John Lambshead is joint author with Dave of The Citizen Series from Baen Books.
When John Lambshead was fourteen, he helped his mother carry lunch to the firemen spreading dispersants so that oil from the tanker Torrey Canyon did not coat the beaches of Newquay, Cornwall. When he was fifteen, he watched green algae coat those same beaches, because the dispersant had killed the sea life which normally controlled algae. continue reading…
For my birthday in 1975, John Squires (who had been taking a bookbinding class) gave me a book bound in one of my fatigue shirts (that Jo had given him) and containing (as tearsheets) Ranks of Bronze, Arclight, Contact!, Something Had to be Done, Under the Hammer, and The Butcher’s Bill. It was my first book in a manner of speaking, under the title Like the Man Said: War Stories. ‘The man’ being General Sherman. There’s only one copy, making it a severely limited edition.
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What he did now was a dustjacket for it. The front has an inset of the October 1974, Galaxy (my first cover; scanned rather than tipped in, a chance with the times). On the back, the picture of me in Nam with an excerpt from Karl’s essay (originally for Fantasy Review in 1982 but lightly modified into an intro for From the Heart of Darkness). Front flap is a Blackhorse patch (the US version) above a list of the stories and their provenance (there’s no ToC inside); the back flap is the picture of me and John at Misty’s reception with a description of the book itself.
At Trinoc-con on Sunday, October 6, 2002, my friend Mark Van Name presided over what was billed as a David Drake Roast but was really a tribute. I was very embarrassed at the idea beforehand, but it turned out to be one of the funniest hours of my existence. Besides the usual sorts of comments from Mark, Jim Baen, and Dan Breen on the panel (and offerings from more distant friends), Mark and our friend Jennie Faries (who does real cover design for Baen Books) mocked up the covers for David Drake volumes kicking off new lines for Baen Books. I don’t think I’ve laughed so hard since the first time I watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail. continue reading…