David Drake

At Trinoc-con on Sunday, October 6, 2002, my friend Mark Van Name presided over what was billed as a David Drake Roast but was really a tribute. I was very embarrassed at the idea beforehand, but it turned out to be one of the funniest hours of my existence. Besides the usual sorts of comments from Mark, Jim Baen, and Dan Breen on the panel (and offerings from more distant friends), Mark and our friend Jennie Faries (who does real cover design for Baen Books) mocked up the covers for David Drake volumes kicking off new lines for Baen Books. I don’t think I’ve laughed so hard since the first time I watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  continue reading…

This is a collection of my humorous SF and fantasy. To my delight it sold very well. There’s really a lot of humor in my other fiction, but it tends to get lost in the other things that are going on in the story.

Quite apart from being funny, Airborne All the Way! and A Very Offensive Weapon are two of the handful of best stories I’ve written. Roger Zelazny created the milieu and heroine of the latter, and directed me as to how the story was to develop; I used his novelet The Furies as a model for my writing. In fact Roger had more to do with the story than Larry Niven did with Mom and the Kids.

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