David Drake

1984 hardcover dust jacket; Cover art: Michael Whelan

BIRDS OF PREY was the first novel I tried to write. It was a very long time before I succeeded, but I think in this case the wait was worth it.

While I was still in law school I got and read the two-volume Teubner (Latin text only) edition of the so-called Scriptores Historiae Augustae, the Augustan Histories. This is a collection of lives of the later emperors (Hadrian through Numerian), purportedly by many contemporary authors but probably by one man of much later (5th century?) date with political axes to grind. While the SHA is in many respects a fictional text, it does incorporate material from books that haven’t survived–and is, for my purposes as a writer, very evocative. continue reading…

NEWSLETTER 65: November 7, 2011

Dear People,

I’ve finished the plot for Into the Maelstrom, which will be the sequel to Into the Hinterlands when John Lambshead writes it next year. (Next year isn’t nearly as far away as I think it ought to be.)

The series is a space opera based on the life of George Washington. Hinterlands took him through the French and Indian War (as it was in North America). Maelstrom picks up fifteen years later with the events leading up to the Revolutionary War and runs through the Battle of Trenton. continue reading…

A ruined caravansary from southern Turkey

The photograph is a ruined caravansary from southern Turkey, some days’ journey east of Adana. The building was constructed during the Seljuk period–old, probably from the 1st millennium AD, but post-classical. It’s a stopping place for caravans, where merchants could lock up themselves and their goods for the night in rooms around the periphery while their animals were corraled in the open courtyard in the center. A building that served the same purpose and looked much the same has probably stood here throughout recorded history: donkeys moved at the same speed in the 3d millennium BC as they did in the 19th century, so the resting places would have been the same distance apart. continue reading…