Two award-winning writers take us on a romp through time, space and Ancient Rome as The Wandering Warriors tells the alternate-history story of a 1940s barnstorming baseball team that’s led by a fictional version of retired baseball player and spy Moe Berg and finds itself transported from rural Illinois to Ancient Rome in 210 AD, just after the death of famous emperor Septimius Severus.
Award-winning author Rick Wilber’s fictional versions of famous baseball player and World War II spy Moe Berg have been entertaining readers of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine for years. In this collection of alternate-history stories, Wilber’s fictional Moe Berg puts down his ball and bat and goes to work for a mysterious superspy woman as they work to save America from a German atom bomb.
A few years ago my friend Ben Bova, one of the most honored writers in science fiction and a very knowledgeable baseball fan, proposed that we work together on a fictional retelling of the famous baseball player and spy Moe Berg. Ben had a movie in mind and we worked up a screen treatment that prompted some interest in Hollywood. Ultimately, that came to nothing; but it did get me started thinking about Berg, one of the more interesting personalities to ever play baseball.
