The Falling Torch is a 1959 science fiction novel by American writer Algis Budrys. A 1999 Baen Books edition was very slightly rewritten, and includes one entirely new chapter.The novel is about a group of human freedom fighters who attempt the nearly hopeless task of liberating planet Earth from the grip of a race of alien invaders. The story has obvious overtones of freeing the author's homeland (Lithuania) from its Soviet occupiers. The situation in the early chapters – of the Earth exiles maintaining a government in exile but losing hope of ever liberating their home planet – was clearly familiar to Budrys; his father Jonas Budrys was appointed as the Lithuanian consul general in New York City in 1936, when his son was five years old and continued to hold that position, even though Lithuania was occupied by Nazi Germany and then annexed by the Soviet Union and made into a Soviet Republic. The United States continued to recognize the pre-World War II Lithuanian Diplomatic Service. During most of his adult life, Budrys himself held a captain's commission in the Free Lithuanian Army. Thus he was in a personal situation similar to that of the protagonist Michael Wireman at the outset – though Budrys never tried to infiltrate Soviet-ruled Lithuania and start a rebellion there. However, in the foreword to the Baen edition, the author firmly denies that such was the primary reason for writing the novel. Instead he aimed to produce a story of a man who, like others such as Timur, were in some way disabled and alienated from society, before coming to dominate it. উৎস: Wikipedia (en)