I just finished the “Janissaries” series written by an author I have always liked, Dr. Jerry Pournelle.  While I was a little disappointed by the series doesn’t come to a conclusion, overall I thought it was very good.

Dr. Pournelle has long promised a 4th book (Mamelukes) to wrap the whole thing up, but it just doesn’t seem to be happening, as he isn’t getting any younger (none of us are), I hope he gets to it soon.

One of the nice things about the Janissaries series is they are available as fairly cheap ebooks via Amazon and iBooks.  They are a good read, I think as long as you know what you are  getting into you’ll be okay with the lack of a definitive ending.  Interestingly enough the books have a modest similarity to Game of Thrones.  Although set on another planet they deal with a similar feudal society and feature a significant amount of palace intrigue.

The first book in the series is the aptly named “Janissaries”.  The word Janissaries – which I had never heard of before – refers back to the Ottoman empire which established a class of slave/soldiers back in the 13th century.  They took boys from their Christian families with the objective of selecting and training the ablest children for leadership positions, either as military leaders or as high administrators to serve the Empire.

The second book of the series is “Tran” and actually consists of two books: Clan & Crown and Storms of Victory and are written in collaboration with Roland Green.  Even the titles remind me of the “Song of Ice and Fire” series (Game of Thrones is the first book).

Like most of Jerry Pournelle’s books it focuses rather heavily on military strategy and tactics – fortunately I am okay with that, but some may find the long battle scenes boring and sometimes a  little confusing.

The basic plot is you have an alien race that kidnaps earthlings and over the course of hundreds of years has converted them to Janissaries.  They are the bureaucrats of the empire, kind of the middlemen, who follow orders and keep the spaceships running on time.   A group of Janissaries working for a faction of the empire needs soldiers to perform a task for their masters, a task that is best kept under wraps, as some other factions of the empire wouldn’t approve.  With this in mind they hijack a group of American soldiers fighting in Cuba just before they are about to be overrun.

The soldiers have the unenviable task of trying to accomplish their mission for the aliens while trying to stay alive while battling the planet’s eccentric orbit and it’s even more eccentric inhabitants.  Still, the books are tightly plotted and if some of the love affairs seem a bit unlikely well … you have to consider when these books were written back on the 80’s and have a lot of themes that seemed pertinent then but now  … not so much.  Still they are fun to read.  If you liked any of his other books such as Lucifers’ Hammer or Footfall you should be fine with the Janissaries series.