David Drake

DAGGER was an important book for me in various odd ways. In the Fall of 1979 I ran into Bob Asprin when we were both boarding an airplane to return from a convention (probably World Fantasy Con in Providence, but I don’t swear to that). I told him I’d picked up a copy of his new novel Tambu. “But did you get Thieves’ World?” Bob said. “That’s much more important. Read it and write me a story for the next volume.”

Looking back on it, the whole business seems improbable–starting with an author saying his solo novel was less important than the anthology he’d edited–but it really did happen that way. And Bob was right: Thieves’ World was possibly the most important book in the f/sf field during the 1980s. There’d been earlier shared universe volumes, just as there’d been horror novels before Carrie; but Carrie and Thieves’ World created new genres which for a time were the hottest thing going. continue reading…

A bookseller asked if I’d sign bookplates for her; sure, I said. (I always say that.) But this time instead of using a commercial product, she wanted to create personalized bookplates with Photoshop. She asked if I still had the pictures I took of my Damascus-steel dagger for Gary Ruddell when he painted the cover of Dagger. I didn’t, but I had the dagger and a camera with a timer. It was cold and windy, so I put on my motorcycle jacket (normally I’d have been wearing a ratty nylon bomber jacket under a photographer’s vest; but then, normally I wouldn’t have been holding a long custom dagger).