Columbus Day: A Military Sci-Fi Adventure (the 10th Anniversary Edition)

Aliens hit us on Columbus Day. That event was as bad for humanity as the arrival of Columbus was for the peoples of the Americas, so the name fits.

Hi, I'm Joe Bishop. The day the Ruhar hit Earth, I was home on leave in the North Woods of Maine, back from a tour of duty in Nigeria with the US Army. We wanted to hit the Ruhar back, of course, but the whole plucky-band-of-humans-defeats-alien-invasion thing falls apart when the enemy can rain missiles and maser beams and railgun darts down from orbit, and we can't shoot back. We had no chance to win. Our civilization would have been knocked back to the Stone Age, except a rival group of aliens arrived to kick the Ruhar off our homeworld, and we were saved!

Yeah, not so much. A year later, I was on a Ruhar colony world, serving our new saviors with the United Nations Expeditionary Force peacekeeping mission. Like every other patriotic human in the UNEF, I had gone off-world to kick ass, to get payback for the Ruhar ravaging Earth. We were 1100 lightyears from home, with aliens controlling our supply line, including all of our food, when we realized we were fighting on the wrong side of a war we couldn't win. The Ruhar weren't the enemy, our "allies" were. Humanity would be enslaved, or go extinct, unless we had a little help from a friend.

Even if that friend is an ancient alien AI. Who is an arrogant jerk. What could go wrong?

This tenth-anniversary edition of the first volume of the furiously funny military sci-fi phenomenon features all-new artwork and an afterword by the author.

Craig Alanson is the New York Times-bestselling science fiction and fantasy author of the Expeditionary Force series. Formerly, Alanson created financial reports by day and wrote fiction by night, but soon the breakout success of ExForce allowed him to pursue a full-time writing career. He lives in Gainesville, Virginia, with his wife, who loves him even though he perpetually refuses to clean the garage.