Fantasy
Details coming soon.
A new direction, currently in development. Full details will be published here closer to release.
The Professional Reality of Modern, Future, and Historical Combat.
Military fiction built on detailed technical research, operational realism, and the professional culture of combat crews. From near-future AI warfare and RAF strike operations to Second World War tank warfare, each series follows combat at the level where it is actually fought.
The Alternative Histories series asks what the twentieth century looks like when its pivot moments go differently — when the wrong man survives, the wrong fleet holds its ground, the wrong silence is broken.
The fantasy series applies the same discipline to imagined worlds: military command, logistics, and the weight of decisions made by people who cannot afford to be wrong.

May 1940. A German Panzer III company punches through the Ardennes in the breakthrough that will stun the world. Commander Franz Kroll has trained for this. His driver can find a route through anything. His gunner doesn't miss.
For six weeks, nothing can stop them.
But Kroll keeps a log — not the official kind. The kind that records what the orders don't say. The fuel that didn't arrive. The infantry that couldn't keep up. The enemy tanks that took more rounds than they should have.
France is a victory. Kroll writes it down exactly as it was.
Because the maps on the table have already been turned east.

June 1941. Kroll's crew crosses into the Soviet Union with three million German soldiers behind them. Three weeks later, they discover their tank can't penetrate the frontal armour of a T-34.
The war just got harder.
Over five hundred days — through the mud of autumn, the killing cold of Russian winter, and the grinding siege war outside Leningrad — Kroll keeps his crew alive through the same method he's always used: knowing his vehicle better than the manual does, knowing the ground better than the map does, and writing down everything the official record leaves out.
The Tiger I that eventually replaces the Panzer III can destroy any Soviet tank it faces. It can't fix the supply lines. It can't bridge the rivers it's too heavy to cross.
The exchange ratio looks good on paper. Kroll's log tells a different story.

Summer 1943. The German army's last great offensive in the east launches into the biggest tank battle in history. Kroll's new vehicle — the Panther — is faster than the Tiger I, better-armed, and prone to catching fire. The Soviet forces have spent months digging in, laying mines, and waiting.
At Prokhorovka, in the smoke and chaos of close-range armoured combat, Kroll's crew fights for its life. They survive. Kroll sits down with his log and runs the numbers.
Eight hundred uncommitted Soviet tanks. A German reserve that doesn't come close.
The retreat begins. Across the Ukrainian steppe, Kroll fights a different war now — not to advance, but to hold on long enough to pull back, to preserve the crew, to keep the record.

June 1944. Kroll's King Tiger arrives in France as the most powerful tank on the Western Front. Sixty-nine tonnes of armour. An 88mm gun that can kill a Sherman at two kilometres. And a fuel tank that empties faster than the supply lines can fill it.
The war Kroll faces in Normandy is not the war he fought in Russia. The Allies have learned. Their tanks work together with infantry and aircraft in ways the German army can't match. Every bocage hedge is a potential ambush. Every bridge is a question Kroll's driver has to answer.
Told through four perspectives — Kroll's crew, a British Firefly commander who has been studying German armour since 1940, an American tank destroyer sergeant who wins by choosing his ground, and a French woman who knows every bridge in the sector — No Fuel for Giants drives toward the end of the war at full throttle.
The fuel does run out. That's not the end.

April 1945. As Berlin falls, ODESSA moves its most valuable asset out of Europe through a ratline that has been running for months. By the time the world declares Hitler dead, he is already in Patagonia.
Seven years later, a Mossad signals operator in Tel Aviv picks up three short bursts from a frequency that should have gone silent in 1945. Ruth Kessler knows what she heard. Getting anyone to believe her is another problem entirely.
Three hunters. Four continents. One man who knows that the only way to stay hidden is to stay useful — and that ODESSA's patience is not the same thing as loyalty.

The TSR3 White Dagger enters operations just as tensions rise across the High North. Flight Lieutenant Alex Mercer and Weapon Systems Officer Sarah Kade must fly the aircraft against a capable adversary who is already building a network designed specifically to find and kill it.
Stealth. Electronic warfare. Deep-penetration strike against targets that cannot be reached any other way.
But no aircraft survives first contact unchanged.

The quantum radar network has been expanded and hardened. A classified launch facility is weeks from readiness. And the counter-measure that saved White Dagger in February has been specifically targeted for defeat.
Kade has a new approach. It requires forty seconds of exposure inside a live engagement envelope.

White Dagger has a successor — Black Dagger — and Mercer and Kade have a new counter-measure architecture built from years of operational data. But the adversary is no longer a state with a fixed facility.
A non-state actor has built a precision hypersonic weapon and mounted it on a ship. No facility to strike. No programme to find. A criminal extortion capability built at military technical scale, ready to use against the ports and shipping lanes that northern Europe depends on.
The question is not whether Black Dagger can defeat the weapon. It is whether the weapon can be found in time.
Details coming soon.
A new direction, currently in development. Full details will be published here closer to release.
Simon Palmer is a Senior Software Engineer with over three decades of delivery across the UK's fast‑jet, UAV and next‑generation combat air programmes.
His career spans mission‑system development and integration, safety‑critical software engineering, and the leadership of engineering teams. He has delivered capabilities across platforms including Tornado GR4 & F3, F‑35, Nimrod MRA4, HERTI UAV and FCAS.
His fiction spans near-future AI warfare, RAF strike operations, and Second World War armoured combat — each series built on detailed technical research and an interest in how wars are actually fought at the tactical level: the gap between what the orders say and what the ground requires, told through the voices of professionals who understand their craft.
Steel Fictions publishes works of fiction created from publicly available information and independent research. The content is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or representative of any employer, government organisation, defence contractor, military organisation, programme, or project. Any resemblance to real organisations, programmes, individuals, or events is coincidental or used solely as inspiration within a fictional setting.