Draka

The first novel of the rise and fall of the Drakan Empire, an alternative history saga. In Marching Through Georgia, the Draka begin their conquest of the globe as they fight and best that more obvious horror, the Nazis.

In Stirling's alternate world of Marching Through Georgia, the Tories of the American Revolution left the colonies for South Africa and founded a slave-based society that evolved into the Domination of Draka, ruling all of Africa and siding with the Allies in WW II just to gain more land and chattel. This sequel opens in the 1940s with the Draka reducing Europeans to serfs, as they have already done with Africans and Arabs, and beginning to come into conflict with a U.S. headed by President Marshall. Fred Kustaa, an OSS agent, ventures into Draka territory to bring weapons to Finnish resistance fighters and to smuggle out Professor Ernst Oerbach, a scientist who holds the key to fusion bombs. Kustaa's contact in the latter mission is serf Marya Sokolowska, a captured Polish nun. Stirling's latest has less military action than its predecessor--though an ambush of Draka forces by Finnish insurgents and a flashback by one of the characters to WW II are limned with vigorous battle scenes--deepening the overall darkness of the author's vision of Draka society. This is a potent, unflinching look at a might-have-been world whose evil both contrasts with and reflects that in our own.

A cold war between the American-led Alliance and the Domination, rivals in the Draka conquest, erupts in a space confrontation that will decide the freedom or slavery of humankind.

Gwendolen Ingolfsson, hurled into a parallel Earth filled with billions of unaltered, antique humans when the molehole experiment she was working on malfunctioned, is very clear where her duty lies. As a member of the Draka, genetically engineered to dominate crude, unmodified humans, her task is to build a molehole device in this universe and establish a bridgehead for the Race to come through. It had been some time since the Draka last had such an opportunity for conquest...As for Detective-Lieutenant Henry Carmaggio, he'd seen plenty of blood, both in Cambodia and in twenty years of police work. But he'd never seen anything like this. Something was loose in his city, something inhuman that walked among us, killing with the easy precision of a leopard in a flock of sheep. And unless he could track it down it would kill and kill again - until the whole world was its hunting ground.

THINK ABOUT HISTORY. NOW MAKE IT WORSE . . . The Domination of the Draka begins as a British possession in Africa, but soon becomes far more. Absorbing refugees after the American Revolution, and later the Civil War, the Draka become a people bred to rule with an iron fist. They permanently enslave the peoples of Africa, when they do not simply kill them. But this does not slake the Draka thirst for power. Sweeping across the world, the Draka empire engulfs nation after nation, shackling into servitude all who are not Draka. Europe, Asia, and finally all the Earth and its colonies throughout the Solar System fall before the might of the Draka. But empires are not faceless monoliths; they are made of individuals, complex humans with their own hopes and dreams. And so one might ask: Who are the Draka What sort of people does the Domination rule The Draka would have many different answers . . .