The Council Wars is an in-progress book series by John Ringo, published by Baen. It is a combination of science fiction, military science fiction, and high fantasy. The Council Wars series explores the chaos that ensues after a high tech civilization collapses on Earth. While the story uses spells and dragons, these magical items are revealed to use technology leftover from the previous generations like genetic engineering, nanotechnology, force fields, and teleportation. Background The series is set several thousand years in the future, in a society with advanced nanotechnology, teleportation, and other technologies which effectively are magical in the sense of Clarke's law made real, all controlled and coordinated by an artificial intelligence called Mother. Initially the world is a near Eden. War has been gone for millennia. The most aggressive, curious or adventurous humans have left Earth to explore space or terraform new worlds. The abundant power and technology allows long lives, powerful genetic engineering that includes the ability to turn into a merman or dolphin, the ability to have homes on mountain tops in the Himalayas or in deep volcanos, and free flight. Despite—or perhaps because of—an idyllic world, technology is stagnant, no great art has been produced in generations, and the human population is dropping slowly. There are elves and dragons as in many fantasy novels. But the elves are the results of long-ago military genetic engineering programs and the dragons are genetically engineered sentients, originally designed by Disney. Mother, who controls all the systems on Earth, as well as in near-Earth space and the Wolf 359 colonization project, is controlled by a Council of thirteen Key Holders who can change system directives and, if unanimous, change even her kernel-level programming. The Council has split into two philosophical factions, and is in a battle for whose ideals will dominate the future of the human race. When one of the Council members dies without a clear successor to their Key, the faction split becomes numerically balanced. That faction split leads to war: something humans have not had for over a millennium. The two factions split into open war only after the faction advocating extensive changes to society to reverse the decline in population fails to persuade the rest of the council and resorts to violence. In the struggle for power, Mother's protocols forces her to split the available power between the voting members of the Council Members. This