SKYRIPPER was a more important book for me than I’d realized until this moment. In 1981 I was driving a bus for the Town of Chapel Hill, having decided that being a lawyer was killing me–and quitting the law business. I’d turned Time Safari in to Jim Baen, SF editor of Tor Books. He and Tom Doherty, the publisher, were pleased with the result.
Cover art: Dave Seeley
In July, 2011, Baen Books is reprinting the paired Tom Kelly thrillers (SKYRIPPER and FORTRESS) as an omnitrade under the combined title LOOSE CANNON.
Tom Doherty really liked Tom Kelly; I didn’t, not least because Kelly could have been me if things had gone wrong (or anyway, had gone wrong in a different fashion).
Kelly is a very angry man. I’m less angry now than I was in the ’80s when I wrote the novels; that said, I can still see Kelly when I look far enough back inside myself. That’s a good reason to have refused to write more books in the series when Tom wanted them; and it’s an even better reason not to look very deeply inside myself.
–Dave Drake
Dear People,
Just as I predicted in Newsletter 58, I’m completely wrung out. Most of that is connected with the one major thing in this newsletter: I completed OUT OF THE WATERS, the second (of four) fantasies in my new Tor series. It’s scheduled to come out in July, 2011, with a Donato cover. continue reading…
Dear People,
The most exciting news this time has very little to do with me. I am therefore turning the stage over to my webmaster, Karen Zimmerman:
The new web site is up at http://david-drake.com. Our very simple original web site went live April 2000 and since then outgrew its ability to handle Dave’s very extensive, rich content. I hope the new site helps users find things more easily—there are a lot of cross references and access points. Please be aware that I’m still tweaking things, so you might see changes in appearance once in a while, and I’m still uploading some of the old archival content, including past newsletters and photos. continue reading…
1984 hardcover dust jacket; Cover art: Michael Whelan
BIRDS OF PREY was the first novel I tried to write. It was a very long time before I succeeded, but I think in this case the wait was worth it.
While I was still in law school I got and read the two-volume Teubner (Latin text only) edition of the so-called Scriptores Historiae Augustae, the Augustan Histories. This is a collection of lives of the later emperors (Hadrian through Numerian), purportedly by many contemporary authors but probably by one man of much later (5th century?) date with political axes to grind. While the SHA is in many respects a fictional text, it does incorporate material from books that haven’t survived–and is, for my purposes as a writer, very evocative. continue reading…