For More Than Glory

While General Bill Booly, the heroic leader in previous Legion novels, and his wife, Maylo, are busy tracking down the last of the mutinous Syndicate rebels, the bulk of the novel takes place on the remote planet of LaNor -- where a flood of alien diplomats, religious fanatics, and conniving traders are descending on the recently discovered preindustrial world. Legion Lieutenant Tony Santana -- newly stationed on LaNor -- must try to quell a full-fledged native rebellion against all aliens on the planet with a handful of mismatched Legionnaires, while attractive Foreign Service diplomat Christine Vanderveen slowly unravels a complicated alien plot that will allow the Ramanthians (a highly intelligent and totally untrustworthy insectoid race) to secretly land on LaNor and hatch billions of new Ramanthian warriors.

Dietz's Legion of the Damned novels are as hard-core military science fiction as any David Drake or David Weber offering. However, they're also comparable to C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner sequence (Foreigner, Invader, Inheritor, etc.) and Alan Dean Foster's Commonwealth novels, in that much of Dietz's story line revolves around the tenuous intricacies of numerous very different alien races trying to exist together without annihilating each other. Categorizing For More than Glory as military science fiction, while accurate, just doesn't do it justice. Paul Goat Allen