David Drake

AFTERWORD: WHERE I GET MY IDEAS

If you decide to write about far-famed Achilles, make him active, hot-tempered, inexorable, and fierce; let him deny that laws were made for him, let him think his sword rules all. –Horace, The Art of Poetry (lines 120-2)

My undergraduate double major was history and Latin, and I continued to take Latin courses while I was in law school in a laughable attempt to stay sane.  Reading Latin centers me. (Note “laughable” in the previous sentence.) continue reading…

“Two incandescent novels of journey and battle across the stars set in David Drake’s best-selling Hammer’s Slammers universe together for the first time in one mega-volume.”  –Amazon Book Description.

Baen’s combined volume due out January 3 2012 reprints Cross the Stars and The Voyage with the following new introduction.

STARTING A LONG WAY FROM HERE

This volume collects Cross the Stars and The Voyage, two cases where I recast an Ancient Greek epic as an SF adventure novel (a space opera). My undergraduate (double) majors were History and Latin, so that may seem an obvious thing for me to try; in fact it wasn’t. (I’ve missed seeing a lot of things that seem obvious after the fact.) continue reading…

THE VOYAGE is space opera based on the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, with embellishments from other classical writers who touched on legends of Jason and the Argonauts. It’s a sequel of sorts to Cross the Stars–a minor character from the earlier novel is the hero of this one–and was a direct attempt to use the lessons I’d learned in a decade of writing to do the same sort of book, only better.

I think I did what I set out to do, but I learned some new lessons besides. The most important was that not all epics are equal.

The Odyssey, my model for Cross the Stars, was composed in the Early Iron Age, a savage time whose bones stick out through the story’s fabric in many places. I changed a number of situations in order to soften them. 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…