Rick Shelley

Rick Shelley (1947-2001) was an American writer from Kankakee, Illinois, prolific across military science fiction and heroic fantasy. He is best known for the Dirigent Mercenary Corps series, a six-novel sequence tracing an officer's career from Officer-Cadet through Colonel within a professional mercenary force fighting on behalf of client worlds, and for the related 13th Spaceborne and Second Commonwealth War series set in the same interstellar milieu. He also wrote the fantasy trilogy The Varayan Memoir and the two-book Seven Towers series, along with the Spec Ops Squad novels published near the end of his life. Shelley's fiction favored tight formation tactics, chain-of-command detail, and ensemble casts of soldiers, reflecting a career-long focus on small-unit warfare across more than twenty novels written through the 1990s and into the early 2000s.