David Drake

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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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 Pickerell Goes to Mars and dreamed of the day I’d turn 13 and could check out books from the adult section of the library. (In fact the librarians at the Clinton Public Library gave me–unasked, bless their hearts–an adult card when I turned 12, but that was still a long time coming.)

In 1955 when I was ten years old I found The Angry Planet in the children’s section. I think it may at least have shaped–I won’t quite say changed–my life. continue reading…

THE CHICKENS

Dave on his second birthday, with a glass of milk and his favorite food.

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 been two years old, and I suspect they got a copy hot off the presses.

In the collection was an anonymous poem titled The Chickens. It was toward the back of the volume and didn’t have the color illustrations that more important poems got. There’s no obvious reason why it should’ve appealed to me. continue reading…

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 magic works but the vestiges of ancient super-science remain also. (I hadn’t read it at the time, but Vance’s novelet The Miracle Workers is even closer to what I was trying to do than his Dying Earth stories.)

Though Vance gave me a model, I fashioned the action of The Sea Hag from fairy tales. Among the first books I read by myself were the Color Fairy Books edited by Alexander Lang. I reread several of them while I was plotting my novel as well as reading Alan Garner’s recent (and brilliant) collections, but most of the tales I used were from the Pantheon collection Russian Fairy Tales.  continue reading…

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 a more general shot of the house and grounds, looking down toward the Connecticut River. (The child is Sarah Van Name, the daughter of my friends Mark and Rana.)

My folks had copies of The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book which I read them when I was quite young. The first volume contains the Mowgli stories, which are fairly straightforward. I won’t say that I understood them at age ten or so, but I thought I understood them. continue reading…

A ruined caravansary from southern Turkey

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 lock up themselves and their goods for the night in rooms around the periphery while their animals were corraled in the open courtyard in the center. A building that served the same purpose and looked much the same has probably stood here throughout recorded history: donkeys moved at the same speed in the 3d millennium BC as they did in the 19th century, so the resting places would have been the same distance apart. continue reading…