Merlin Books in Order

The Merlin stories take place unimaginably far in the future, long after most of humanity has been wiped out in wars against an implacable enemy. The last scattered fleets of human ships are losing ground to the Huskers, a mysterious civilisation that specialises in long slow genocides.

Merlin is an almost mythic figure in this era, a traveller who has stretched his life across millions of years through relativistic travel and advanced technology. He roams a half empty galaxy in his ship Tyrant, obsessed with rumours of a legendary weapon supposedly left behind by an older culture called the Waymakers.

Each story drops Merlin into a different corner of that wrecked future. In tales like Hideaway and Minla's Flowers he encounters human communities clinging to survival under local pressures, from collapsing stars to brutal politics, and must decide how far he is willing to go in the name of his larger war.

The Iron Tactician and Merlin's Gun push deeper into the mystery of that super weapon and the alien transport network known as the Waynet. Along the way Merlin teams up with reluctant allies, explores derelict war machines, and discovers that the clean solution he has been chasing may come with terrible costs.

As a sequence these stories combine deep time melancholy with the pleasures of classic adventure. You get old school starship exploration, mysterious artefacts, and big cosmic stakes, but filtered through a single stubborn character who has seen almost everything and still chooses to keep fighting.

Because the pieces were written over many years you can read them in either publication order or internal chronology. The through line is Merlin's long, quixotic attempt to find something that can finally tip the balance against the Huskers, and whether that kind of victory is possible at all.