The Human Legion

March 23, 2016

The Invasion of Athena: Order of Battle

Book5 will be ready to roll, just as soon as the edits are back for the last section. While we’re waiting, I thought I’d give you a taste of what’s coming with a partial order of battle from partway through the book. You won’t recognise most of the names yet, but you should know a couple. The Legion has certainly scaled up a little since they started with the First Tranquility Campaign, and not just with the units described here. Author J.R. Handley is working on what is going on back on Tranquility with his Sleeping Legion series. His plans for novellas have turned into novels, and a draft of the opening novel is undergoing an alpha test at the moment. History of the […]

March 2, 2016

Book 5 releasing soon

Thanks for your patience, everyone. Here’s a quick update on the progress of Book 5: War Against the White Knights. I finished the first draft of the novel earlier this week, and it weighs in at just over a hundred thousand words. Now, first drafts can be a bit rough, but Ian and I have been editing each other’s chapters all the way through. I’m still waiting for Ian’s feedback on the last two chapters, but other than that the draft pretty tight. Normally, by this point I would have asked for volunteers to sign up to a Force Recon Team. The volunteers from previous books have given us sage advice, but running the Recon Teams takes time, and so I’ve decided […]

February 3, 2016

The Empire at War is available for pre-order

The launch of a major new military sf anthology.

February 3, 2016

Keeping up to date with the latest Legion news

If you want to keep abreast with the latest developments (such as when the next book will be available, which I know a lot of you are asking) then the simplest way is to subscribe to the humanlegion.com website — there’s a button to do that on the side of each webpage. Subscribers get each post sent to them automatically via email. Alternatively, if you have an account on amazon.com, you can go to my author page and ‘Follow’ me. My amazon.com author page is here, and the follow button is under my mugshot. This is a fairly new facility on the US Amazon store only, but for readers elsewhere in the world, you don’t have to buy from the US […]

January 18, 2016

The invasion of the White Knight homeworld

One of the greatest pleasures of life is the warm swell of pride at watching your helpless babies grow first into children — with their own personalities, interests, and aptitudes — and then mature into adults who achieve feats we as the older generation could only dream of. We realize that the youngsters really did learn from those mistakes they made in their youth, that they were actually listening to our sage advice (even though they never admitted it at the time), and quietly ignored our advice when they had moved beyond us. Doesn’t always work out so well, of course, but it has for me with the characters of the Human Legion. In the first TO&E I wrote out […]

January 8, 2016

Sometimes nice things come in the post

These arrived a couple of days ago. Look good to me 😀 The audio edition of Indigo Squad is out later this month. There’s an MP3 edition too.

January 7, 2016

Book 5 progress report

I was so confident that the fifth book was going to be out by January that I wrote that down in the back of book 4 and on the website. That will teach me. Today I’ve taken stock of the situation, and realistically we’re not going to make January. That’s partly due to the box set I’m working on taking more time than I expected, but mostly due to the authors and their families being ill (though nothing serious, thankfully). I don’t say that to make excuses, but rather to explain that it’s nothing to do with being out of ideas or writer’s block or anything else that means the book won’t be something that will make me proud when […]

December 24, 2015

Happy Christmas from the Human Legion

I’m in full-on Christmas mode now. Dad needs some sherry, the guinea pigs need more hay, and my son needs to engage in intense physical activity in case he explodes from excitement because tomorrow is Christmas Day. I wanted to take a moment out to thank all of you for your support during 2015. It was December 26th 2014 when the first Human Legion book was published. Since then we’ve launched a total of four novels and sold around 70,000 copies. I say ‘we’ because I haven’t done this on my own. My most obvious partners are Ian Whates who is co-writing the main series with me, JR Handley with The Sleeping Legion, and the team at my audio publisher, […]

December 18, 2015

Empire at War – a military SF box set

More announcements! You’ve probably seen plenty of box sets in the Amazon Kindle Store in recent years. The idea is that several individual titles are collected into a single Kindle book, and usually presented at a bargain price. The books are connected by a theme, and the first Kindle military SF/ space opera themed box set that I’m aware of was Stars & Empire, which came out last year and did very well. These box sets are a very good idea, I thought to myself. So I decided to make one of my own. I wanted a strong theme, which took me a while to dream up. Then it occurred to me that I had discovered other British military […]

December 17, 2015

The Sleeping Legion series

Time for more revelations about the Human Legion spin-off series: Sleeping Legion. I announced this a few weeks ago as a series of novellas that pick up the story of the war on Tranquility that we leave behind in Human Empire, the 4th book of the Human Legion series. As tales are wont to do, this beast has come alive and is now telling us its own story. The Sleeping Legion series will indeed pick up the events left in Human Empire, but will now start off many years before the Human Legion series, deep into the dark history of the Human Marine Corps. Nix the novellas too. The Sleeping Legion will be short novels. I’m working closely with author J.R. Handley […]

December 15, 2015

Marko Kloos interviewed

Not by me, unfortunately, but there’s a podcast interview by the #Wrongfun podcast team that they carried out at the recent Honorcon militarySF convention at Raleigh, NC. [The interview is episode 7, which you can find here.] It’s a small world, because a guest of honor at next year’s Honorcon is Christopher G. Nuttall, and in a few days I’ll be announcing a collaboration that Chris and I are working on together. If you don’t know about Marko Kloos and his ‘Frontlines’ series, then I recommend you check him out. I read the first book when it was still self-published by Marko, but now he’s published by 47 North (a very successful division of Amazon) which means he gets smarter […]

December 11, 2015

Have a science fiction Christmas with Human Legion audiobooks

Tantor Media have been busy producing audio editions of the first three novels in the Human Legion series. Narrator Tom Zingarelli does a fantastic job of bringing Arun McEwan and the others to life. It is a strange experience for me to hear a voice actor speak the words I wrote in 2014. You can hear a sample of Marine Cadet here and of Indigo Squad here. You can pre-order CDs or an mp3 download at the Tantor website (follow the links above to the audio samples). You can buy CDs from most Amazon stores too, though at the moment the purchase links seem to be for CDs only and aren’t available in Australia. The audio edition of Marine Cadet […]