The Council Wars Books in Order

The Council Wars series starts from an almost utopian far future, where a world-spanning computer called Mother quietly runs everything. People reshape their bodies at will, death is a solved problem, and the old struggles of scarcity have faded into myth. Then the ruling council that oversees Mother falls out, and in an instant the safety net is gone.

John Ringo uses that collapse to mash up epic fantasy and science fiction. In There Will Be Dragons, Emerald Sea, Against the Tide, and East of the Sun, West of the Moon, readers follow characters like historian and smith Edmund Talbot and warrior Herzer Herrick as they try to keep a pocket of civilization alive. Their tools are anachronistic by design: Roman-style legions, longbowmen, dragons bred from old bio-tech, and a handful of still-functioning artifacts.

Because Mother’s fall strands people in whatever bodies they happened to be wearing, the world is suddenly full of elves, merfolk, orcs, and other mythic shapes that are in fact heavily modified humans. The villains of New Destiny want to use that chaos to build a rigid, fascist order. Edmund and his allies aim for something freer, even if that means fighting a war the soft citizens of old Earth are not ready for.

The books combine big battles with a lot of nuts-and-bolts rebuilding: agriculture, metallurgy, tactics, and the question of who gets to decide what the new normal looks like. If you enjoy watching characters jury-rig a functioning society from the wreckage of a post-scarcity paradise, The Council Wars offers a long, detail-rich ride.