Written from 1967 to 1986 by
with a last book published in 2008 2 year before the death of the authorThe Dumarest saga was one of the inspiration for the Traveller (role-playing game)
Each story is a self-contained adventure, but throughout the series, Earl Dumarest, the protagonist, searches for clues to the location of his home world, Earth.
The stories are set in a far future galactic culture that is fragmented and without any central government. Dumarest was born on Earth, but had stowed away on a spaceship when he was a young boy and was caught. Although a stowaway discovered on a spaceship was typically ejected to space, the captain took pity on the boy and allowed him to work and travel on the ship. When the story opens in The Winds of Gath, Dumarest has traveled so long and so far that he does not know how to return to his home planet and no-one has ever heard of it, other than as a myth or legend.
This is the tale of Earl Dumarest. Space-wanderer, gladiator-for-hire, seeker of Man’s forgotten home.
Dumarest’s search begins on the ghost-world of Gath, where he becomes unwilling champion of the Matriarch of Kund, and must undergo a fight-to-the-death at stormtime.
Victory could give Dumarest his first clue to the whereabouts of the planet he fled from as a child – an obscure world scarred by ancient wars, which lies countless light years from the thickly populated centre of the galaxy; a world no-one else in the inhabited universe believed exists.
Earth, the birthplace of Man.