Lieutenant Fusilier in the Farthest Reaches
A downloadable book
An Alloy of Steel & Officer Material!
Sergeant Theodora Fusilier, serial number 110552, is one of the hundred thousand war machines in the army of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Beyond that share her name. She was programmed to protect innocents, battle alien threats, and obey her human officers. It’s all she’s supposed to need.
But Dora’s always been a rather ambitious machine.
After decades of saving, an expensive officer’s commission is finally within reach, but it won’t be easy. Faced with the foreign drama of human aristocracy, rebellious troops and incompetent subordinates, and battles both internal and very real, Lieutenant Fusilier finds herself thrown headlong into an unfamiliar world in more ways than one...
An expanded and edited version of the 2020 web novel, Lieutenant Fusilier is a frankly bizzare alternate history retrofuture military sci-fi story, a bit Napoleonic war fiction and a bit reverse portal fantasy. It's a story about responsibility, imperialism, and being out of place, starring a useless gay robot working very hard not to live up to the legacy of her red uniform.
The winner of SufficientVelocity.com's Users' Choice Awards Best Completed Fic for 2021.
As a bonus, there's an STL of Lieutenant Fusilier herself at 28mm scale, if you're the 3d printing sort!
Purchasing the PDF/EPUB will give a discount for the print-on-demand version from DriveThruFiction at-cost when it is released!
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Development log
- At-Cost Print LinkFeb 22, 2024
- New Version - Tiny Typo FixesJan 30, 2024
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Lieutenant Fusilier In The Farthest Reaches is a light hearted pulp novel about a robot soldier in Space Britain's army who becomes an officer. While not the first to do so, she's only like the 9th in all of British history and faces some social challenges from it, primarily from her fellow robots.
It manages to be a metaphor for both class mobility and transness. I can really relate to her concerns about standing out, being questioned about where she belongs, and her joy at seeing and being who she *wants* to be.
If another is written, I'll be very excited for it, and if this is the only one, I'll be glad for the wonderful time I had with it!
What a wonderful, pulpy, imaginative book. Incredibly imagined alt history of earth, British military adventurism without racism, and a thorough understanding of 19th century tactics, deployed against evil crabs. This book absolutely ripped, I’ll absolutely be checking out other books by Chappell after this one.