A warrior with the secret powers of knowledge and training. It's sad that this series gets such low ratings. I've read the books several times over the past 20 years and found the plot intriguing: a man trained in the psychology and application of war and conflict is sent to a world(s) where some of the original colonists have learned to manipulate time/space to basically function as minor gods. The hero is sent there to find out what's going on and inserts himself into the fighting milieu using his inherent talent for conflict (he's a natural born warrior...only with real training) and moves to the top of the hierarchy. It was a thrill for me to read how he analyzes the culture, the battle techniques, the weapons and the basic psychology of the combatants to ingratiate himself with the various warlords with the aim of reducing the level of brutal one-on-one conflict throughout the various planets of the star-system(?).

The gimmick of the stories is that the native culture is pure medieval with swords and bludgeons, etc. using super-advanced electronically cyber-enhanced battle suits of which the natives have only the most rudimentary knowledge. Hansen, the hero, quickly analyzes the complexity of the suits and experiments with the powers that one might expect such suits to have and uses this knowledge to dominate the landscape to make himself the kings’ most trusted war martial.

The only reason I hold back from rating all the books 5-stars is that, even though Hansen has been sent there to find out what has happened to all the fleets that have been sent to investigate this star system, and have never returned, David Drake never tells us how the originals ever became ‘gods’. Nor how they made Hansen a god—without his knowledge.

Maybe it just didn’t matter to Drake. After all, he’s only retelling the legends of Norse/Scandinavian mythology in a more modern guise—where the how or why really wasn’t important. ( )