A while back I mentioned a "social cataloging" website called Goodreads that allows individuals to freely search it's extensive user-populated database of books. It is sort of the IMBD for books. I have been using it for some months now to track what I have read, both past and present and have discovered at least one gem, that is right in my personal wheelhouse, that I wouldn't have known about otherwise: The Destroyermen Series by Taylor Anderson.

Anderson has a masters degree in history and teaches at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas, is a gun maker and forensic ballistic archaeologist who has been a technical and dialogue consultant for movies and documentaries. He is a member of the National Historical Honor Society and of the United States Field Artillery Association. He has appeared as gun crew in movies like American Outlaw, The Alamo, and Rough Riders and is an amateur palaeontologist.

The Destroyermen is a series of alternate history books that chronicle the adventures of the crews of the destroyer USS Walker (DD-163) and the Japanese battlecruiser Amagi, in the early stages of the War in the Pacific during World War II, being transported to an alternate Earth. This earth is the same geographically as the one they left, but evolution took a different turn eons ago and is populated by two very different races one (the bad guys) evolved from raptors the other (the good guys) from giant lemurs of Madagascar. If you like WWII naval action, the age of fighting sail, heroes who stand against impossible odds, alternate realities, dinosaurs and lost worlds, or historical fiction or world building you will probably find something in the Destroyermen Series that appeals.

I have just finished the third book in the series and for me it is the ultimate smashup of all of the above.

The heroes are from World War II though their two destroyers actually date back to the Great War and the bad guys, called the Grik, sail around in East Indiamen (apparently one when through the same vortex that brought Walker to their world only a hundred or so years earlier and got captured) so not only do we have intelligent dinosaurs but the age old chestnut of what would happen if you had a machine gun at the Alamo.

-Don

Don,

Nice description of the books. I enjoyed the descriptions of the lemurs 'ships.' Though a bit light on explanatory depth, the amount of changes the society goes through is well-covered.

Long live the lemurs!