recovery is beginning.

That seems fine to me, and I don’t see any need to mess with the wide-scale setting. Now, I need to have a reason for the PCs to have a ship of their own, but not have that much money - in this setting, ships are expensive. I could change that, or I could come up with some sort of a reason for a large number of space freighters to have been built...and there is an obvious one. War. A few years ago, a big war ended, and in the course of it, a lot of Liberty Ships were constructed. Once the War ended, they were auctioned off in large numbers, perhaps with military veterans getting preferential treatment, or able to use their back pay. I can come up with the details later on - though if these ships were built cheap, it suggests that their long-term life-expectancy is not promising, and that they will quickly become maintenance nightmares.

What this also suggests is a core reason for the crew to be together - all of them served during the War. Now, that might be a little limiting, so I can expand it out a little to widows and orphans of the original team, either during the War or after. It seems reasonable that a group of veterans who had served together might weigh in to buy themselves a ship - think of it as Serenity, but the crew consists of the ones on the winning side. Though if the war was a Vietnam analogy, that might not completely be the case - and I like that idea enough that I think I’m going to run with it. The war was not won, but abandoned. Allies left to rot, and perhaps the alliance that fought the war fell apart.

That suggests I need two sides to the war, one probably rather stronger than the other; I get a sense that one side was probably able to take the high ground, secure orbit, but then failed at the ‘boots on the ground’ side of the equation. This can then reduce down to a couple of planets, rather than a sprawling ‘empire’. which is helpful - though both sides can have had allies in the war. Likely enough that neither of them will be visited during the course of the campaign, though I will need a home base somewhere between the two, perhaps an analogue of the Philippines - a system that was widely used by the ‘Allies’ during the war, but now is more independent, a melting-pot. More like Casablanca, now I think of it.

That means I can start to think about some sort of a map. Planet A, the heroes’ homeworld, is one parsec away from Planet B, the Casablanca of the setting, which is in turn one parsec from Planet C, the Vietnam analogue. Planet B will need to have other accessible systems in order to make it a good jumping-off point. Ideally, Planet C will have something that the inhabitants of Planet A wanted. (I suppose I could take the analogy still further and have a Planet D that Planet A was fighting a proxy war with - and that is actually a pretty good idea, because it means that there is a bit of a ‘Cold War’ feel in all of this as well, with possibilities for intrigue and espionage later on.) Assuming that the same situation faced Planet D, that means there is another Planet E close by.

This is looking better. The two homeworlds of the leading powers are probably out of bounds, but there will be a sizeable ‘neutral zone’ between them. The era of the proxy war has ended for the moment, perhaps due to economic problems - interstellar wars are expensive as all hell. Espionage is a lot cheaper, and presumably a new administration back home is working on that right now. Psychic powers are a factor in this setting, and it would be very easy to go down the ‘Psi-Cops’ route, but that would really eliminate a lot of ideas for characters. As an alternative, let’s go for the ‘Men Who Stare At Goats’ route (read that book if you haven’t, it’s fascinating). Each side has a Psychic Corps, used for tactical advantage. If they are rare, then we’re talking Special Forces stuff here, or Deep Intelligence - and both concepts seem sound enough to me for this sort of story.

Something this is screaming to me - if this is inspired by the ‘80s - is Cyberpunk, and I think that’s going to be something highly relevant to this campaign. A group of Cyberpunk veterans, some of them Psi-Ops, trying to set up a shipping line on a broken-down old transport, with opposition from all sides. Which rather suggests that I’m going to need a few more worlds, so let’s expand that out to eight in the ‘zone’, giving eleven in total - and to add a little variety, throw in a trio of ‘empty’ worlds on the map as well, suitable for colonization. I don’t want the setting to be too big, as it will become a bit of a pain to create, and I’d like a lot of return visits, rather than the ‘planet of the week’. As I also want this to be a battleground between two shadow-boxing powers, keeping the field a little limited is also a good idea. I can always add more worlds later on if I want.

So, let’s see what’s out there...

...And Now Night Has Fallen

There is an old military maxim that I find is generally true in most situations - far more is learned in defeat than in victory. Nowhere is this more the case than when it comes to writing; I find that the books that were the hardest to write - that, in some cases, I failed to complete - were far more instructive than that ones that came most easily. (Not that I object when I get a ‘Ghost Ship’ or an ‘Aces High’ that almost write themselves, of course…) I suspect that any writer will tell you that this is the case.

When I first began to seriously work on what would become the ‘Battlecruiser Alamo’ series, back in 2011, the form it was taking was very different to what eventually ended up in print. I’ve got those early drafts lying around somewhere, and I’ll have to dig them out at some point - but the general gist was that the ‘Battlecruiser Alamo’ was an obsolete ship with a commander who had been posted there to put him out of the way, who ended up taking charge of a thrown-together battle group in the aftermath of a ‘Pearl Harbor’ to get home - my model was the Asiatic Fleet in the early days of the Second World War, as I recall. I won’t go into any more details, because I might actually end up writing it someday.

Which is one of the main points I am making. Those first three drafts bore little or no resemblance to ‘Price of Admiralty’ other than sharing the same series name, and that the lead’s last name was ‘Marshall’. (It was ‘William Marshall’ for a long time, and I think ‘John Marshall’ in one iteration; ‘Daniel Marshall’ was a far later decision, indeed after I had started writing the fourth draft, the one that clicked.) A few bits and pieces were cannibalized for later books, the gas giant dogfight, for example, but not much other than that.

Was it a waste of time, then? Absolutely not. There is an old saying that you have to write a ‘million words of crap’ before you can expect to do anything good, and I think the spirit of that is probably about right. Another example - Logan Winter, originally the lead in a pair of long novellas in a ‘space noir’ setting. I enjoyed writing them, but they were well behind where I am now - to the point that I have no intention of releasing them without major revisions, except perhaps as a ‘freebie’ at some point. The character, however, I was able to salvage and drop into Alamo, even retaining certain elements of his backstory, and he’s played a significant role in four Alamo novels up to this point, as well as having his own in the shape of Spitfire Station. Definitely not a waste of time.

So we come inexorably to my latest project, the Crusades book. I finished the draft yesterday, and having read it again...I don’t think I’m going to release it. I swung, and I missed, and it happens sometimes. While none of the Alamo novels have had anything like the tortuous start of Price of Admiralty, certainly there have been occasions where I had to start from scratch after writing half a dozen chapters, realizing I was on the wrong road. Usually because I was rambling too much at the start, rather than getting to the point - in one case, and I won’t say which one, I removed the first three chapters and replaced them with a paragraph of description and three lines of dialogue, which essentially served the same purpose. (As a rule of thumb, if I find something boring to write, it’s likely that it’s going to be boring to read as well. Which is one thing if it is a couple of paragraphs of necessary exposition, but something else if we’re talking about a couple of chapters.)

Where did I go wrong? Well, the book is too short, and it doesn’t have enough plot to it. Somewhere along the road I danced between what should have either been a fifteen-thousand-word novella, or a seventy-thousand-word novel that needed two more point-of-view characters and a lot more meat to it. I found the setting I had locked myself into rather constraining, which was also a problem, and thinks were either moving too fast or too slowly...a strange situation, really. There is a lot to this book I like, some of the scenes, some of the dialogue, but it doesn’t make that cohesive a whole. None of this means that I won’t revisit it, write that second draft that will turn it into something a lot bigger, a lot grander, of course, which is another reason for not releasing it - I can strip a lot of the content out for a theoretical ‘new book’ in the line.

So, I spent two weeks on this project - not counting the research, which was a lot of fun in its own right, and definitely not wasted time - and I learned a hell of a lot. First of all, I learned that I really have found a novel length that I’m comfortable at in the 70-80k area. Sufficient time for me to complete a book in a reasonable time, but long enough that I can build in the intricacies that I enjoy, and I think that’s an important compromise. I learned a huge amount about structuring research, and the format in which I like to work. (Short version - lots and lots of bullet points. For the long version, read 'Writing A Western In Thirty Days'.) That’s going to be vital in the future.

What is next on the list, then? Well, I have two projects in mind. The most important at present is of course my work on the next Alamo, ‘Not In My Name’. This one has been postponed about five times in the last year and a half, and was originally meant to be the second ‘Spitfire Station’ novel, though its shape has naturally changed considerably since then. Between them, ‘Aces High’ and ‘Not In My Name’ are intended to set the tone for the next twelve Alamo books, and I’m looking forward to getting started on that next week; on the list for this week is some work on the outline, character lists, that sort of thing. This one will be on sale some time around the middle of September.

In the longer term, I have my other big historical project, and one thing that it certainly cannot be accused of is a lack of scale. I want to tackle the campaigns of Alexander the Great, starting with his accession to the throne of Macedon and going some way into the chaos and confusion that followed his death. This would take the form of - gulp - eighteen novels over three years, each of which at the usual ‘Alamo’ length, going by my current outline. Three POV per book, though the identity of those characters would likely change from book to book, and none of them would be Alexander himself. I want to look at the stories of those surrounding him, about which we have surprisingly little historical detail. More on this - probably a lot more - later on, but this one was always the ‘post-Crusade’ project, and I think it might have been moved up by a year or so.

Well, I guess I’d better get to work...