Gateway Essentials: Gordon R. Dickson

If, like us, you’re currently struggling to process the fact that it’s already November, you could probably do with some distraction. May we recommend losing yourself in a good book?  Perhaps something by an award-winning author equally at home with either SF or Fantasy?

Gordon R. Dickson is, of course, best-known for the Dorsai! series – a key progenitor of military science fiction and it’s these books we’d recommend starting with; and we think the best reading order is:

Or you could try The Dorsai! eBook Collection, which includes the first six Dorsai novels in publication order: Dorsai!, Necromancer, Soldier, Ask Not, The Tactics of Mistake, The Spirit of Dorsai and Lost Dorsai:

However, Dickson also received a World Fantasy Award nomination, and won the British Fantasy Award, for The Dragon and the George, a secondary world fantasy, which built into a nine book sequence over the next quarter of a century.  So if space opera featuring top-of-the-range warriors isn’t your thing, maybe try some good honest fantasy fun:

In addition to the Dorsai! books – also known as the Childe Cycle – Dickson wrote over three dozen other SF novels (some in collaboration with fellow SF legends such as Poul Anderson and Harry Harrison); books like The Alien Way and Time Storm:

That should be enough to distract you.

You can find more of Gordon R. Dickson’s work via his Author page on the Gateway website, and read about him in his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.