Introduction: Melvin Winsor is the veteran of dozens of battles and a member of the vaunted drop marines, men trained to insert into warzones from orbit and destroy the enemies of the USAS... Or at least he was before he stepped on an improvised land mine and lost a leg. Nowadays he is little more than a glorified garbage man, waiting to fire capsules of refuse off into the sun from a big ol' railgun and passing the time by day drinking. Only when extraterrestrial invaders show up is he forced out of his funk and back into the fight, whether he wants to or not.Liftoff is set on an alternate Earth, where the United States' army engineered a soft coup after WWII and used the atomic bomb to take control of the planet and become a dictatorship. Don't take that to mean that this novel has some grand political aspirations or message or anything like that, it doesn't. The USAS is not representative of the USA, characters are not meant to be parodies of real-world people, events are not meant to mirror real-world ones. Feel free to draw any and every possible interpretation you like about the meaning of the novel....