An unusually brutal and bloody work of fiction. You are warned, if you care. Nonetheless, I highly recommend these novels.

Three novels, collectively retelling the career of Sir Francis Drake as a science fiction tale. The first, Igniting the Reaches, follows the Drake character, Piet Ricimer, as a slaver and near-pirate. The second, Through the Breach, is a creative recreation of Drake's 'round the world voyage. The third, Fireships, is based on the battle of the Armada, and the events leading up to and following that battle. While I'm not expert on Drake's career, I know enough to recognize some of the battles and events as told here.

This is a marvelous work of imagination. The author has developed plausible and internally-consistent reasons for starships to have similar properties to age-of-sail warships, and similar vulnerabilities. Moveover, he's created a political universe enough like that of Elizabeth's reign to use it as a framework for a Drake-like career. Finally, he's told the story through the eyes of sympathetic, albeit very brutal, characters who are certainly real enough to be credible; they worry about each other, brood about the impacts of their activities, and--most interestingly--they grow as we watch them.

Well done, David Drake. Now do a followup based on Horatio Nelson. Please?

This review has also been published on a dabbler's journal. ( )

This volume contains the trilogy of Igniting the Reaches, Through the Breach, and Fireships, previously published separately. It was a great pleasure to be able to read them together in one volume. The books are full of exciting action, with battles for starships and war, pirates and evil doers aplenty. The books center on Stephen Gregg, a gentleman of Venus, and his friend, Captain Piet Ricimer. These two meet aboard a merchant vessel at the beginning of Igniting the Reaches. It is Gregg's first voyage beyond Pluto. Almost immediately the small ship gets into trouble and the crew must fight to stay alive in a harsh galaxy. Gregg finds that he has a talent for killing and becomes a valued member of the crew as well as Ricimer's best friend. They return to Venus very wealthy men.
In the next book, Through the Breach, we see the story through the eyes of young Jeremy Moore, an upstart with a handy talent for electronics. Jeremy talks himself aboard Captain Ricimer's next voyage to escape from his entanglements on Venus, and also to find out what kind of man he is. This journey is to take the ships through a thin part of the Mirror, a boundary between the universe as we know it and a kind of parallel universe that exists, although hidden, beside us. Again there is a lot of fighting and near disaster before the brave men return to Venus with holds full of loot, making everyone rich and further opening the trade routes to far away planets.
The third part of the trilogy is concerned with the building pressure from Earth, which is ruled by a tyrant. Earth would like to conquer Venus as it has conquered nearly every other planet with human inhabitants. Venus is fiercely independent and, thanks to Captain Ricimer's earlier voyages, has the means to defend itself at last. Ricimer gathers an armada and goes out to meet the enemy. This time his voyage is military in nature, unlike previous voyages in which sailors doubled as warriors when need arose.
All three books are highly entertaining and fast-paced. ( )

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