Search Worlds Without End

Hugo Award winning story. It originally appeared in Galaxy Magazine, October 1964. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Hugo Winners, Volume 2: (1963-70) (1971), edited by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg Presents the Great SF Stories: 1964 (2002), edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg. It is included in the collection Beginnings (1988) and was expanded to the full novel Soldier, Ask Not (1967).

Throughout the Fourteen Worlds of humanity, no race is as feared and respected as the Dorsai. The ultimate warriors, they are known for their deadly rages, unbreakable honor, and fierce independence. No man rules the Dorsai, but their mastery of the art of war has made them the most valuable mercenaries in the known universe.

Donal Graeme is Dorsai, taller and harder than any ordinary man. But he is different as well, with talents that maze even his fellow Dorsai. And once he ventures out into the stars, the future will never be the same....

On the sixteen colonized worlds, mankind had changed, evolved into something that was slightly more than human...and slightly less. Men of War on the Dorsai worlds, men of Faith on the Friendly Worlds of Harmony and Association, men of Science, the Exotics of Kultis and Mara, and the Splinter cultures which had produced even stranger new talents.

Those who knew said it was the Dorsai who supplied soldiers to the sixteen worlds. The Friendlies supplied cannon fodder, common soldiers who could be relied on to obey orders at all times.

But even cannon fodder can sometimes produce genius. Jamethon Black is a true soldier, and a true man of faith. Now he must face a deadly enemy--an enemy whose defeat will forever separate Black from the only woman he has ever loved.

It's obvious that Cletus Graeme--limping, mild-mannered scholarly--doesn't belong on a battling field, but instead at a desk working on his fourth book on battle strategy and tactics. But Bakhalla has more battlefields than libraries, and Graeme sees his small force of Dorsai--soldiers of fortune--as the perfect opportunity to test his theories. But if his theories or his belief in the Dorsai lead him astray, he's a dead man.

The Dorsai are the finest soldiers ever trained to fight and win against all odds. The Spirit of Dorsai is an illumination of the heart and soul of the planet Dorsai and its people, showing with epic clarity and unforgettable vision how why the Dorsai fight and live. It tells of the beginning when the first Dorsai was former by mercenaries willing to fight other's battles to buy freedom for their own homes. It tells how even children and old men fought for the dream of Dorsai. From the mouth of Amanda Morgan, direct descendant of two illustrious women who bore her name, the full story is told in all its splendour.

The Childe Cycle, also known as the Dorsai series, is Gordon R. Dickson's future history of humankind and its ultimate destiny. Now one of its central novels return to print in a two-volume corrected edition.

In The Final Encyclopedia the human race is split into three Splinter cultures: the Friendlies, fanatic in their faith; the truth-seeking Exotics; and the warrior Dorsai. But now humanity is threatened by the power-hungry Others, whose triumph would end all human progress.

Hal Mayne is an orphan who was raised by three tutors: an Exotic, a Friendly, and a Dorsai. He is the only human capable of uniting humanity against the Others. But only if he is willing to accept his terrifying destiny... as savior of mankind.

A towering landmark of future history, The Final Encyclopedia is a novel every SF fan needs to own.