Leo Frankowski Books in Order

If you want the classic starting point: The Cross-Time Engineer → The High-Tech Knight → The Radiant Warrior
If you want the main Conrad arc first: The Cross-Time Engineer → The High-Tech Knight → The Radiant Warrior → The Flying Warlord → Lord Conrad's Lady
If you prefer military science fiction: A Boy and His Tank → The War Against Earth → Kren of the Mitchegai
If you want space naval adventure: The Two-Space War
If you want stand-alone big ideas first: Copernick's Rebellion → The Fata Morgana

Leo Frankowski was born in Detroit, Michigan, on February 13, 1943, and grew up in a Polish American family with Kashubian roots. His family ran an inn in the city, and that mix of immigrant memory, working life, and practical problem-solving stayed close to him for the rest of his career.

Before he published novels, he had already lived a very technical life. He worked as an engineer, ran Sterling Manufacturing and Design in Utica, Michigan, and held several patents. Part of his professional world involved hydraulic and pneumatic systems, and one of his patented products, Formital, was used in auto-body repair.

That background shows.

Frankowski liked stories where tools, logistics, and know-how mattered, and he wrote as someone who had actually built things for a living. His fiction is full of workshops, supply problems, improvised solutions, and the kind of step-by-step thinking that comes from engineering rather than from abstract theorizing.

He had been writing short science fiction for years, but the big turn came in the early 1980s, when he joined a Detroit-area critique group that became the National Science Fiction Writer's Exchange. Members read their work aloud and pulled it apart together. Frankowski's time-travel material got a strong response, and he quickly turned one of those ideas into a novel. Sold to Del Rey, it appeared as The Cross-Time Engineer and launched the Conrad Stargard books.

Those Conrad novels are still the center of his reputation. In The Cross-Time Engineer, The High-Tech Knight, and The Radiant Warrior, a modern Polish engineer lands in thirteenth-century Poland and starts trying to prepare the country for the coming Mongol invasion. Readers who connect with Frankowski usually connect here first. The appeal is not hard to see: big alternate-history stakes, lots of practical invention, military planning, and the pleasure of watching one fix lead to three new complications.

He kept working that vein, but he did not only write medieval time travel. A Boy and His Tank moves to a harsh colony world where a young soldier bonds with an intelligent tank and fights wars shaped by virtual reality. The Two-Space War, written with Dave Grossman, takes space opera in a very different direction, imagining interstellar travel through a realm where advanced machinery fails and sentient wooden ships travel under sail.

He could go stranger, too.

Copernick's Rebellion plays with genetic engineering, living houses, and bio-made tools. The Fata Morgana starts with two modern engineers stumbling onto a legendary island and turns that setup into a story about isolation, belief, and survival. Across very different books, the same interests keep coming back: engineers, soldiers, colonists, institutions under pressure, and people trying to rebuild the world in front of them instead of waiting for somebody else to do it.

His Polish and Kashubian background was not just biographical detail. It shaped the Conrad books' focus on Poland, and it also fed into the New Kashubia series, which carried Kashubian names and identity into a space-colony setting. In 1987 he was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, a good sign of how quickly his first novel had put him on readers' radar.

Later in life he spent several years living in Russia with his wife and adopted daughter. He died on December 25, 2008, in Lake Elsinore, California. Frankowski was never a smooth, one-size-fits-all writer, but he had a very clear lane. If you like science fiction that cares about process, pressure, and what an engineer would do next, his books still feel very much like his own.