Artillerymen Books in Order

Artillerymen takes readers back a century before Destroyermen and shows how part of that alternate world was shaped long before USS Walker arrived. In 1847, a loose collection of American replacement soldiers is sailing to join General Winfield Scott's campaign in the Mexican-American War. They never reach Veracruz. A violent storm throws them onto the same dangerous Earth seen in the later books, but at a time when flintlocks, field guns, and raw nerve are all they have.

This series starts rougher and more ground-level than its naval cousin.

Major Lewis Cayce becomes the key figure, not because he has a perfect plan, but because someone has to turn a scattered shipment of infantrymen, artillerymen, dragoons, and riflemen into a real force. The early books, especially Purgatory's Shore, lean hard into that problem. These men were not supposed to become founders of anything. They were replacements, half strangers to one another, and they arrive in a place where their old assumptions about nation, race, religion, and destiny stop being enough.

The Yucatan matters here. So do the local peoples they meet, the Jaguar Warriors who become allies, and the looming threat of the Holy Dominion, a human power built on conquest, slavery, and ritual bloodshed. Anderson uses that setup to make the action feel more immediate and more uncomfortable. Cayce and his men have to build friendships, train side by side with new allies, and decide what parts of the world they came from are worth carrying forward, and what parts are not.

By the time you get to Hell's March, Devil's Battle, and Inferno's Shadow, the series becomes a campaign story in the old sense of the word. There are marches, sieges, gun crews, awkward alliances, and brutal problems that cannot be solved by simply standing on defense. Readers who enjoy artillery detail, field leadership, and the gritty side of alternate history will probably find this series even more tactile than Destroyermen.

It also adds important background to the larger world. These books help explain how later powers rise, why certain old conflicts still matter, and how the future New United States first began to take shape. Even so, Artillerymen works best as its own story, a hard, muddy, determined military adventure about building order where none exists.