<b>From the flaps of the DAW first edition:</b> "It is the twenty-sixth century, and the world is a ver different place. Gone are the United States and Canada, replaced by the socially rigid, authoritarian Confederacy of the Yukon. Gone too is the electronic age - destroyed in the apocalyptic Storm Times that devastated the globe and decimated the world's population in the last twenty-first century. It is now, once again, an age of steam, and age of lighter-than-air craft, and age of feudalism and knighthood, and for some, an age of conquest.
<p>One of this new world's greatest heroes is Lord Isaac Prophet Fitzpatrick, Consul and Supreme Commander of the Yukon Confederacy in the early years of the twenty-fifth century. Tall, handsome, dashing, and noble, this young man who likened himself to Alexander the Great conquered the world in the name of the Yukons. And although his empire didn't last, Fitzpatrick is still revered by his people a century and a half after his untimely and mysterious death.
<p>But now a document has surfaced - an intimate memoir written by one of Fitzpatrick's <i>Basilets</i>, his closest companions. This document promises to shed light on the most personal details of the life of this glorious Yukon Hero. Its author, Sir Robert Mayfair Bruce, a Knight of the Field, seems to have been the most honest of men. Elevated from the ranks and brought into Fitzpatrick's inner circle, he owed everything to his mentor and Commander. And he was nothing if not loyal. As Fitzpatrick's chief engineer, Sir Robert Bruce did whatever Lord Fitzpatrick required. He designed the airfields in India from which the Yukons conquered China. He leveled jungles, built the staging grounds for Fitzpatrick's world war, even fought on the front line, never questioning the authority of the great man he had come to love.
<p>Why then do academics from the twenty-sixth century - decades after Sir Robert's death, seek so studiously to discredit this man who was Fitzpatrick's most trusted friend? Why do some call this memoir the work of a lying traitor?
<p>What you hold in your hand is the "infamous" memoir of Sir Robert Bruce, chronicling the years 2415 to 2427, and annotated by a highly regarded scholar in 2591.
<p>Now you can decide for yourself - was Robert Rruce a degenerate scoundrel... or the only man brave enough to tell his world the truth?"
