David Drake

LORD OF THE ISLES was my chance to get back to writing fantasy. It now seems an obvious thing to have done, but it sure took me a long time to come to that realization.

Andrew Lang’s Color Fairy Books were a staple of my reading as a child, and when I entered my teens and could buy books for myself I was just as interested in fantasy as science fiction. Robert E Howard’s heroic fantasy stories were a lot of the reason I started writing myself, and when I was seventeen I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time. (I’ve reread the work frequently).

It’s my belief that heroic fantasy forms a broad arc, with Howard being one pole and Tolkien the other. The works of the two men differ in emphasis but are extremely similar at the core level. Both writers affected me and my writing a great deal. continue reading…

What novel have you personally enjoyed the most writing?

Once I apparently answered this question, ‘Northworld.’ I can’t imagine why I did that, because I was so stressed while writing Northworld that I was having back spasms that made it difficult for me to walk some days. I’m very proud of the book and the series, but they’re enormously complex works–note the way words are echoed within and among the interwoven plot strands, for example–and the first one darned near crippled me.

Now I’d say Lord of the Isles. I’ve always loved fantasy, but because I’d been successful with military SF I wasn’t able to do as much as I’d have liked to. Getting the chance to write Lord of the Isles was a wonderful change of pace. You can take the series as homage to Tolkien and to Robert E Howard both if you like; I do.