Five millennia before the birth of Luke Skywalker and the fall of Palpatine's Empire, our story unfolds…

Before there was Black Company, there was the Dread Empire, an omnibus collection the first three Dread Empire novels: A Shadow of All Night's Falling, October's Baby and All Darkness Met.

This was a time of civil war, anarchy, intrigue, and assassination.

Between 193 and 284 the Roman Empire knew more than twenty-five emperors, and an equal number of usurpers.

Shlapentokh undertakes a dispassionate analysis of the ordinary functioning of the Soviet system from Stalin's death through the Soviet collapse and Russia's first post-communist decade. Without overlooking its repressive character, he treats the USSR as a "normal" system that employed both socialist and nationalist ideologies for the purposes of technological and military modernization, preservation of empire, and expansion of its geopolitical power. Foregoing the projection of Western norms and assumptions, he seeks to achieve a clearer understanding of a civilization that has perplexed its critics and its champions alike.

Here the author applies statistical analysis to broad groups of people on matters ranging from justice through medicine to language.

These essays on popular mores in the Roman Empire cover such topics as language and art, acculturation, thought and religion, sex and gender, cruelty and slavery, and aspects of class and power relations.