Jason Anspach

Legionnaire opened the Galaxy's Edge series in June 2017, written by Jason Anspach with Nick Cole and published independently rather than through a trade house. A patrol of Republic legionnaires is ambushed deep in hostile territory, and a sergeant is left holding the survivors together while rescue stays uncertain. The series grew to a main sequence plus several spin-offs, and the prequel Savage Wars won the 2020 Dragon Award for best military science fiction or fantasy novel; an earlier volume, Order of the Centurion, had been a finalist in the same category in 2019 without taking it. Anspach, born in 1979 and raised in a military family, lives in Puyallup, Washington. Before the space opera he wrote the Rockwell Return Files, a 1950s detective comedy whose private investigator works for clients who have recently died, and he has since written the Wayward Galaxy books with J.N. Chaney and Forgotten Ruin with Cole.