David Drake

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 (TAB) in my 8th grade speech class. TAB sold mass market paperbacks in regular publishers’ editions through a monthly catalogue distributed in schools. One selection each month was SF; and it was through TAB that I found The Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster.

Though the book I bought was published by Ace, it was nonetheless a school edition: one half of an Ace Double. It had ads more Ace SF in the back, however, and gave an address from which to order an Ace catalogue–which I promptly did. continue reading…

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…

Me, Manly Wade Wellman and Dave Shelton, 1971

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 Manly to say they were naming me after him. He wrote back ‘Forget about me; name him Wade Hampton!’ So I got the full load.”): heavy, iron-grey with a brush mustache, wearing a sport coat, dark blue shirt & tie.

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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 Tolkien trilogy in the SUI Library before the books came out in paperback.

The other strand is Latin authors and the classics more generally (though the Greek mostly in translation). I’ve got a separate section on this site on the classics, but the short version is that Tacitus and Caesar in their different ways are models for prose in any language, and the ability of some of the poets (Ovid and Juvenal spring first to mind) to handle tricky problems like continuous action and capsule description can teach any writer. They certainly taught me.

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 ’30s and ’40s. Hmm; and I regularly reread R.E.Howard and C.A.Smith; I should mention them.

Video Interviews:

In 2008  Blackfive TV did a six-part series of video interviews, sponsored by Baen Books. They are all posted on the Baen Webscription site, and at the Blackfive TV blog site.  You can also find them on YouTube.

Dave talks about his background, writers who influenced him including early SF writers, his military service in the Blackhorse in Vietnam and Cambodia, how he started writing military SF, working with Jim Baen, and generally about his writing career.  He ends with a message for the troops.

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 true to a degree; but now, forcing myself to look at the situation from the safe distance of a decade, I’m ready to be honest.

The early ’90s were a difficult period for me. I’d been a full-time freelance writer since 1981. I’d done all right financially from the beginning and from the mid-’80s on had done very well indeed. We’d bought a tract of land in the country and my wife was becoming increasingly demanding that we should start to build a (much larger) house on it. She was quite right: it was time. We arranged with an excellent and utterly trustworthy architect and contractor to begin work. continue reading…

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 remained basically the same: to write a short novel that could be packaged with Henry Kuttner’s novella Clash By Night. That 1943 classic was a formative influence on me, and I wanted to bring it back into print. continue reading…

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 in 1943 by Henry Kuttner with input from his wife CL Moore (billing themselves as Lawrence O’Donnell). I first read Clash by Night when I was thirteen, and it’d made an enormous impact on me. I agreed.

Things got fuzzy then. I really wanted some paperwork to say exactly what I was doing and for how much money. I didn’t much care what the answers to those questions were, but I was a lawyer: I wanted the terms down on paper, especially since this was a three-party transaction. Marty is completely honest, but he isn’t a lawyer. No contract appeared. continue reading…

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 certain knowledge that it wasn’t going to make a lot of money for anybody.

Jim Baen did me a favor by publishing Old Nathan because he knew it was important to me. This is an example of why I work for friends. Sure, it’s business; but if that was all it was, I could’ve stayed a lawyer. (Though Jim assures me that he didn’t lose money, just the profit that he’d have expected on a new David Drake title.)

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