How Many BattleTech Books Are There

The BattleTech franchise has produced over one hundred novels and well over two hundred total publications when you count sourcebooks, rulebooks, anthologies, and short fiction collections. The exact number depends on how you count. Novels alone number around one hundred for the mainline series. Add the twenty-eight MechWarrior: Dark Age novels, and you pass 130. Include anthologies, ebook-original novellas, omnibus collections, and short fiction, and the count pushes past 150 fiction titles. Factor in the sourcebooks, rulebooks, box sets, and scenario packs that support the tabletop game, and the BattleTech library surpasses two hundred published works. Figuring out which order to start reading BattleTech can be a challenge.

That number surprises people who think of BattleTech as a tabletop game first, but the fiction catalog is one of the largest in licensed science fiction. The catalog keeps growing, too, with Catalyst Game Labs releasing several new titles per year.

I’ve published more than a hundred BattleTech stories, novels, and sourcebooks over a career spanning more than twenty years, and I spent years as editor of BattleCorps, the franchise’s official fiction magazine. I’ve seen this list of BattleTech books grow from both the reading side and the production side.

What follows is the breakdown.

How Many BattleTech Novels Are There?

The BattleTech novel line includes roughly one hundred mainline novels published between 1986 and the present. The first was Decision at Thunder Rift by William H. Keith, Jr. The most recent titles come from Catalyst Game Labs, which has been publishing new BattleTech fiction since 2012.

The count gets complicated because the franchise published fiction under multiple brand names over the decades. The original FASA-era novels (1986 to 2002) were published under both the BattleTech and MechWarrior names. The MechWarrior: Dark Age series (2002 to 2009) added twenty-eight novels set in the early thirty-second century. All of these share a single continuity. The MechWarrior books are BattleTech books in every meaningful sense, and any list of BattleTech books should include them. For a complete list of BattleTech novels by era, I have a separate reference page.

Beyond the mainline novels, the fiction catalog includes anthology collections like the BattleTech Anthology series, ebook-original novellas and short novels released through BattleCorps and later CGL Digital, and the ongoing Shrapnel magazine, which publishes new fiction quarterly.

The BattleTech reading order has the complete sequence.

What About Sourcebooks and Game Material?

The non-fiction side of the BattleTech library is even larger than the fiction. Sourcebooks, Technical Readouts, era guides, scenario packs, and rulebooks number well over a hundred publications on their own. These are the BattleTech game books that support the tabletop experience, and they contain enormous amounts of lore, unit histories, and setting detail that the fiction draws from.

The core rulebook for the current edition is Total Warfare. New players entering through the tabletop side will start with the Beginner Box or A Game of Armored Combat, neither of which requires any novel reading. But if you want to understand the universe at depth, the era sourcebooks (particularly the Historical series and the various Era Reports) fill in the gaps between what the fiction covers.

I’ve written sourcebook fiction for Catalyst Game Labs, and the production process for those publications is different from novel writing in ways that affect the final product. Sourcebook text has to survive rules development, continuity review, and playtest feedback. Novel prose only has to survive editing. Both end up in the catalog, but they serve different audiences.

Are BattleTech Books Still Being Published?

Yes. Catalyst Game Labs actively publishes new BattleTech novels, novellas, and the quarterly Shrapnel fiction magazine. The fiction line has been continuous since Catalyst revived it, and new titles are announced regularly. The ilClan era, the current period of the BattleTech timeline, is the setting for most new fiction.

The BattleTech Legends reprint series has also brought many out-of-print classics back into circulation as ebooks and print-on-demand paperbacks, organized by era. If you’re looking for older titles that were unavailable for years, Legends is where to find them.

Are BattleTech Books Good?

The strongest BattleTech novels stand alongside quality military science fiction from any publisher. Quality varies by era and author, as it does in any franchise with a catalog this large, but the high points are genuinely good books. Michael A. Stackpole’s Warrior Trilogy and Blood of Kerensky Trilogy are the titles most often cited as the franchise’s best work. Robert N. Charrette’s Wolves on the Border and William H. Keith, Jr.’s Gray Death Legion trilogy are consistently recommended as entry points because they hold up on their own terms.

The lower end of the catalog exists too. Some of the MechWarrior: Dark Age novels were written on tight production schedules and it shows. But the overall hit rate for a franchise this large is respectable, and the best BattleTech books reward rereading.

The best BattleTech novels ranking covers the catalog from a practitioner’s perspective, and the guide to choosing a first BattleTech book walks through the decision by era and reader type.

How Many BattleTech Eras Are There?

BattleTech fiction spans six major eras, each with its own tone, conflicts, and cast of characters. In chronological order: the Star League era (the golden age before everything collapsed), the Succession Wars (the long decline, and the setting for most of the early novels), the Clan Invasion (the most popular era in the fiction), the Civil War and Jihad era, the Dark Age (covered by the MechWarrior: Dark Age novels), and the ilClan era (the current timeline, where the Clans have taken Terra).

Each era has its own entry-point novels. You don’t have to start at the beginning and read forward; most readers pick an era that interests them and start there. The Succession Wars and Clan Invasion eras have the deepest fiction catalogs. The ilClan era is where new fiction is being published.

The guide to choosing a first BattleTech book is organized by era preference, and the full history of BattleTech covers the franchise from FASA through Catalyst.