L.E. Modesitt, Jr. – The Official Website

Home

The Books

Welcome

Like most authors, I want my readers to have as much background information as possible, particularly about recently released books, and books that will be published in the months ahead. But it’s equally important for new readers to learn about the books already out there. Those are some of the purposes of this site.

Another reason for the site is to acquaint you all with the range of my books. Just because you liked one of my fantasies doesn’t mean, unfortunately, that you will like one of my “hard” SF novels. I’d hope that you would, but another point of this site is to give you more information so that you know more about what I’m writing and what I have written.

Thanks again for reading my work, for supporting me, and for keeping the written word alive and well!

—L.E. Modesitt, Jr.

A Few Questions
February 17, 2026

Why do so many Republicans oppose requirements for ICE agents:

To wear body cameras?
To wear name badges?
To obtain a judicial warrant before forcing their way into homes, churches, and other private spaces?
To be prohibited from wearing masks?
To be held to the standards and accountability of other law enforcement agencies for use of force, especially lethal force?

Right now, ICE often operates more like Hitler’s brownshirts than like a legitimate law enforcement body, and yet Republicans oppose any reforms to ICE operating procedures, despite the killings of protesters and the blatant lying about those events.

Could it be that immigration reform is secondary to establishing the practice of punishing citizens for speaking out against heavy-handed government.

ICE isn’t the only area where the current administration is violating the Constitution and established law.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) is the foundational, congressionally enacted legal system (10 U.S.C. Chapter 47) regulating the U.S. armed forces, and one of its provisions is that military personnel must not obey unlawful orders. A specific example of an unlawful order is one that suppresses lawful protest against suppression of First Amendment speech. Yet both President Trump and his Secretary of Defense/War have attempted to suppress the free speech of members of Congress, merely for pointing out this provision of the UCMJ. That’s certainly against the Constitution.

In addition, Trump has used the Department of Justice to attack political enemies, attempting to file lawsuits where even grand juries refuse to bring indictments. Federal attorneys (from both political parties) have literally resigned by the score in protest of such tactics, and at least one federal district attorney’s office had no attorney able or qualified to carry out such an indictment.

Trump has also flagrantly ignored the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution that bars officials from accepting foreign gifts or profits, although he’s paid lip service to it by funneling such gifts to façade foundations and family members (which at least one other President has done, not that such makes it legal, but never on the scale Trump has done).

So… why do a majority of Republican members of the House and Senate put up with such patent illegalities?

Is it because they believe that if the President (but only a Republican President) declares that something is legal, then it must be? Or are they simply afraid that their own President will attack them? Either way, what does all this say about the Republicans? (Not that the Democrats are exactly paragons of virtue).

The Dawn of (Selective) Authoritarian Absolutism?
February 13, 2026

Extreme idealism shouldn’t be enshrined in government or law, and certainly not in a democratic government. Ideals are fine for personal guidance. They’re even acceptable as governmental goals, but they become tyranny when turned into unyielding law.

Take abortion. Any policy that forbids abortion is going to kill a certain and not inconsequential number of mothers, as is already happening in Texas, and any policy that allows even restricted abortion to save the life of the mother will kill a certain number of viable fetuses. It also forces doctors to choose between disobeying the law or seeing women die unnecessarily. Why? Because extremist and absolutist laws can’t take into account all the possible health permutations.

Or take immigration. The current ICE policies, combined with the legal fallacy that immigration is a civil offense, effectively make no distinction in terms of guilt between someone trying to escape being killed by a dictator in their former homeland and someone who’s committed multiple crimes. They also punish infants and children who had no choice about where they were born or where they live. But then, why should one expect any more of the descendants of people who wiped out millions of indigenous peoples and enslaved millions of others for hundreds of years, who also just conveniently forgot that they are the descendants, essentially, of illegal immigrants?

And some of those who support ICE actions and policies even profess to believe in a God, whose professed Savior said, “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me.” And one of those supporters is even a pastor, whose professed savior didn’t say, “just the children whose preferably white parents were born here.”

Then, of course, there’s the problem of selective enforcement of absolutist laws. We’re seeing ICE agents picking up U.S. citizens because they “look different.” Add to that an administration that changes the law, without the approval of Congress, so that immigrants who were here legally became illegal overnight, and not because of anything they did, while ICE unilaterally decides that agents don’t need judicial warrants to break into homes.

But apparently that legal absolutism being applied to pregnant women and once-legal immigrants doesn’t apply to white male sexual abusers or well-connected drug dealers or white politicians convicted of financial fraud.

Fancy that.

The Greater Good?
February 9, 2026

There is a story. It was written in 1973 by Ursula LeGuin, and it’s entitled “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” In its essence, the story presents a utopian city whose successes and virtues all rest on the misery of a child confined in a basement room barely larger than a broom closet. The people of Omelas fall into two groups – those who accept the child’s misery as the cost of maintaining all the virtues of the city and those who walk away.

This is obviously an artificial dichotomy, and a fictional device to raise a question, and what that question might be has been the subject of discussions and arguments about the meaning of the story, its moral issues, and various take-offs for more than fifty years. Now, I certainly haven’t read all the philosophizing and stories/novels arising out of that story, but those I have read seem to tiptoe around one other aspect of the story, an aspect particularly pertinent to the present social/culture issues of today.

The United States is facing and not handling particularly well a number of social/political issues, all of which have negative impacts on someone or some group of individuals. No matter how one handles the issues around abortion and maternal health, in a great many instances someone is going to get hurt and die. In the case of gender issues, someone is going to be disadvantaged, hurt, or worse – no matter what law or policy is adopted. The same is true of immigration.

LeGuin’s story unrealistically simplifies the issue – one child versus the greater good of an entire city, and those who cannot accept that price must leave.

More than a half century ago, when I was in college, one of my professors defined the goal of government as “the greatest good for the greatest number.” It’s hard to argue against that generality, but what’s always bothered me about that definition is that it doesn’t address the fundamental and largely untouched of issue of how society should define the “greatest good.”

According to the Constitution, Congress is supposed to define that greater or greatest good through legislation, but right now, we have a President who is redefining the greater good by his standards, and a Congress unable to oppose him because the institution cannot agree on what’s best for the country… and, unhappily, that makes fictional Omelas look better by comparison.