New Kashubia Books in Order

New Kashubia is not a comfortable space colony. The planet is rich in heavy metals but badly short on carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, so even dirt is expensive and most people live in tunnels cut through solid gold. That contrast gives the series its mood from the start. The colony sits on immense mineral wealth and still feels poor, cramped, and one bad decision away from disaster.

Mickolai Derdowski is the main human thread that carries the first two books. In A Boy and His Tank, he escapes a death sentence by joining the army, which means being sealed into a close bond with an intelligent tank. Frankowski uses that setup for more than combat scenes. The human-tank partnership is the emotional and technical center of the series. Training happens in virtual reality, orders move through simulations, and the border between practice and real experience is not always as solid as Mickolai thinks.

This series likes military hardware, but it is really about systems.

Because New Kashubia has so little to spare, its leaders turn people into the colony's main export. They send soldiers out as mercenaries, backed by smart machines and immersive simulation, and that gives the books a strange mix of poverty, ingenuity, and dark humor. The first novel reads partly like a coming-of-age story and partly like a military science fiction setup. Mickolai grows up fast, learns how the tank corps works, and discovers that survival on this planet depends as much on adaptation as courage.

Then the scale widens. In the second book, the story moves from mercenary service and training culture into a direct clash with Earth. That shift matters because it turns a closed colony story into a political and military fight over autonomy, debt, rationing, and who gets to control the future of the planet. New Kashubia is still poor, still improvising, and still leaning hard on smart weapons and hard choices, but now the stakes are much bigger than one recruit and one tank.

Kren of the Mitchegai opens the door even wider. Instead of staying focused only on human politics, it brings in a powerful alien civilization and spends real time showing how strange that enemy is. The Mitchegai are not just another rival fleet. Their biology, social order, and way of thinking make them feel like a genuine long-term threat. That change gives the series a broader space-opera edge without losing the rough colony-world feel of the earlier books.

What you should expect, then, is not polished court intrigue or glossy starship adventure. New Kashubia is harsher than that. These books are about survival on a bad world, improvised prosperity, and the uncomfortable alliance between human beings and the machines that keep them alive. If you like military SF with a strong colony setting, practical details, and the sense that every gain has been clawed out of scarcity, this is the appeal.