I’ve had a lot of good book covers. I’ve never had a cover better than Steve Hickman’s for this volume.
The three Lacey stories are harsher than anything else I’ve written. It’s probably not a coincidence that I wrote them in the later ’70s when I was starting to raise my head up a little. For the first five years or more after I got back to the World I was afraid to do that.
By contrast, Travellers is a gentle, upbeat time travel story, and Time Safari a novella about hunting dinosaurs. Neither one has any heavy emotional baggage for me.
The Lacey stories were successful in a commercial as well as (I believe) a literary sense. I’ve been asked to do more of them; and have refused, because that’s not a place I want my head to go back to.
The thing is, if I hadn’t written the stories maybe my head would still be back there.
Contents of LACEY AND HIS FRIENDS
- Nation Without Walls
- The Predators
- Underground Travellers
- Time Safari
—Dave Drake
Lacey and His Friends. 1986, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 299 p. 0671655930 (pb). $3.50