David Drake

“Two incandescent novels of journey and battle across the stars set in David Drake’s best-selling Hammer’s Slammers universe together for the first time in one mega-volume.”  –Amazon Book Description.

Baen’s combined volume due out January 3 2012 reprints Cross the Stars and The Voyage with the following new introduction.

STARTING A LONG WAY FROM HERE

This volume collects Cross the Stars and The Voyage, two cases where I recast an Ancient Greek epic as an SF adventure novel (a space opera). My undergraduate (double) majors were History and Latin, so that may seem an obvious thing for me to try; in fact it wasn’t. (I’ve missed seeing a lot of things that seem obvious after the fact.) continue reading…

AFTERWORD: WHERE I GET MY IDEAS

If you decide to write about far-famed Achilles, make him active, hot-tempered, inexorable, and fierce; let him deny that laws were made for him, let him think his sword rules all. –Horace, The Art of Poetry (lines 120-2)

My undergraduate double major was history and Latin, and I continued to take Latin courses while I was in law school in a laughable attempt to stay sane.  Reading Latin centers me. (Note “laughable” in the previous sentence.) continue reading…