Overall Story Arc of The Series
The theme of this series is that a small force of principally United States troops, acting as faux mercenaries under a secret CIA contract in Africa during the Cold War, is "rescued" from annihilation by a Cuban military force by extraterrestrial beings (part of an interstellar Confederation) who offer them their lives in exchange for service on a primitive planet in raising a crop of plants that are used in the manufacture of a recreational drug. The primitive planet, called Tran, is populated by other Earth-origin humans who have been periodically and secretly brought there over the past several thousand years of earth history for the same purpose. In the Confederation, humans are used as a soldier class vaguely similar to the Janissary soldiers of the old Ottoman Turkish empire, thus the name of the first novel and the series.
The series of novels describe how these 20th-Century soldiers proceed to both integrate with the existing human cultures and use them to establish a base of operations for the growing and harvesting of the plant, which only becomes sufficiently potent for use as a drug for a few years out of every 600 earth years. The first book shows how the soldiers use a combination of modern weaponry, knowledge of technology, and advanced military tactics to carve out a political enclave that will enable them to fulfill the rest of their mission, to actually plant and raise the crop they are expected to provide to the extraterrestrials that brought them to this place. The subsequent books illustrate the further adventures of the human soldiers as they perform their mission, but also begin to raise the standard of civilization among the disparate cultures of the humans of Tran. As they learn more of the history of this world, it also becomes clear to them that they will eventually be betrayed by their benefactors, as this has been the fate of each generation of new immigrants in turn. They begin to plan for that betrayal, and other forces outside of Tran begin to plan for what appears to a possible uprising of all humans in the Confederation.
Read more about this topic: Janissaries Series
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