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Whatever Happened to Robert Frezza?

A Small Colonial War  (Small Colonial War, volume 1)

By Robert Frezza  

24 Jun, 2015

Military Speculative Fiction That Doesn't Suck

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1989’s A Small Colonial War is Robert Frezza’s debut novel [1]. It is also the first volume of Frezza’s short lived Small Colonial War sequence, a military science fiction series that would bookend Frezza’s career as an SF novelist. 

All the world’s problems finally came to a head in the great calamity known as the break up. Four billion corpses later, Japan emerged as the remaining dominant power on Earth. Not especially humanitarian in purpose, the empire seems no better and no worse than the empires that came before it.

By the 22nd Century, Japan’s empire reaches to the stars. But there’s a catch: their ships may be faster than light, but they’re still slow. A combination of time dilation and time spent in hibernation means that travellers return home to Earth to find that decades have passed while they have only aged months or years themselves. As a result, the Japanese Diet has only the vaguest ideas as to what its imperial tendrils are doing, way out in the stars. A second consequence is that interstellar travel is exile, something that those in power avoid if they can. 

Which brings us to Lieutenant-Colonel Anton the Veriag” Vereshchagin and his command, the 1st Battalion, 35th Imperial Infantry. 


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