The Sunset Warrior Cycle

About The Sunset Warrior Cycle

Eric Van Lustbader's first published fiction, written well before his thrillers made his name, is a post-apocalyptic sword-and-sorcery cycle set after the surface of the Earth has frozen over. The survivors of that catastrophe shelter in the Freehold, a feudal underground society ruled by lords called the Saardin and enforced by an elite caste of samurai-trained fighters, the Bladesmen. The Sunset Warrior (1977) introduces Ronin, an unaffiliated Bladesman who lives by his own code rather than any lord's, and who is pulled into the Freehold's brewing civil war as its rigid class structure starts to crack. The four sequels -- Shallows of Night, Dai-San, Beneath an Opal Moon and, after a long gap, Dragons on the Sea of Night -- follow Ronin's journey from reluctant outsider toward a role that will determine whether what's left of humanity survives its own internal conflicts, eventually taking him back to the frozen, abandoned surface itself.

The series shows an early, more overtly mythic and philosophical side of Van Lustbader than his later espionage fiction -- closer to Roger Zelazny's science-fantasy hybrids than to the Nicholas Linnear books that would make him a bestseller a few years later, though the interest in Eastern martial philosophy that defines his best-known work is already fully present here.