Lois McMaster Bujold's series of novels, mostly based on the fragile (both in ego and in corpus) hero Miles Vorkosigan, have deservedly attracted a large following. Miles subverts hierarchies and discipline but is remarkably effective in spite of-or because of-that. His adventures also have in them a strong humorous strain not often seen in military science fiction.

Where Drake and Stirling have projected the career of an actual historical figure into the future, David Weber's series of novels about Honor Harrington has many analogies to the fictional seafaring adventures of Horatio Hornblower set in Napoleonic times. Many fans of military science fiction are also passionate aficionados of the tales penned by C. S. Forester, Patrick O'Brian, and others who work in the small, crowded world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I don't precisely know why this should be so, but that it's so seems indisputable; it's an enthusiasm I share myself.

One of the advantages of writing an introduction such as this is that I can also subject my readers to a two-paragraph commercial for my own work. As an escaped Byzantine historian, I've used Byzantium as a base for my Videssos universe, with the Time of Troubles series being based on the eventful career of the Emperor Herakleios, The Tale of Krispos on the reigns of Basil the Macedonian and John Tzimiskes (an advantage to fiction is that one can mix and match to suit oneself), and The Videssos Cycle on the chaos surrounding the Battle of Manzikert.

Switching from fantasy to science fiction, I've imagined time-traveling South Africans interfering in the American Civil War in The Guns of the South, an alien invasion during World War II in the Worldwar series, and the United States and Confederate States on opposite sides of the European alliance system during the late nineteenth century and World War I in How Few Remain and the books of the Great War series.