David Drake

THE FORLORN HOPE started in 1980 with a phone call from Susan Allison, who had just taken over as SF editor of Ace Books after Jim Baen left. Ace hired her away from Pocket Books, but earlier she’d been Jim’s assistant and knew both his methods and his authors, me included.

Military books–fiction and non-fiction–were selling very well at the time. All the divisions of Ace Books had been directed to start military series. Hammer’s Slammers had been very successful for Ace (at the time, I had no idea how successful) so Susan came to me with a proposal: 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…