Books You Should Read, Epsiode 1: Gordon R. Dickson’s Dorsai!, The Silver Medal of Classic Military Science Fiction

I first read Gordon R. Dickson’s novel, Dorsai! (the exclamation mark is part of the title), when I was eleven years old. The novel follows the quasi-transcendent, mercenary genius Donal Graeme from his graduation of his world’s military academy through his ascent to the commander of the largest military force in human history.

Being both military minded and a little (maybe a lot… definitely too much) in love with my own intellect, the themes of the novel greatly appealed to me as a boy. It was good enough to stay on my re-reading cycle for several years, but I realized the other day that I hadn’t read it in the last half-decade or so.

Re-reading it as a thirty-two year old veteran and aspiring author, I find it’s still a good book but its flaws are a little more apparent.

Dorsai! and its attendant sequels, prequels and related books occupy a universe in which humanity inhabits eight different solar systems. Interstellar civilization is marked by an arguably unrealistic degree of specialization by each colony world. The resultant trading of skilled personnel back and forth between the worlds is the basis for the galaxy’s economy.

Some, like Venus and Newton, focus on feats of science and engineering, but the real stars of Dorsai! and every the other novel in this universe are the Splinter Cultures, each of which is focused on some particularly extreme philosophy.

The first are the Exotics who practice a combination of Hari Seldon’s psychohistory, Bene Gesserit breeding programs, and Hindu mysticism/philosophy. They are personally non-violent, but not philosophically pacifistic, ergo they have a closer relationship with the mercenary Dorsai than most despite their philosophical differences.

Then come the ironically named Friendlies who are all fundamental monotheists of various flavors and embody, in various characters, the potential for both extreme decency and irrational zealotry inherent to religious convictions.

Finally, we have the eponymous Dorsai of the planet Dorsai. They are the galaxy’s most elite mercenary soldiers. The Dorsai maintain a libertarian confederation of extended family units upon their world whilst exporting their military talent to the other worlds to support life back on their rugged and beautiful but resource-poor planet.

The novel’s primary strength is a compelling, if clearly overpowered, protagonist in Donal Graeme. A son of the Dorsai’s most prominent family, Donal engages in a meteoric political and military career in the pattern of a soldier/statesmen of the classical Mediterranean. He’s a science fictional Julius Caesar or Alcibiades, if you will, but with a morality more palatable to our modern sensibilities. Donal Graeme is both superhuman and super-humane in his goals and methods.

The novel’s primary weakness is its bloodlessness, both in its philosophy towards war and in its treatment of its characters.

Dickson does posit a few valid notions about war. First among these is the emphasis on simplicity in equipment and disdain for over-engineering—specifically with regard to infantry weapons. Dickson’s far-future mercenaries still use projectile rifles much like our own due to the impossibility of gimmicking such weapons from a distance.

The modern Army could take a cue from the ideas here. I’m not a military luddite, advanced weaponry has its place. Any weapon that relies upon a GPS or any external wireless signal to function at all, however, is going to be easily blunted in a fight against someone more advanced than Iraq. We are entirely too reliant upon radio and computer networks; so much so that the notion of a runner carrying orders back and forth is alien in practice, if not in theory, in the US Army.

But the primary military thesis of Dorsai! is the promotion of the indirect theory of maneuver warfare. That is, the idea that the primary aim of any commander should always be to maneuver and deceive his enemy into an entirely untenable position before engaging in battle, or better yet, accepting the enemy’s surrender when he realizes the hopelessness of his situation.

Tom Kratman examines the flaws of this theory and its relation to Decision Cycles in modern American military theory more skillfully than I could here at the Baen website.


From the standpoint of the novel, this translates into all of Donal’s victories being the result of clear, quick decisions on his part with few if any enemy actions or random factors bearing on the tactical problem. Each victory is decisive from his first outing as a platoon leader to his final triumph as commander of a multi-planetary joint space/ground force.

The issue I have with this, the issue anybody who has led in combat, or even seriously trained as a combat leader should have, is that it captures none of the chaos, confusion and ambiguity of war.

Every time a ground combat leader makes a decision, he does so with less than perfect information about the enemy and about his own forces, almost always under duress and, depending on echelon, while in personal danger. He then issues his orders not to unfeeling machines, but to troops who, no matter how well-trained, are themselves susceptible to the stresses of the environment and combat. The result is virtually never the neat, orderly action that Dorsai portrays.

Furthermore, aside from Donal and his antagonist, William (an evil super-genius commodities/stock trader), the characters are almost uniformly flat. The biggest offender is the love interest, Anea. I’m more willing than many to make allowances for generational differences in how women are perceived when judging books, but Anea is just plain boring in any era. Despite being allegedly bred for superior intellect and moral judgment by the aforementioned Exotics, she spends the majority of the book being a childish ninny until at the very end when she decides she loves Donal for no apparent reason.

No reason that is, until the head Exotic explains that she was bred to have the hots for the most powerful man in the galaxy- so much so that she couldn’t resist marrying him, whoever he was. They actually wanted her to marry the bad guy, William, to smooth his rough edges. But since Donal beat William, lucky her, she gets the hero instead. Phew!

And she isn't even pissed when they tell her this.

Compare Anea with any of Heinlein’s talented and valiant heroines from Podykane of Mars to Wyoming Knott to Hazel Stone or even Carmen Ibanez for her brief appearances in Starship Troopers (THE MOVIE NEVER HAPPENED) and she’s just a sad, sad character. To be fair to Dickson, though, he proves that he can write compelling women in later works. Specifically, Amanda Morgan the First in Spirit of the Dorsai is a multi-dimensional and sympathetic treatment of the stern-matriarch archetype.

Despite all the harsh criticism I’ve just leveled at the book, it is still a classic and well worth the read, especially since it is such a short read. Dickson uses the super-competent arch-rivals trope about as well as anyone in Donal and his archenemy, William of Ceta. The conflict is more interesting for the mismatch of professional soldier versus economic genius. The concepts behind the setting are cool and make for a good milieu—even if they’re not terribly plausible in my opinion. Furthermore, it’s foundational to the Dorsai Series, also known as the Childe Cycle.

There are many superior volumes in the Childe Cycle, including the two other Dorsai books; Spirit of the Dorsai and Lost Dorsai. Each of these is actually two novelettes combined. All four stories are exceptional. The story of Michael deSandoval in Lost Dorsai actually contains the only pacifist in all of fiction that I have ever found sympathetic. I also recommend Soldier, Ask Not and Young Bleys, which showcase protagonists from outside the Spartan culture of the Dorsai. You can read the four books I’ve just named with no background, but the experience will be richer if you start at the start with Dorsai!.

David Drake, himself a luminary in the sub-genre of military science fiction, claims that Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Dickson's Dorsai! are the standards against which all other military science fiction should be judged. I don’t necessarily think he’s wrong, but I think there’s a clear reason Starship Troopers is the better known and more widely read of the two. Dickson wrote an important book, but Heinlein wrote one that was just as important and much more fun.