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.)

In 1980, I quit lawyering and was driving a bus for the Town of Chapel Hill. While sitting in the bus garage between runs, I wrote a letter to a friend in which I commented that the Odyssey could be rewritten as a Western, though of course I didn’t write Westerns. As the words came off my pen, it struck me that I did write SF; what was true for a horse opera would probably work for a space opera as well.

Nothing happened for a few months. Then Jim Baen called and offered me a two-book contract: a big book for $10K and a little book for $7,500. I said “Yes!” immediately. (I’ve done a lot of dumb things, but I was never dumb enough to turn that down. I made $6,100 during my year of bus driving).

Then, because at the time both Jim and I thought that we ought to know what the books would be about, I said the big book would be what became Birds of Prey (my working title was The Warm Summer Rain; note what I said above about doing a lot of dumb things) and the little book would be a rewrite of the Odyssey. That was off the top of my head, but it seemed like a good idea on reflection also. (Almost immediately thereafter I became a full-time writer, though the decision didn’t have as direct a connection as it may seem to.)

I wrote Birds of Prey first (I had been trying to write it for more than a decade). Then I reread the Odyssey (for the umpteenth time, of course), making a précis of everything that happened in it.

Until I made the précis, I didn’t have a real understanding of the way the Odyssey is paced and connected. Almost all the incidents which people (myself included until then) think of as being the Odyssey occur in one book: after dinner on the island of Scheria, Odysseus recounts to his hosts the things he claims have happened to him since he left Troy. Homer doesn’t tell the reader about the Cyclops: that’s a story which Odysseus tells to King Alcinous and his other guests.

I mentioned this development to Jim in one of our regular phone calls. “But you don’t have to do it that way,” he said.

Which took me aback. Of course I had to do it that way! It’s that way in the original.

Then I actually thought about the situation instead of just reacting. I wasn’t going to be graded on my understanding of the Odyssey; my present job was to tell a good story in English. That meant the form of the story had to be translated, as surely as the language in which I told it.

This was a typical case in which I benefited from being Jim Baen’s friend (because we were chatting as friends, not as editor and writer). There were many similar instances on both sides. Over the years, Jim and I saved one another from ourselves as a regular thing.

I already understood that I would have to adapt the incidents of the Odyssey functionally, not simply copy them. A one-eyed giant is a credible threat to an Iron Age chieftain, but such a creature doesn’t read the same in relation to the commander of a high-tech combat unit.

Finally, I had to allow for technological as well as cultural differences. Odysseus caps his victory by slowly strangling–the process is described in some detail–the female servants who have been sleeping with Penelope’s suitors.

This is only one example (although a pretty striking one) of normal behavior in an Iron Age culture which is unacceptable in a society that I (or anybody I want as a reader) would choose to live in. I might’ve been stupid enough to follow the structure of an ancient epic in a modern space opera, but I wasn’t going to describe a hero with the worldview of a death camp guard.

Adapting the Odyssey was the second most important lesson I got writing. (The most important was learning that I needed to outline.)

Since Cross the Stars I use the same process on all material, historical as well as fiction. First I consider the requirements of my medium; space opera, military SF,  and fantasy all start from different assumptions. Then I look at the functional effect of every element of the original.

Only when I’ve completed those basics do I begin to plot my novel. Paying the Piper is Military SF based in Hellenistic history; The Voyage (included in this volume), is space opera based on the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes. I developed both of them and many other stories by using the technique I learned by writing Cross the Stars.

There’s one other thing to mention: I don’t forget the original while I’m writing. In Cross the Stars you’ll find hints of Homer’s words as well as his story. I’ll never be the writer Homer was (nobody else will either, but that’s another matter), but I’m better for having read him than I would have been without his example.

–Dave Drake

Voyage Across the Stars. Hammer’s Slammers Series. Riverdale, NY: Baen. 612 p. 978-1451637717. $13.00.

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.

Before long I had resold my original copy to a classmate and bought the double version with The Contraband Rocket by “Lee Correy” on the flip side.

Decades later I met G Harry Stine (AKA Lee Correy) and told him truthfully how much I’d enjoyed The Contraband Rocket, but it was The Forgotten Planet that, well… changed my life. It was great, and it was great in fashions that I could appreciate

The book is a fixup of three novellas, two of them published before there were SF magazines, while Murray Leinster (whose real name was Will F Jenkins) was still in his early Twenties. (They appeared in Argosy in 1920 and ’21.) The third was written more than 30 years later… but with light editing they fitted together in seamless fashion. The Stanley Melzoff cover shows a youth using the horn of a giant stag beetle as a spear while he faces a bumblebee [actually a wasp] as big as a cow.

In the novel version a boy struggles to survive on a world in which insects–arthropods; spiders are a particular threat–and plants have grown to giant size. He successfully battles varied monsters, welds together a tribe, and starts humanity back on the road to civilization (just in time to meet envoys from the society which seeded the planet with live millennia in the past).

This was a great adventure story, and it was hard SF–though not of the usual sort. Leinster’s monsters come from the French naturalist Henri Fabre’s Life of Insects but Really Big. It brought SF into my own back yard–literally.

I owe so much to that Ace Single of The Forgotten Planet. Its double replacement is still on my shelves; but more important, it has never left my heart.

–Dave Drake, August 2009

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.)

A story doesn’t depend on the language in which it’s told, and a story that’s been around for several thousand years is likely to be a very good story.  While rereading The Odyssey (in translation; Ben Jonson would be even more slighting about my Greek than he was about Shakespeare’s) I remarked to a friend that the story would make an excellent Western.

And as I said that, a light dawned.  The Odyssey would make a heck of a space opera as well, though translating Homer’s story to an SF idiom would take some subtlety if I were to avoid being absurd. For example, I couldn’t just have my hero land on a planet of one-eyed giants who shut him and his crew in a cave. But what about an automated city that . . . ?

I did a precis of The Odyssey and plotted my story around that armature, focusing always on situations that would serve the same structural purposes that Homer had achieved in his medium.  Then I wrote Cross the Stars.

By the way, the Cyclopes appear twice in The Odyssey: once in direct conflict with Odysseus (which everybody remembers) and once as the creatures whose savage attacks drove the Phaecians out of their original home. If you’ve just finished reading Cross the Stars, you may recall a passing reference to giant one-eyed mutants. The latter, like the local creature called the argus and other asides in my novel, is homage to the man/men/woman who wrote The Odyssey; and who is, for my money, the greatest literary genius of all time.

As I was writing Cross the Stars I commented to the same friend that while The Odyssey translated easily to other media, The Iliad (perhaps an even greater achievement) was too fixed in its own cultural idiom to be used the way I did the other. For a long time I believed that I couldn’t use The Iliad at all in my fiction.

One day I was rereading Horace’s Ars Poetica and came to the quotation I’ve translated as the epigraph to this essay. Homer is the only source for the character of Achilles (which Horace summarizes with his usual succinct brilliance), but the character can have a life outside the cultural confines of The Iliad. There are and always have been men (and here I mean “male human beings”) like Achilles; Alexander the Great made a conscious attempt to model his life on the character (and succeeded, in my opinion, only too well).

So I thought about the problem for a long while, then wrote The Warrior. I set the piece (a short novel) in the Hammer universe, as I had Cross the Stars before it, but The Warrior was straight military–as surely as The Iliad is. I used the milieu of modern warfare, of tanks rather than armored spearmen, and the background has no connection with the Siege of Troy.

But remember, Homer didn’t say he was writing about the Siege of Troy: I sing the wrath of Achilles. . . .

Not all of my plots come from classical (or even historical) sources, but most of them do. That’s not only because of my personal taste, but because I believe (with Shakespeare) that literature wich survives the buffeting of time is worth a second or thirty-second look.

I opened with a quote from Horace. I’ll close with another one:  I have builded a monument more lasting than bronze. . . . Horace did; and Homer did, and Apollonius did, and so many others did. I’m proud to be able occasionally to stand on their magnificent structures.

–Dave Drake, 1994

Cross the Stars. Hammer’s Slammers Series. 1984, New York, NY: Tor. 342 p. 0812536142 (pb). $2.95.
————– 1994, New York, NY: Tor. 342 p. 0812509994 (pb). $2.95.
————– 1999, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 309 p. 0671578219. $1.99.

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.

We talked about the John stories, about Charles Fort (Manly said that Orlin Tremaine, the first editor of Astounding after Street and Smith Publishing took over the magazine, bought the rights to Fort’s third book, Lo!, to serve as plot germs which he would farm around to his table of trained seals–including Manly. Tremaine wound up publishing the whole volume as a serial in the magazine, however); about North Carolina folklore; about Lord Dunsany (whom Manly had met) and about Oscar Wilde.

In range and and choice of subjects that conversation was pretty typical of the hundreds of others I had with Manly in later years. He also mentioned the young friend who’d sold a novel (‘That Robert E Howard stuff’) and dropped out of medical school to write full time. The young friend was Karl Edward Wagner, and Karl too became a major part of my life after I got back to the World.

I was under orders to go to Vietnam in two weeks. I had read and loved Manly’s work since 1958, but although I knew he lived in Chapel Hill I hadn’t looked him up when we moved down to the area in 1967 when I started law school. I was embarrassed and didn’t want to seem pushy to such a great figure. I phoned to set up a meeting in the awareness that there was a very good chance I was going to die in the next year and that I’d feel like an idiot in my last moments if I hadn’t taken the chance to meet Mr Wellman when I could have done so.

When I got back, Jo and I socialized with Manly and his wife Frances, and with Karl Wagner both before and during his marriage. We’d all get together several times a month. I wouldn’t say Manly and I were close friends, but I heard a lot of stories about his marvelously varied life: birth and boyhood in Portuguese West Africa, now Angola; tramping through Arkansas with Vance Randolph, the pioneer folklorist; interviewing celebrities whose trains passed through Wichita when Manly was a reporter in the early ’30s; meeting in Steuben’s Delicatessan with other professional writers in the ’40s; befriending a Navy veteran, Mac McKenna and travelling with him to the Milford writers’ conferences in the ’50s before Mac wrote The Sand Pebbles.

Manly was a lot smarter than I in my arrogance (my stupid arrogance) gave him credit for. As one example that can stand for many (this, by the way, is a peril of a memory as good as mine is: I remember many things that embarrass me with the eyes of hindsight), Manly was adamant that cocaine was an addictive and destructive drug, based on his experience as a police reporter in Wichita. Karl was sneeringly certain of the medical opinion that cocaine was non-addictive.

I bought into the ’scientific truth’. Now, after watching a very close friend as well as a number of acquaintances in the writing community (including Stephen King) lose years and nearly their lives to cocaine, I can only nod to Manly’s memory. Now I know there’s psychological addiction as well as physiological addiction. Manly was right; I was wrong. And that was generally true when we differed on matters of opinion.

In 1985 Manly fell and broke his elbow. The wonderful UNC orthopedics department fixed that injury, but because Manly stubbornly refused to move for several days while convalescing he got bed sores on his heels. Over the next ten months those bed sores killed him by inches. He lost his heels; then his legs; and finally he died.

Because I had reliable transportation and a flexible schedule, I was the only one of Manly’s many friends who was able to visit Manly more days than not. He used me, consciously I believe, as a dump for his memories about old girlfriends, books he’d known and loved, and all the other fragments of his long life that were most vivid to him in what he knew were his last months.

I wouldn’t wish anyone go through the pain that Manly did during that time, but if he’d died quickly and peacefully I wouldn’t really have known him despite the previous fifteen years and the enormous influence his writing had on me. If it had to happen, I’m glad I was there; and Manly was glad to have me.

So long as I live, so does a little bit of Manly Wade Hampton Wellman.

–Dave Drake

Manly and Frances Wellman

On May 7, 2000, my friend Frances Obrist Wellman died peacefully at home; she was 92. On the 14th we scattered her ashes in the sideyard of her home of fifty years where they joined the remains of her late husband Manly. Frances said she still saw Manly around the house with her, so I don’t think much has changed.

Freelance writers are difficult people to live with. Frances was as good a wife for Manly as I can imagine existing. They were married 55 years at the time of his death, including the difficult last ten months while she nursed him.

Frances always did her best. As I get older I realize how rare, and how great, a virtue that is. I miss her.

–Dave Drake

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.

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.

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 R. Fultz, Blake Charlton, David B. Coe, and Freda Warrington.

—– 

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 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.

I was terrified to an irrational degree. Our son was in a private college, and I was very well aware that a freelance writer is in an extremely chancy business. I’d dealt with the uncertainty by buying nothing on time: if I couldn’t pay cash, I waited. This understandably created stress at home, since people with much lower incomes were (for example) buying new cars.

I was, I repeat, irrational on the subject; though I think many people take–and certainly took, fifteen years ago–far too much for granted. My need for a completely controlled environment is in part a reaction to Vietnam, which put an emotional loading on matters which others mostly saw from my reactions alone.

When I was firmly committed to building the new house, the Berlin Wall came down and the USSR collapsed. I was just as happy about that as anybody else, but one of the obvious consequences was that the US military would be downsized. Much of my income depended on Military SF, a subgenre which would be negatively impacted by the fact that there would be a million fewer young men and women with an interest in the military and time in barracks to read.

I say ‘obvious’ because it certainly was obvious to me, but I couldn’t get anybody else to listen. I wrote space operas, in no sense Military SF, and saw them published with “The King of Military Science Fiction!” on the cover. And sure enough, Military SF took a serious hit. (I’m sure Cassandra would’ve agreed with me that there’s no satisfaction in saying, “I told you so!” when your world is burning down around you.)

I had three publishers at the time: Tor, Ace, and Baen. My (wonderful) editor at Ace had left publishing. This had a bad result for my books there because though my new editor was a friend and very able, she was also a VP of Putnams, the parent corporation, and simply didn’t have the time to work with individual titles. I learned that my next Ace book wouldn’t be published for two years after I’d turned it in. There was going to be a considerable period in which no book of mine appeared.

I noted earlier in this essay that Nam was part of my problem. On the credit side, it–or at least the fact I served with the Blackhorse–taught me to react to bad situations instead of waiting for them to roll over me. I knew Jim Baen could bring a book out quickly, so I called him and arranged to do one to plug into the gap.

The problem was that Jim wanted something military. It struck me that I could satisfy him by having soldiers as my viewpoint characters while actually writing an action/adventure story. I’d use a six-man team assessing a gangster-ruled planet for potential mercenary deployment. The book could be honestly marketed as adventure if Jim came around to my way of thinking later. (He didn’t.)

I stole the plot from Dashiell Hammett. His first novel, Red Harvest, has always been a favorite of mine (second only to The Glass Key).

When in 1962 I saw A Fistful of Dollars, the first spaghetti western, I assumed it’d been lifted from Red Harvest with the addition of an important scene from The Glass Key. I later learned that that Leone, the director, had copied Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, and that it was Kurosawa who’d cribbed it from Hammett. I like both movies very much, however movie people are not only thieves (which doesn’t bother me) but litigious thieves. With that in mind I wish to emphasize that the entire plot of The Sharp End came from Dashiell Hammett, not from Akira Kurosawa or Sergio Leone.

I adapted the plot and was proceeding happily with an 80,000 word paperback original when Jim called and told me he’d be doing the book as a hardcover. I wasn’t one of the writers who demanded the prestige of hardcover publication. I made my money from mass-market paperbacks, and status isn’t a major concern of mine. A hardcover needed more bulk than a paperback (even in the early ’90s), but it was too late to add an additional 20-30K into the plot proper. Furthermore, the change would delay publication, the whole reason I was doing the book in the first place.

Man proposes, God disposes; and once more, thank God for Blackhorse training. I wrote introductory scenes giving the background of the six main characters, bringing the total wordage to 109,000–just what I’d been aiming at.

All six of my central characters are trying to redeem themselves. One of them, Johann Vierziger, is what Hammer’s dead assassin and bodyguard, Joachim Steuben, might’ve been if he were returned to the waking world to find what in his case is redemption of a particularly muscular kind.

Many readers have asked me how that could happen. I don’t have an answer or at least not a rational answer. I hope that everyone who’s looking for redemption finds it somewhere, though; whether or not we can find a rational basis for it.

Jim pushed his sales force hard enough to get out a lot of copies of The Sharp End; more than half of them came back. Jim told me–volunteered to me with some irritation–that the book had failed in hardcover and that Military SF was in serious trouble. Neither of those things was news to me.

Things got better. My son graduated. I paid off the new house. I began writing epic fantasy successfully with covers that didn’t refer to Military SF. And for that matter, Military SF picked up to previous levels for me, because writers who’d come into the subgenre because it was booming were sifted out of the marketplace when it crashed.

The paperback of The Sharp End did fine on initial release and continues to bring in money every royalty period. It’s a good book, as it should be when I used a master like Dashiell Hammett for my model.

But the text itself is only a small part of what goes through my mind when I think about a book, and this book comes with a lot of baggage.

–Dave Drake

The Sharp End. Hammer’s Slammers Series. 1993, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 377 p. 0671721925. $20.00.
————– “The Sharp End (Extract)” Amazing, October 1993.
————– 1994, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 377 p. 0671876325 (pb). $5.99.
————– The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, v.3. 2007, San Francisco, CA: Night Shade Books.
————– The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, v.3. 2010, Riverdale, NY: Baen.
————– (audiobook), Audible.com, 2011

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.

I like to stretch myself in my writing by doing something new each time. The setting of this one would be the same Kuttner Venus as Surface Action: land masses covered with ravening jungles; domed underwater cities; and competition between cities through proxy battles by fleets of mercenary warships.

Surface Action had been a very simple story stylistically, though. I decided to use three viewpoint characters in the new piece, and to run one strand of the story in continuous story present. Paired with each such chapter was another, from the same viewpoint but at widely scattered periods of the story past.

The result was far and away the most stylistically complex thing I’ve ever written, even compared to the Northworld trilogy. I’m really pleased with the way it turned out.

Another aspect of the book came from Anthony Price, one of the best writers of spy novels. Most of his novels have contemporary settings, but he did one that was never published in the US: The Hour of the Donkey, set in the chaos of the Fall of France and the prelude to the British withdrawal at Dunkirk.

The Hour of the Donkey is about real heroes: people who go on doing their job because it’s the only thing they understand as the world goes to pieces about them. They don’t think about what they’re doing as remarkable; mostly they don’t even feel that they’re carrying their own weight. They’re confused and afraid; they make mistakes, and the best of them were never saints.

But they go on until they’re killed; and because of them, others can go on also.

I was lucky enough to know and serve with some of those people in the Blackhorse. I hope I did them justice in The Jungle.

And I hope that if the time comes, I’ll be one of those who goes on also.

–Dave Drake

The Jungle. 1991, New York, NY: Tor. 282 p. 0312851979. $18.95. Volume contains Clash By Night by H. Kuttner. 1992, New York, NY: Tor. 282 p. 0812501985 (pb). $4.99.
————– The Jungle reprinted in Seas of Venus. 2002, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 400 p. 0743435648 $15.00.

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.

Then things got awkward. I talked to Debbie Notkin, the Tor editor who was handling the project. Another book in the series was the classic Vintage Season, written by CL Moore alone but again using the pseudonym Lawrence O’Donnell. Robert Silverberg was writing the sequel. Ms Notkin made it politely clear that one O’Donnell piece was enough for the series; that she preferred Bob’s work to mine; and that anyway, Kuttner and Moore had written their own sequel to Clash By Night, the novel Fury.

Professionally (and I hope generally in life) I don’t go where I’m not wanted. I wrote the book anyway but removed direct references to Clash By Night. A new agent I was trying at the time put it up for auction. Ace (who were doing the Northworld series then) and Baen Books (my friend Jim) bid. Tom Doherty, Tor’s publisher, had heard by then about why Tor wasn’t getting the book and acted himself, making a third bidder.

I’m really uncomfortable about what happened next. Supposedly the parties didn’t know one another’s bids. The book would’ve gone to Tor, except at the last moment the Ace publisher (whom I’ve never met) stepped in and boosted the Ace bid by $5,000 over the recommendation of my friend and editor Beth Fleisher.

One reason that might have happened is that somebody had told the publisher what the Tor bid was. I personally can’t think of another reasonable possibility.

Ace got the book–which in itself was fine. I felt bad enough about the way it’d happened, though, that I wrote a different sequel to Clash By Night for Tor (and for that, see my notes on The Jungle) and sold it to Tom (myself) for half the money Ace had paid for Surface Action.

That’s a lot about the business side of the book. As for the writing–the fun part–I had a great time. Kuttner’s story was about a soldier who tries to become a civilian but realizes when the chips are down that he’ll never be happy as anything but a soldier. I turned that on its head, a civilian who thinks he wants to be a soldier, but who sees what that really means and returns to civilian life.

I consciously wrote my story in a tone and style appropriate to 1943 SF. This isn’t the tone of adult fiction today, so I turned Surface Action pretty much into a Young Adult novel with a teenaged protagonist. (If it had been published as a YA, I’d have made the few sexual innuendos less graphic.)

I’ve always loved warships. Kuttner’s story was built around the concepts of fleet action that were common between the World Wars, when aircraft were merely scouts for the fighting fleets and the real action was carried on by dreadnought battleships.

This obviously wasn’t reality by 1943, so Kuttner eliminated aircraft from the Venusian atmosphere by auctorial fiat–citing the weather. He wanted to write about battleships slugging it out; and that suited me right down to the ground, because that’s what I wanted to do also.

Golden Age writers often added poetic epigraphs to stories or chapters within longer pieces. Kuttner did this in Clash by Night, thereby introducing me to Matthew Arnold and AE Housman (the latter poet a lifelong companion as a result). I took enormous pleasure in choosing epigraphs for Surface Action.

As a matter of fact, I had a great time with every part of Surface Action except for the business side, and the business was as unpleasant as that of any solo book I’ve done. Still, even that was a learning experience–I learned never to do certain things again. I’ll call that a win too.

–Dave Drake

Surface Action. 1990, New York, NY: Ace Books. 236 p. 044136375X (pb). $3.95.
————– Reprinted in Seas of Venus. 2002, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 400 p. 0743435648 $15.00.