RCN Series
Science fiction book series by David Drake
The RCN Series (also known as the Lt. Leary series or Leary and Mundy series) is a sequence of stand-alone science fiction novels by David Drake. They center around Daniel Leary, an officer in the Republic of Cinnabar Navy (RCN), and Adele Mundy, a librarian and spy. Drake, as well as a number of reviewers, have described it as "an SF version of the Aubrey/Maturin series" by Patrick O'Brian. In contrast to the hardcore military science fiction bent of Drake's Hammer's Slammers series, these novels are more character-driven and feature political intrigue as well as battles.
The plots of the novels are based on historical incidents, often from Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome. The prologue of each book includes details of its historical basis.
The series began with With the Lightnings in 1998. The final—thirteenth—entry in the series is To Clear Away the Shadows, published in 2019.
Creation
After discovering the Aubrey/Maturin novels, Drake gave some thought to space opera with two equal but very different characters as protagonists.
The public source identifies “RCN Series” as science fiction book series by David Drake. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Series, Science and fiction.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7276116. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1998 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “RCN Series” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.