I think I did what I set out to do, but I learned some new lessons besides. The most important was that not all epics are equal.

The Odyssey, my model for Cross the Stars, was composed in the Early Iron Age, a savage time whose bones stick out through the story’s fabric in many places. I changed a number of situations in order to soften them.

On the other hand, Apollonius was head of the foremost intellectual and literary center of his time, the Library of Alexandria; he was a highly sophisticated man (and poet) by any standards. He told the story of the Argo very skillfully, but he didn’t describe (and perhaps couldn’t visualize) the brutal realities that must have underlain such a story.

I’d been thinking about the project for many years before I actually wrote The Voyage. In fact, I recall beginning to precis the Argonautica during one of my trips to Atlanta in 1983 while I was working on Window of Opportunity. I’d used the Odyssey only as a general model when I wrote Cross the Stars, but The Voyage stuck very close to Apollonius. That is, I eliminated some incidents and conflated others, but those which remain (up to the climax) are from the Argonautica and in the order Apollonius set them out.

The Argonautica stops as the Argo and her triumphant crew approach their home port. The bloodbath that followed the return was outside the taste and understanding of a literary sophisticate like Apollonius. In another, better, world I might have been able to say the same about myself; but in this one, I was drafted and sent to Southeast Asia in 1970. I was able to tell the rest of the story; and for the sake of the men I served with, I thought and think I needed to tell it.

Hiding that sort of truth makes it more likely that some later LBJ or Robert S MacNamara could send our children into a cesspool like the one those statesmen created in Viet-Nam. The Voyage is a more violent book than could’ve appealed to Apollonius, but I hope he would have appreciated the degree to which it’s homage to him. Besides, the book contains a vignette that’s both as good and as peaceful as anything I’ve written: a scene modeled on Jason’s sighting of the Cattle of the Sun on the island of Trinacria. Apollonius–and also his rival Callimachus–might well have taken pleasure in that little flash of tranquility.

–Dave Drake

The Voyage. Hammer’s Slammers Series. 1994, New York, NY: Tor. 415 p. 0312851588. $23.95.
————– 1995, New York, NY: Tor. 403 p. 0812513401 (pb). $5.99.

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.)

In 1980, I quit lawyering and was driving a bus for the Town of Chapel Hill. While sitting in the bus garage between runs, I wrote a letter to a friend in which I commented that the Odyssey could be rewritten as a Western, though of course I didn’t write Westerns. As the words came off my pen, it struck me that I did write SF; what was true for a horse opera would probably work for a space opera as well.

Nothing happened for a few months. Then Jim Baen called and offered me a two-book contract: a big book for $10K and a little book for $7,500. I said “Yes!” immediately. (I’ve done a lot of dumb things, but I was never dumb enough to turn that down. I made $6,100 during my year of bus driving).

Then, because at the time both Jim and I thought that we ought to know what the books would be about, I said the big book would be what became Birds of Prey (my working title was The Warm Summer Rain; note what I said above about doing a lot of dumb things) and the little book would be a rewrite of the Odyssey. That was off the top of my head, but it seemed like a good idea on reflection also. (Almost immediately thereafter I became a full-time writer, though the decision didn’t have as direct a connection as it may seem to.)

I wrote Birds of Prey first (I had been trying to write it for more than a decade). Then I reread the Odyssey (for the umpteenth time, of course), making a précis of everything that happened in it.

Until I made the précis, I didn’t have a real understanding of the way the Odyssey is paced and connected. Almost all the incidents which people (myself included until then) think of as being the Odyssey occur in one book: after dinner on the island of Scheria, Odysseus recounts to his hosts the things he claims have happened to him since he left Troy. Homer doesn’t tell the reader about the Cyclops: that’s a story which Odysseus tells to King Alcinous and his other guests.

I mentioned this development to Jim in one of our regular phone calls. “But you don’t have to do it that way,” he said.

Which took me aback. Of course I had to do it that way! It’s that way in the original.

Then I actually thought about the situation instead of just reacting. I wasn’t going to be graded on my understanding of the Odyssey; my present job was to tell a good story in English. That meant the form of the story had to be translated, as surely as the language in which I told it.

This was a typical case in which I benefited from being Jim Baen’s friend (because we were chatting as friends, not as editor and writer). There were many similar instances on both sides. Over the years, Jim and I saved one another from ourselves as a regular thing.

I already understood that I would have to adapt the incidents of the Odyssey functionally, not simply copy them. A one-eyed giant is a credible threat to an Iron Age chieftain, but such a creature doesn’t read the same in relation to the commander of a high-tech combat unit.

Finally, I had to allow for technological as well as cultural differences. Odysseus caps his victory by slowly strangling–the process is described in some detail–the female servants who have been sleeping with Penelope’s suitors.

This is only one example (although a pretty striking one) of normal behavior in an Iron Age culture which is unacceptable in a society that I (or anybody I want as a reader) would choose to live in. I might’ve been stupid enough to follow the structure of an ancient epic in a modern space opera, but I wasn’t going to describe a hero with the worldview of a death camp guard.

Adapting the Odyssey was the second most important lesson I got writing. (The most important was learning that I needed to outline.)

Since Cross the Stars I use the same process on all material, historical as well as fiction. First I consider the requirements of my medium; space opera, military SF,  and fantasy all start from different assumptions. Then I look at the functional effect of every element of the original.

Only when I’ve completed those basics do I begin to plot my novel. Paying the Piper is Military SF based in Hellenistic history; The Voyage (included in this volume), is space opera based on the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes. I developed both of them and many other stories by using the technique I learned by writing Cross the Stars.

There’s one other thing to mention: I don’t forget the original while I’m writing. In Cross the Stars you’ll find hints of Homer’s words as well as his story. I’ll never be the writer Homer was (nobody else will either, but that’s another matter), but I’m better for having read him than I would have been without his example.

–Dave Drake

Voyage Across the Stars. Hammer’s Slammers Series. Riverdale, NY: Baen. 612 p. 978-1451637717. $13.00.

A ruined caravansary from southern Turkey

The photograph is a ruined caravansary from southern Turkey, some days’ journey east of Adana. The building was constructed during the Seljuk period–old, probably from the 1st millennium AD, but post-classical. It’s a stopping place for caravans, where merchants could lock up themselves and their goods for the night in rooms around the periphery while their animals were corraled in the open courtyard in the center. A building that served the same purpose and looked much the same has probably stood here throughout recorded history: donkeys moved at the same speed in the 3d millennium BC as they did in the 19th century, so the resting places would have been the same distance apart.

I used this particular caravansery for the climax of Birds of Prey, one of my personal favorites of my novels, though the book is set in 262 AD. As I said above, there’d have been something similar at the location then.

I’ve made a lot of fictional use of classical places and times, but that’s not the main value the classics have provided me. They’ve been my life’s anchor at times I badly needed one.

I’d taken two years of Latin in high school. When I went off to a large university and found everything scary and different, I took more Latin not for any practical reason but just to remind myself of a time when my life was simpler. (Well, come to think that was a pretty practical reason.) The first year and a half of Duke Law School was tough, but I found I could take classics courses along with those in law school. They didn’t count toward law school graduation, of course, but I didn’t care about that.

Then I got drafted and sent to Southeast Asia. I read Horace in basic training and Vergil in Cambodia. Oxford Classical Texts and a compact dictionary didn’t take up much room even in my dufflebag in the field. (I’d have had more of a problem if I’d been with infantry instead of an armored unit, but I’d still have needed Latin.)

I took more Latin after I got back to the World and finished law school. I remember the paper I did in Medieval Latin on weapon terminology in The Walterius more vividly than I do any of the courses I was taking in law school at the same time; after the fact, that strikes even me as odd.

I was a long way from sane back then; but I was functional, which is at least as much due to the Latin authors I was reading as to any other single factor. It’s a regular pleasure to me to read a few hundred lines of Ovid or Juvenal or Tacitus–and others as the whim strikes me. Not only do they bring back pleasant memories, they are in their different ways some of the best writers in human history. (OK, Silius Italicus isn’t one of the best writers ever; and the various authors of the Priapea mostly weren’t great either, though that’s a fun little volume.)

My Greek was never very good. It’s sufficient to make sense of footnotes or to illuminate an English translation in a bilingual edition, but apart from some Xenophon and chunks of The Iliad I don’t claim to have read Greek. Greek history interests me as much as Roman, however, and some of the best historians of Rome wrote in Greek. I continue to read them also–for fun, but I regularly jot notes from them to use in my fiction. I find it a lot easier to copy reality than I do inventing it.

I said that the classics were more important to me than merely to use as sources and that’s true, but they do regularly provide me with bits to work into my fiction. Some of my pieces have classical settings (like Ranks of Bronze and many others), and I’ve written my share of actual fantasies where people are swinging swords and don’t have electricity. (Lord of the Isles and its sequels fall into this category.)

But it’s beyond that. I assume that people are going to be much the same in the future as they are now and were in the past, so human politics are going to be similar also. Lt Leary, Commanding, the space opera I turned in to Baen Books in January, 2000, had its genesis in a fragmentary story told by the 2nd century AD historian Appian. That’s one example of many where a squib in a classical writer has given me a bit of business.

Twice I’ve reworked the plot of a classical masterpiece into SF. Cross the Stars uses The Odyssey for its armature, and The Voyage is a very direct retelling of Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica. There are many other cases where my copying isn’t quite so close. The Forlorn Hope had Xenophon’s Anabasis as its germ, but the action diverges quickly from that of the historical original; and The Warrior isn’t The Iliad but rather Horace’s description in the Ars Poetica of the character of Achilles. And so on. The classics permeate my life; it’s inevitable that they should permeate my work as well.

For no particular reason, I’ve decided to run the translations of Ovid’s Amores and Metamorphoses here on my website for anybody who wants to see them.

The setting of this ring is a denarius of Hadrian from 122 OR 123 AD. (The dating is determined by the number of times the emperor received certain honors.) It reverses, so I could wear it showing Hadrian’s head if I wanted to; but I decided many years ago that I’d rather stay with the winged victory that you see here.