Jason Striker

About the Jason Striker series

Jason Striker is a judo and martial-arts expert who gets pulled into international intrigue, criminal conspiracies, and hand-to-hand combat across a run of pulpy 1970s action novels co-written by Piers Anthony and martial-arts writer Roberto Fuentes. Each book puts Striker's fighting expertise (and Anthony and Fuentes's evident enthusiasm for depicting judo, karate, and other combat disciplines in technical detail) at the center of globe-trotting plots involving organized crime, exploitation, and revenge, in the vein of the era's men's-adventure paperback series.

The five core novels appeared in a rapid burst between 1974 and 1976, at the height of the 1970s martial-arts fiction boom that followed the mainstream popularity of kung fu films; a sixth entry, Curse of the Ninja, followed decades later in 2001. It's a very different register from Anthony's fantasy and science-fiction work — leaner, pulpier, and built entirely around action set-pieces rather than idea-driven worldbuilding — reflecting his early-career work-for-hire collaborations before Xanth made him a bestseller.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with Kiai!. Each novel is largely a self-contained action adventure built around Jason Striker's martial-arts expertise, so the books can be read individually, though starting from the beginning gives the fullest sense of the character's development across the original 1974-1976 run.

Curse of the Ninja (2001) arrived roughly a quarter-century after the original five books and functions as a late, standalone addition to the series rather than a direct continuation of any specific earlier plot thread.