Military Fantasy Books: Where to Start

Military fantasy is fantasy told from inside an army: soldiers, officers and mercenaries, sieges and campaigns, with the war itself at the center rather than in the background. Start with the three books below, then pick by the kind of war you want: mercenary companies, sieges and supply, muskets and gunpowder, soldiers in the making, wars seen from several sides, the big epics, or war played for laughs.

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Must read classics:

Mercenary companies

Soldiers who fight for pay, and what happens when the pay, the employer or the cause runs out.

Sieges, supply and survival

Wars decided by walls, food, money and what people do when they run out of all three.

Muskets and gunpowder

Line infantry, cannon and magic. For the full list, see our guide to flintlock fantasy.

Soldiers in the making

Recruits, cadets and young officers learning what the army is for.

Wars seen from several sides

The big epics

Long series where war is one of the main engines.

Warhammer's soldiers

Military science fantasy from the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

War played for laughs, mostly

Realistic battles and logistics in military fantasy

"Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics." The line is usually credited to Omar Bradley, though a documented version comes from Robert H. Barrow, a US Marine general, in the San Diego Union of 11 November 1979: "Amateurs talk about strategy and tactics. Professionals talk about logistics and sustainability in warfare." An attribution to Bradley appears in a reader's letter in The Economist of 16 November 1996. Somewhere between the two, the line lost half its words and changed generals.¹

When readers go looking for "realistic" military fantasy, they usually mean the battles: tactics that mirror or are closely inspired by how soldiers and armies behave in the real world, commanders who don't win by doing something obviously stupid, a clear sense of who is standing where doing what. And beyond that, whether the weapons and terminology are used correctly. All that matters, but there's another side to the coin. Armies spend far more time not fighting than fighting, and in the meantime they are eating, waiting to be paid and dragging everything they own along with them. A fantasy army that only exists on battle days is a stage army, however realistic the battle is written.

Supplying an army was part of its strategy and could determine a war's outcome. The idea of making war pay for itself goes back at least to ancient Rome, where the historian Livy (59 BC–AD 17) credits Cato the Elder (234–149 BC), who sent the grain contractors home in Spain in 195 BC, with the phrase bellum se ipsum alet: "The war will feed itself."² Much later, the German poet Friedrich Schiller put a similar phrase into the mouth of General Isolani in Die Piccolomini, the second part of his Wallenstein trilogy: Der Krieg ernährt den Krieg—"War feeds war."³

In 1625, during the Thirty Years' War, Wallenstein was raising an army for Ferdinand II, using his wealth and access to credit to get it into the field. Forced contributions from the territories supporting his troops helped meet the expense. Enemy, neutral or ally, the distinction mattered rather less when payment was due.⁴ Wallenstein wasn't the only commander making civilians pay. In Telgte, the town authorities borrowed money to meet contributions demanded by different commanders, driving the town deeper into debt. The war fed itself at somebody else's expense.⁵ What is often forgotten when mentioning "war" here is that it also included the soldiers' families and the people working around them: cooks, washerwomen, merchants and servants. All of them needed feeding too.⁶

This baggage train, or Tross, is a part of the army that fantasy rarely shows. In the Thirty Years' War, soldiers traveled with substantial numbers of women, children and other camp followers whose work helped keep the army supplied. They needed feeding, but the soldiers depended on them too.⁷ For a fantasy story drawing on this period, the baggage train is one of the better sources of inspiration, I think. Someone from it could become a soldier, or a soldier could end up working in it. Of course that has been done before; it's not as though no stories have tried it. But it should be on the list when judging a story's realism or writing one yourself.

Like everything else, realism has to earn its place. Having a realistic army in a fantasy setting is a weird thought anyway, and the detail should go only as far as it helps immerse readers in the world. In the end, every story needs to be just that, a story. And it needs to work as a story, which sometimes means leaving out the more mundane or dirty side of war. Django Wexler jokes that readers aren't especially interested in "the details of orc logistical and latrine arrangements," and he is right.⁸ Battles and logistics have to serve the story first and be realistic second.

So where do these concerns turn up in fiction? Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K. J. Parker puts an engineer in charge of defending a city that lacks the food and weapons it needs for the coming siege. Resources and improvisation are built into the premise.⁹ In A Dirge for Sabis, credited to Leslie Fish and C. J. Cherryh, having the weapon is only part of the problem: the threatened empire's rulers must also recognize its value and agree to pay for it.¹⁰ Joe Abercrombie's The Heroes concentrates on a single three-day battle, seen from both sides and different levels of command.¹¹ Parker's The Company follows five veterans trying to build a life on an abandoned island after their military service.¹² They approach different parts of the question: how you prepare for war, how you experience it and what you carry home.

From the author of this site

FAQ

Sources

• Book descriptions: the site's book catalog, built from publisher pages and reviews for each book.
• The essay's sources are in its footnotes.

Notes

1. Barrow quotation and Bradley attribution. Robert H. Barrow, interview in the San Diego Union, 11 November 1979, p. C4; Timothy Bolton, reader's letter in The Economist, 16 November 1996, p. 6. These newspaper references and the quoted wording are documented by Barry Popik, "'Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics'," 20 June 2019. The newspaper originals were not independently inspected. ↩

2. Livy. Ab urbe condita (History of Rome), book 34, chapter 9, section 12. The passage describes Cato dismissing the grain contractors and saying bellum se ipsum alet. Latin text, book 34. ↩

3. Schiller, Friedrich. Die Piccolomini, Act I, scene 2, in the Wallenstein trilogy. The speaker is Isolani. Text of the scene. ↩

4. Wilson, Peter H. The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. Chapter 12, "Denmark's War against the Emperor 1625–9," pp. 385–423, particularly the section "War Finance." Discusses Wallenstein's wealth, credit arrangements and contribution system. Book and chapter listing. Kampmann, Christoph. "Albrecht Wenzeslaus Eusebius von Wallenstein." Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 27, 2020, pp. 320–323. Discusses the army's financing through contributions imposed on enemy, neutral and allied territories. Academic reference entry. ↩

5. Stadtarchiv Telgte. "Telgte im Dreißigjährigen Krieg." Archive in Nordrhein-Westfalen, 1 February 2023. The municipal archive explicitly states that the town borrowed money to pay contributions to different warlords, increasing its debts and impoverishing its population. ↩

6. Andresová, Klára. "Women and Children in the Military Camps of the Thirty Years' War." Historická demografie 43, no. 1 (2019): 21–46. Especially the discussion of army composition and camp followers, pp. 24–29, and women's and children's work, pp. 36–42. Full journal issue, PDF. ↩

7. See note 6. ↩

8. Wexler, Django. "So You Want to Have a War?" A Dribble of Ink, 22 April 2013. Source of the quotation about orc logistics and latrines and the discussion of realism serving character and plot. ↩

9. Parker, K. J. Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City. Orbit, 2019. Publisher's description. ↩

10. Fish, Leslie, and C. J. Cherryh. A Dirge for Sabis. Baen Books, 1989. The Sword of Knowledge, book 1. Authors credited as on the publisher's listing. Publisher's description. ↩

11. Abercrombie, Joe. The Heroes. Gollancz, 2011. For the three-day structure and viewpoints on both sides of the battle, see Abercrombie's "The Heroes," 25 August 2009. ↩

12. Parker, K. J. The Company. Orbit, 2009 paperback edition. Publisher's description. ↩