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Title............................................................. Year..... ISBN.......................... Publisher
Nomads of the Sky........................................ 1992...... 978-1-56076-098-6....... TSR
Warlords of Jupiter....................................... 1993...... 978-1-56076-576-9....... TSR
     Warlords of Jupiter (import edition).............. 1993...... 978-0-099-31551-3....... Wizards of the Coast

The Invaders of Charon/Buck Rogers series had an interesting history. The game company TSR (of "Dungeons and Dragons" fame) owned the rights to the old Buck Rogers series ... not the Star Wars TV rip-off of the early '80s, but the ORIGINAL Buck Rogers from the 1920s and '30s. They'd turned out a roleplaying game and updated it, trying to give it realistic science, complete with a Pavonis Mons space elevator and a terraformed Mars. The original concept called for nine novels written by various writers, following a long and involved war in the Solar System of the 25th century. Someone else had already done Book 1. I was contracted for Book 2.

After I turned it in, I was contacted by the editor who gave me the old "good news/bad news" routine. The good news: I got to finish the series AND the war. The bad news: they'd decided to change directions with the game universe and make it 1920s space opera, so there would be only one more book in the series. In other words, the war that I had oh-so-slowly developed in Book 2 had to break out, be fought, and be won ALL in Book 3. Something of an anticlimax, that. But I had fun writing the thing, and I got to play with some ideas about aliens and nanotech that I later developed more fully in Warstrider.

All text copyright (c) William H. Keith
Cover art copyright (c) individual publishers
This page was last updated on 05/29/2011