Phule's Company

Phule's Company is a comic military science fiction novel by the American writer Robert Asprin, published in 1990.

Willard J. Phule is a multimillionaire, the son of the owner of an arms company, and the novel begins with him being court-martialled and then, through a combination of circumstance and money, being given command of a company in the Space Legion, an organisation that resembles the Foreign Legion of the nineteenth century. The company he is given is the one nobody wanted: a collection of malcontents, incompetents and people with more talent than discipline, posted to an undistinguished base and expected to do nothing. Phule sets about turning them into something, using his own money and his understanding of what people actually want, and the book is mostly narrated by his butler, Beeker, whose commentary deflates his employer's more heroic assumptions. The novel made the New York Times bestseller list and began a series.

Asprin was known for comic fantasy and science fiction, and this book puts the same temperament into a military setting.