Eric Flint Wiki
Eric Flint Wiki
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The Belisarius Series is a fictional saga co-written by David Drake and Eric Flint and published by Baen Books.

The premise of the series is that a war between two competing societies in the future spills over to 6th century Earth. The New Gods back the Malwa Empire of India and commence attempts to conquer the world and stamp out meritorious accomplishment as a means to privilege and instead favor planned eugenics and hereditary birth (autocracy) in order to change the future. Meritorious performance is seen to originate in the Eastern Roman Empire (a.k.a., the Byzantine Empire), and the root cause of a future that must be changed by conquest, and Malwa has a malleable society and the base power for their intervention. Anything in the way (other Indian kingdoms, the Sassanid Persian Empire, and so forth) must be crushed. China is to be the next target after Byzantium falls.

The Malwa Empire is advised and controlled by a calculating cyborg (human/machine) interface named Link, and the empire uses gunpowder technology to conquer most of the rest of India. To counter this, the other side, crystalline entities originating in humanity's far future contact the Byzantine general Flavius Belisarius via a local holy man and show him a vision of the future with the Malwa conquering the Byzantine Empire and the world. This in essence, puts the problem of thwarting the horrible future in Belisarius's lap even as emissaries of the Malwa Empire are visiting Rome to establish a factional struggle to divide Byzantium—and at the same time are becoming very popular amongst some of the ruling class of Byzantium, including the Emperor Justinian I, forcing Belisarius and his allies to move surreptitiously.

Books[]

  • An Oblique Approach
  • In the Heart of Darkness
  • Destiny's Shield
  • Fortune's Stroke
  • The Tide of Victory
  • The Dance of Time
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