Amazon.com Review

It's about time! No more scouring used-book stores for tattered copies to replace the ones you loaned your friends: the first two installments of S.M. Stirling's superlative military-SF/alternate-history Draka trilogy are back in print, bound along with the third installment in hardcover. The only downside to this collection--which spans Marching Through Georgia, Under the Yoke, and The Stone Dogs--is the disappointing omission of the helpful maps, glossary, and so on that appeared in the original editions. But as some consolation, we at least get a bit of new backstory for the pseudo-sequel to Stone Dogs, Drakon, in the form of a prologue and a few interspersed paragraphs bookending each title.

The Draka series (dubbed The Domination in this collection) still requires a strong stomach--you'll find no shortage of blood and bullets or sex and violence here. But it's prudish to argue with Stirling's choices. A skilled writer and rigorous thinker, he's spun a compelling--not to mention plausible and well-researched--alternate history for earth: in this timeline, the Loyalists losers in the American Revolution set up shop in South Africa and then proceed to subjugate and industrialize the continent, eventually exporting their brutal system of slavery and conquest through WWI, WWII, and beyond to cover the better part of the globe. Page-turning, blood-pumping, realistic, and masterfully written combat SF, The Domination is part of the genre's canon. --Paul Hughes

Product Description

Originally published as three separate volumes, S.M. Stirling's masterly alternate history tells of the rise to power of the Domination of the Draka and its long struggle with the American-led Alliance for Democracy. Beginning in the rich subcontinent of South Africa, the people calling themselves the Draka - disaffected refugees from the American Revolution - first forged an empire of inconceivable wealth and savagery, founded on conquest and slavery. Spanning the whole of the African continent, the Great War of the early twentieth century gave it much of Asia as well. Then in the Eurasian War, Germany and the Soviet Union exhausted one another and the Draka stepped in, leaving the Domination triumphant from the English Channel to the China Sea. Only America and its allies stands between the Draka and their dream of an enslaved planet. By the 1990s the Draka commanded the stuff of life itself, mastering biotechnology until they could create new species at will - and transform themselves into the Master Race of their savage dreams. Meanwhile the Alliance for Democracy travelled another path, into the mysteries of the physical universe and the knowledge to be gained there. The final confrontation would settle which was the more powerful ...or it would leave the earth a lifeless rock on which nothing human remained but bones.