Novel: The Long Run

Overview
The Long Run (1990) opens Daniel Keys Moran's sprawling Tales of the Continuing Time future, introducing a far-reaching interstellar civilization where cutting-edge technology and human ambition collide. The novel follows seasoned, high-tech mercenaries whose long careers and hard-learned loyalties make them both indispensable and dangerously exposed amid rival powers. Action and speculation are braided together, producing a narrative that moves between brutal field operations and the slow, patient maneuvering of empires and corporations.

Main Story
At the heart of the narrative is a veteran operative whose past assignments and professional reputation set the stage for a high-stakes contract that pulls together multiple factions. Missions range from surgical strikes and extraction ops to political sabotage and clandestine negotiations, each mission revealing more about the fragile balance that holds this civilization together. The plot travels across worlds and enclaves, showing how personal decisions ripple outward to affect entire star systems and how old debts and covert alliances determine the fate of powerful players.
The novel's momentum comes from alternating sequences of kinetic, close-quarters conflict and quieter, strategic plotting. Technological details, cybernetic enhancements, advanced weaponry, cutting-edge surveillance, and artificial intelligences, are treated as both tools and characters in their own right, shaping choices and creating moral dilemmas. Betrayal, loyalty, and long-term planning are recurring motifs as the protagonists navigate shifting loyalties and uncover layers of intrigue that threaten to unmake the structures they served.

Themes and Ideas
A central theme is the cost of longevity: careers, relationships, and institutions extended across decades or centuries accumulate unseen consequences. The title's resonance, "The Long Run", captures Moran's interest in long arcs of causation, where a single action echoes forward, altering political landscapes and personal destinies. Questions of identity, especially when augmented bodies and implanted memories blur the line between original self and constructed persona, recur through the characters' reflections and choices.
Another key idea is the tension between individual agency and systemic power. The mercenaries are experts at exploiting tactical advantages, yet they often find themselves up against impersonal forces, machine intelligences, entrenched bureaucracies, and market-driven empires, that require different strategies altogether. Technology is neither purely liberating nor purely oppressive; it reshapes incentives and moral horizons, forcing characters to weigh immediate survival against the long-term implications of their methods.

Style and Impact
Moran's prose combines detailed technical imagination with brisk, cinematic pacing. Action scenes are vivid and tightly choreographed, while expository passages build a dense, lived-in future without losing momentum. Dialogue often crackles with dark humor and professional jargon, enhancing the sense of a community forged under pressure. The result is a work that appeals to readers who want both the mechanical plausibility of hard science fiction and the human stakes of a military thriller.
As the first full-length novel set in the Continuing Time milieu, The Long Run establishes many of the series' recurring tensions and personalities, providing a foundation for later installments. Its blend of political maneuvering, ethical complexity, and relentless fieldcraft earned it a devoted readership among those who favor character-driven action within elaborate speculative settings. The novel's scope and appetite for long-game consequences mark it as a distinctive entry in late-20th-century space opera and speculative military fiction.