This was written at about the same time as 'The Fata Morgana'.

I'd first played a bit with the problems of human-machine interfaces in Copernick's Rebellion, but now I wanted to get deeper into it. At the time I wrote this book, the term 'Virtual Reality' wasn't in common usage, so I called it 'Dream World'.

And I wanted to explore the military advantages of Virtual Reality, which are many.

I'd long been a fan of David Drake, and I wanted to write something about these super tanks with mercenaries inside, blasting the countryside.

But, either a mercenary is a pschycopath who loves killing people so much that he is willing to risk his own life to do it, or he is someone who is so poor that it is rationally worth risking his life to keep his family from starving.

I've met too many psychopaths to want to write about them. And if my hero is so poor, how did he afford the multi-million dollar tank in the first place? Explaining this one took about fifty pages, and it was hard work to keep that much explanatory text from being boring.

The series solidified in my mind long before the first book was finished. The first book is about our boy's basic training, but he doesn't know that it's not real. The Virtual Reality they had was very convincing.

The second is about his raise to wealth, fame, and power in the army. I did this because I wanted him to have something that he did not want to lose, and would fight to the end to keep.

The third is about his nemesis, Kren, the most evil creature that I could come up with. His people are biologically evil! Dey bad mudrfks!

The fourth about their first major clash in combat.

The fifth about attacks and counter-attacks between two star empires.

And the sixth is about the final victory, and the re-birth of the Human Race, which had gotten snuffed along the way.

Six is really a very nice number for a trilogy, don't you think? It's what Tolkein used, after all.

Well, when the first book came out in hardcover, the ending raised howls of protest.

"Dammit Frankowski, 'And the little boy fell out of bed and found out that it was all a dream...' is hardly a proper ending for a modern Science Fiction novel! If you had the slightest respect for your readers ....." And on and on for nine more pages.

There were a lot of letters like that. Finally, we pulled the last chapter from the paperback version, and left it with Mickolai being a hero.

You've probably noticed that I use a lot of Slavic characters in my books. This because, being Slavic, I know the culture better than most people, and because no body else is writing it, so I have the field to myself. Mike Resnick gets Africa, I get Poland.

Enjoy.