Trivia / Legacy of the Aldenata

• Development Hell:
  • Ringo previously announced two more books, Beneath the Avalanche and Master of the Winds, but they have yet to come out, as he's released his Black Tide Rising series (and the Monster Hunter Memoirs trilogy, co-written with Larry Correia) instead.
  • According to a Facebook post in 2017, he was working on about nine different projects at the time, and said of Beneath the Avalanche that:
  "Yes, there is a Hedren/Posleen war book in progress. Problems being many. One being I'm so far 'out' of the universe I have a hard time getting back into that one and basically have a few interesting scenes)."
  • A few months later, he added that
  "I have a vision for the next two (and last) aldenata books. I've posted some snippets (he let me win, enter the posleen). I have a rough mental outline. But getting the next two to gel is tough. The big problem is that there are so many characters and so many stories that need 'completion' and I'm so out of touch with the universe. I have the basic Mike O'Neal thread fairly well thought out but the rest of the story is essentially no-where."
• Write Who You Know:
  • Ringo does this enough that it could almost be called his signature style. Just one, of the numerous examples of this is early in a A Hymn Before Battle O'Neal wants to speak with a science fiction author named David who specializes in space naval combat. This is probably a reference to either David Weber or David Drake, fellow Baen Books writers with whom he is friends.
  • Another example of this is Joe Buckley, although his character wasn't specifically given a full name until the third book in the Posleen War Series.
  • O'Neal himself is a former military man in the 82nd Airborne Division who left the service and went into private life in a technology-related job. Guess what Ringo was doing before he got his book contract?
  • Colonel Cutprice is explicitly based on Colonel David Hackworth, one of the most decorated soldiers in the US Army.
• What Could Have Been: According to the afterword of Watch on the Rhine, apparently, Watch on the Rhine was going to be a shorter novella paired with Back to Bataan, a novella that was also a collaboration between John Ringo and Tom Kratman about the Japanese-assisted defense of the Philippines from the Posleen. However, the story of Watch on the Rhine grew beyond the planned 45,000 words and turned out to be more interesting than Back to Bataan.

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