Tag Archives: Influences

Voyage Across the Stars

“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 … Continue reading

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The Forgotten Planet

Written August 2009 for posting at SF Signal’s web page MIND MELD: Books That Hold Special Places in Our Hearts and On Our Shelves THE FORGOTTEN PLANET When I was 13 in 1958, I was enrolled in the Teen-Age Bookclub … Continue reading

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Cross the Stars

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 … Continue reading

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Manly Wade Wellman

On March 17, 1970, I met Manly for the first time, in his writing office above a drugstore in the center of Chapel Hill. According to my journal for the day: Talked to Mr. Wellman (“My parents wrote my great-uncle … Continue reading

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Who were your influences?

Who were your influences? One strand is pulp fiction–literally, stories from the ’30s and ’40s collected into anthologies in the ’50s when I started reading SF and fantasy. Robert E. Howard in particular, then when I got to college the … Continue reading

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What do you read for pleasure?

Who do you read for pleasure? In the field–I read a lot of stuff out of the f/sf field–I read Vance and Pratchett among living authors, and have a particular affection for Kuttner, Kornbluth, and Jack Williamson’s work from the … Continue reading

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Video Interviews

Video Interviews: Moses Siregar III posted a YouTube video in four chunks of the panel “The Continued Viability of Epic Fantasy” recorded at the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus OH October 30, 2010. Dave is on the panel with John … Continue reading

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The Sharp End

THE SHARP END is a book many people tell me is one of their favorites; they’re generally surprised to learn I don’t have a high opinion of it myself. I’ve given various reasons for my ill feelings, all of them … Continue reading

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The Jungle

THE JUNGLE grew out of the series of Tor dos-a-dos double novels which I discuss in my comments on Surface Action. You can check the background there, so I won’t repeat myself. Tor had terminated that series, but my plan … Continue reading

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Surface Action

SURFACE ACTION came about because Marty Greenberg was packaging a series of dos-a-dos short novels for Tor Books, pairing a classic with new work by a contemporary author. He suggested that I write a sequel to Clash By Night, written … Continue reading

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Old Nathan

OLD NATHAN is a book I wrote for myself. There’ve been books that didn’t do as well as I’d hoped (The Sea Hag is a striking example), but I think Old Nathan is the only one I wrote in the … Continue reading

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Early Influences – The Angry Planet

THE ANGRY PLANET by John Keir Cross I was fascinated by SF from a very early age–I’m not sure why–but there wasn’t very much real science fiction available for kids during the 1950s. I made do with books like Miss … Continue reading

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Early Influences – The Chickens

THE CHICKENS My parents read to me before I was able to read for myself. One of the books they read–and there were many–was The Big Golden Book of Poetry. The first edition was published in 1947 when I would’ve … Continue reading

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The Sea Hag

THE SEA HAG was one of my attempts to write a commercially successful book that was different from anything I’d done before. The closest analog to my plan was The Dying Earth series by Jack Vance: a world in which … Continue reading

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Rudyard Kipling

Kipling had a major influence on my writing and a lesser one on my life. The photo above is me in the garden of his house in Brattleboro in September, 1996. The one at the bottom of the essay is … Continue reading

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The Classics

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 … Continue reading

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