David Drake

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…

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…