Cover art: David Mattingly

The question I’m most often asked about WITH THE LIGHTNINGS is, ‘Who the hell is Cassian’? Cassian is a mistake; or rather, a series of mistakes.

I used ‘Leary Daniels’ as the name of the hero of my untitled novel and was proceeding happily with the writing until Jim Baen called. He very strongly didn’t like the name Leary.

We had a discussion. I did like the name Leary Daniels, but I need a better reason than that before I go to the wall with my publisher, editor, and friend.

The discussion then turned to alternatives. Between us we came up with ‘Cassian Daniels’, which neither of us liked but both figured would do. I had a novel to write and I wanted to get back to it.

I finished the book, by now titled With the Lightnings, and sent it to Jim as disk copy. A little while later he called again. He’d been thinking about the name. He still didn’t like Leary Daniels, but he liked Daniel Leary a lot better than he did Cassian Daniels. So did I. (Mind you, I liked Leary Daniels even better, but that may be just stubbornness.) Jim said he’d do a global search and replace on his electronic copy, and I figured I’d catch any glitches when I did the page proofs.

A few months later Jim asked me to do flap copy for With the Lightnings. (I usually do the copy for my Baen titles; Jim correctly believes that the author knows best what the book is supposed to be about.) The covers were duly and very attractively printed. I still hadn’t seen page proofs.

The proofs came, but instead of the usual loose sheets I received one of the Advance Reading Copies, the perfect-bound ‘book’ which went out to reviewers in the same mail. I opened it and found that Jim had sent the wrong electronic text to the typesetter. In this version the hero’s name was still Cassian Daniels. I called and told Jim what had happened.

This was not a fun phone call for either of us. Because the covers were already printed, we didn’t have the option of leaving the hero ‘Cassian Daniels’, so the typesetter had to do the global search and replace–and neither I nor the reviewers saw the results. All things considered, the typesetter did an excellent job; but one ‘Cassian’ got through, and all the reviews had the hero’s name wrong. (Including the reviews quoted as cover copy on the paperback. Sigh.)

Welcome to the high-tech world of publishing, my friends.

A question that I get less often than ‘Who the hell is Cassian’? is, ‘Have you read Patrick O’Brian?’ Darn right I have: I’ve read Patrick O’Brian’s novels and I love them. Some reviews have referred to my Leary/Mundy series as an SF version of Hornblower. That’s not correct; I did an SF version of the Aubrey/Maturin series, Patrick O’Brian’s superb knockoff of Forester’s Hornblower. (If you want an SF version of Hornblower, Dave Weber and David Feintuch both do excellent but conceptually distinct takes on that paradigm.)

I write a lot of military SF. With the Lightnings is something quite different: space opera. When I was 13 I encountered Poul Anderson’s Flandry series which started in the pulps. Those tales and not, say, Starship Troopers and Dorsai! stood as godparents to With the Lightnings.

It was marvelous fun to write. I’ve done a sequel (Lt Leary, Commanding) and hope to do many more. I hope Patrick O’Brian would have approved.

–Dave Drake

With the Lightnings. RCN Series. 1998, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 323 p. 0671878816. $22.00.
————– 1999, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 400 p. 0671578189 (pb). $6.99.
————– 2000, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 323 p. 0671878863. $6.99.
————– 2008, Newark, NJ: Audible Frontiers [Audiobook]. 13 hours 44 mins.[Available for download from Audible.com]

Cover art: Steve Hickman

I’m using English and Metric weights and measures throughout Lt. Leary Commanding, as I did in With the Lightnings.  I wouldn’t bother mentioning this, but the decision seems to concern some people.  I’m doing it for the same reason that I’m writing the novel in English instead of inventing a language for the characters of future millennia to speak.

I’d like to note for those who’re interested that the orders in Chapter Nine are a close paraphrase of those which sent the frigate USS Congress to Hawaii in 1845.  Here as elsewhere, I prefer to borrow from reality rather than invent it.

–Dave Drake

Lt. Leary, Commanding. RCN Series. 2000, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 432 p. 0671578758. $24.00.
————– 2000, New York, NY: SFBC. 432 p. SFBC 05840. $11.98.
————– 2001, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 556 p. 0671319922 (pb). $7.99.
————– 2008, Newark, NJ: Audible Frontiers [Audiobook]. 16 hours 28 mins.[Available for download from Audible.com]

Cover art: Steve Hickman

One of the problems when you’re writing of either the past or the future is ‘How much should I translate?’ I don’t mean simply language: there’s a whole complex of things that people within any society take for granted but which vary between societies. (But language too: I had somebody complain that the Arthurian soldiers in The Dragon Lord talked like modern soldiers. My reaction to this was that I could write the soldiers’ dialogue in Latin, but the complainant couldn’t read it; and if I’m going to translate into English, why on Earth wouldn’t I translate into the type of English the same sort of men speak today?)

Weights and measures are a particular problem. I don’t assume that the world of the far future will use the weights and measures of today, but I’m quite certain that my inventing new systems will do nothing desirable for my story. (There are people who’re really happier for a glossary of made-up or foreign words. I’m not, though I’ll admit I still occasionally murmur to myself, “Tarzan bundolo!”)

In the RCN series Cinnabar is on the English system and the Alliance uses Metric, simply to suggest the enormous complexity I expect will exist after Mankind spreads among the stars. (Well, I certainly hope we’ll spread among the stars, but I won’t pretend I’m sanguine about our chances at the moment.)

Communications protocols are very roughly based on those of the 2^nd Squadron, 11^th ACR, during the period it was—I was—under the command of LTC Grayle Brookshier. There were a lot of stories about squadron and regimental commanding officers. The stories about Battle Six were all positive.

I think I should comment on the background of this novel also. Today physical travel is easier than ever before, and television takes us literally anywhere. The world is generally accessible to most people, and as a result it’s becoming homogenized. I don’t insist that this is a bad thing, but it’s a major change from the situation of a generation ago, let alone that of a hundred years in the past.

In the late 19^th century a party of Russian nobles bought a South Seas trading schooner from its owner/captain, hired as captain the former mate (a man named Robert Quinton), and for several years sailed the Pacific from Alaska to New Zealand, from Kamchatka to Diamond Head. They hunted, bought curios, visited ancient ruins, and viewed native rites in a score of localities.

This sort of experience was available only first-hand and only to the exceptionally wealthy (or their associates like Quinton, who wrote a memoir of the voyage). Today anybody who watches PBS and the Discovery Channel can see everything those aristocrats saw, or at any rate as many of those things as survive.

I’ve tried as one of the themes of The Far Side of the Stars to give the feel of that former time, when travel was a risky adventure possible only for  the few. While I’m glad that many–myself included–can share the world’s wonders today, I do regret the passing of the romance of former times and the fact that maps no longer have splotches marked Terra Incognita.

–Dave Drake

The Far Side of the Stars. RCN Series. 2003, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 436 p. 074347158X (hardcover). $25.00.
————– 2004, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 514 p. 0743488644 (pb). $7.99.
————– 2005, New York, NY: SFBC. 436 p. SFBC 1154846. $12.49.
————– 2008, Newark, NJ: Audible Frontiers [Audiobook]. 14 hours 57 mins. [Available for download from Audible.com]

Cover art: Steve Hickman

The general political background of the RCN series is that of Europe in the mid-18^th century, with admixtures of late-Republican Rome. (There’s a surprising degree of congruence between British and Roman society in those periods.)

Major plot elements in The Way to Glory, however, come from the 19^th century. Those of you who know some American history may note echoes of the Somers Mutiny, and if you’re really well-versed you’ll understand how greatly I simplified the details of political factions both in Washington (Whigs, Democrats, and the intimates of President Tyler whose own party had repudiated him) and in the US Navy. Real history is a great deal more complex than anything I could make up.

The situation of the British North America and West Indies Squadron, based in Bermuda, would’ve been much as described during the 18^th and even 17^th centuries, with one important difference: Haiti didn’t gain its independence till 1804. From that point through the 1880s (from which I’ve drawn several plot incidents) much of the squadron’s work involved interceding in Haiti on behalf of British citizens (many of whom brought no credit upon their status) and refugees in general. One could scarcely ask for a better description of the term ‘thankless task’. This one came with cockroaches.

In more recent times, the US has taken over the former British role in Haiti. I suspect the roaches are still there; certainly nothing else has changed.

I’ll note again that I don’t invent systems of weights and measures for the background of the RCN series: the practice would neither advance my plot nor make the world a better place. I don’t assume that people thousands of years in the future will still be using the systems in use today. Those who would quarrel with my choice here might usefully ask themselves, however, how long feet and inches have been in use thus far.

–Dave Drake

The Way to Glory. 1st ed. RCN Series. 2005, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 402 p. 0743498828 (hc). $25.00.
————– 2005, New York, NY: SFBC. 402 p. SFBC 1185629. $12.49
————– 2005, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 511 p. 1416521062 (pb). $7.99.
————– 2008, Newark, NJ: Audible Frontiers [Audiobook]. 14 hours 20 mins.[Available for download from Audible.com]

Cover art: Steve Hickman

I’ve based the setting of Some Golden Harbor on political and military events taking place during the early 5^th century BC in Southern Italy (Aricia, Cumae, and the Etruscan federation). All right, that’s a little obscure even for me, but I found the discussion of Aristodemus of Cumae in an aside by Dionysius of Halicarnassus to be an extremely clear account of the rise and eventual fall of an ancient tyrant.

There’s more real information here than in the lengthy, tendentious, and generally rhetorical disquisitions on Coriolanus (a near contemporary, by the way). I suspect that’s because Aristodemus is unimportant except as a footnote to Roman history, whereas Gaius Marcius Coriolanus provided one of the basic myths of Rome. The real Coriolanus and the real events involving him are buried under a structure of invention, but nobody had a reason to do that in regard to Aristodemus.

While the basic politico-military situation comes from ancient history, I took most of the business on Dunbar’s World from the South during the American Civil War and the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. I’ve enormously simplified what went on in both cases.

Every time I really dig into a period I learn that what a secondary history gave two lines to was an incredibly complex business that could’ve as easily gone the other way. I’m pleased when I meet people who know any history at all, but I do wish that people who’ve read only secondary sources (or worse, have watched a TV show on the subject) would keep in mind that there’s a lot beneath the surface of any major historical event. I want to scream every time I hear someone say something along the lines of, “What really caused the Roman Civil War was–”

No, it didn’t. Nothing that complicated has a single, simple causation. When somebody frames his statement in those terms (those doing so have invariably been male in my experience), he proves that he doesn’t know enough to discuss the subject.

The scattered human societies I postulate for this series would have many systems of weights and measures. Rather than try to duplicate that reality and thereby confuse readers without advancing my story, I’ve simply put Cinnabar on the English system while the Alliance is Metric. I don’t believe either system will be in use two millennia from now, but regardless: my business is storytelling, not prediction.

–Dave Drake

Some Golden Harbor. RCN Series. 2006, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 373 p. 1416520805. $25.00.
————– 2006, SFBC ed. Riverdale, NY: Baen. 373 p. 13:9781416520801.
————– 2008, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 532p. 13:9781416555247.
————– 2008, Newark, NJ: Audible Frontiers [Audiobook]. 14 hours 09 mins.[Available for download from Audible.com]

Cover art: Steve Hickman

The genesis of my RCN novels was Patrick O’Brian’s wonderful Aubrey/Maturin series, set during and after the Napoleonic Wars. It therefore won’t surprise many of you to find a number of plot points common to O’Brian’s last novels and When the Tide Rises. This is a case of convergent evolution, however, rather than direct borrowing on my part: we’re both working from Lord Cochrane’s memoirs of service under the revolutionary governments of Chili (sic) and Brazil.

Jack Aubrey and Daniel Leary are supporting independence movements as agents of their governments. In reality, the British government threatened Cochrane with prosecution if he accepted the Chilean offer, and the British warships which Cochrane encountered during his operations against the Spanish empire baulked him at every possible opportunity.

Mr O’Brian isn’t around to ask, but I suspect we diverge from Cochrane’s reality for the same reason. If you’re writing a series, you create an enormous problem for yourself if your hero is seen as a traitor by his government. Cochrane himself returned to favor, but it took more than thirty years for that to happen.

Lord Cochrane was skilled, intelligent, and personally brave. Having said that, his memoirs often make uncomfortable reading. It’s not that he was too stupid to see the political ramifications of his actions; rather, he looked on such considerations as unworthy of a superior being like himself. The political disasters which follow military victories throughout Cochrane’s career, with the Royal Navy and then with foreign governments, seem to the reader as inevitable as night following day.

Cochrane frequently says about the people with whom he dealt, “He swore to do something, but he didn’t carry through on his promises.” After a while, I became exasperated with this nonsense. Cochrane was an extremely intelligent and experienced man who must have expected the bad result. As with a woman who’s married three abusive drunks in a row, there’s more involved than bad luck or even bad judgment.

But what that means is that Cochrane was unwilling to work within the system when his undoubted brilliance made it possible for him to have done so. It is equally true that the systems he was involved with were deeply flawed–the Royal Navy in the early 19^th century, and the South American revolutionary governments.

What comes through powerfully in every English memoir I’ve read involving Latin America at that time is that almost none of the players (Bolivar may have been a exception) had a concept of a nation that was greater than the individual’s own clan/family/tribe ruling as many of its neighbors as possible. Consistently when a region revolted from the colonial power (Spain or Portugal), the districts revolted from the capital and then the wealthy magnates revolted from the district government (which was generally run by one of the several powerful families in that district). The magnates than spent their time in burning out rival magnates.

If you’ve been following Latin American politics for the past fifty years or so (I suspect the problems go much farther back, but I personally don’t), you might reasonably come to the conclusion that nothing much has changed. For even more vivid modern examples of clan-based politics, consider Iraq and Afghanistan.

The business of When the Tide Rises is taken largely from real events in Chile, Peru, and Brazil. The major naval action, however, is based on the 1811 Battle of Lissa. (The 1866 Battle of Lissa is fascinating, but in fiction you couldn’t make one side as incompetent as the historical losing side was. As one example, the gun crews of the defeated flagship forgot to load shells and therefore fought the battle firing blank charges.)

I write to entertain readers, not to advance a personal or political philosophy (I don’t have a political philosophy); nonetheless, my fiction is almost always based on historical models. When you read When the Tide Rises, you might occasionally think about today’s news and remember that it’ll be tomorrow’s history.

Heaven knows, I thought about the news while I was writing.

–Dave Drake

When the Tide Rises. RCN Series. 2008, Norwalk, Conn.: Easton Press, signed first edition, bound in leather. 356 p.
————– 2008, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 416 p. 14165-55277 (hc). $25.00.
————– 2008, Newark, NJ: Audible Frontiers [Audiobook]. 13 hours 35 mins.[Available for download from Audible.com]
————– 2009, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 486 p. 14165-91567 (pb). $7.99.

Cover art: Steve Hickman

I learned with the first book of the RCN series, With the Lightnings, that I have to explain that I use English and Metric weights and measures as a convenience to readers, not because I think the same systems will be in use three millennia hence. To me, that went without saying. Here as often, I was wrong.

There are many snatches of song in this novel, as generally in my work. They’re all my paraphrases of real music ranging from The Handsome Cabin Boy to the Carmen Saeculare of Horace. I do this for my own amusement–but people do sing, and I think it gives the work resonance to use pieces that people have sung instead of pieces that I’ve invented.

My fantasies are generally based on folk tales. My science fiction (and this is true of both Military SF and Space Opera) almost always grows from historical events, more often than not from ancient history.

That’s certainly true of In the Stormy Red Sky, where I weave together three separate incidents which took place in the Mediterranean Basin during a five-year period (216 bc to 211 bc):

1) The death of Dionysius II, whose grandson Hieronymos succeeded to the throne of Syracuse.

2) The successful revolt (or coup, if you prefer) of a group of young aristocrats in Tarentum, aided by Hannibal.

3) The successful assault by Scipio (later Scipio Africanus) on the fortress city of Cartagena.

On the face of it these events had nothing in common, but in another sense they’re woven about one another like strands in a sweater. They were aspects of the war which decided who would rule the Mediterranean Basin for the next thousand years.

The unseen impetus of all three situations was the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal’s crushing defeat of a large Roman army in 216 bc. Cannae was the epitome of the decisive battle except in one crucial aspect: it decided nothing, beyond the fact that certain individuals would die that day instead of dying later.

Cannae affected the attitude of the teenaged boy who suddenly became the Tyrant of Syracuse. It affected political calculations within the Greek cities of Southern Italy. It affected the choice of an initial field of operations made by perhaps the best Roman strategist of all time.

What Cannae didn’t do was determine the outcome of the Second Punic War, any more than the Battle of Chancellorsville determined the outcome of the American Civil War.

In history as in life, big events aren’t as important as the way people react to those events. Rome couldn’t go back and undo the mistakes that led to the disaster at Cannae, but the Republic could and did buckle down and deal with the consequences, both good and bad.

I write about people who deal with consequences. I try to be one of those people as well. I don’t hold myself out as a role model generally, but I think the world might be better off if more people accepted responsibility and dealt with consequences.

–Dave Drake

In the Stormy Red Sky. RCN Series. 2009, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 378p. 9781416591597. $25.00 [added 1 June 2009]
————– 2009, Newark, NJ: Audible Frontiers [Audiobook]. 14 hours 29 mins.[Available for download from Audible.com]
————– 2010, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 480 p. 1439133646 (pb). $7.99

Cover art: Steve Hickman

I’ll start out with what in my days as a lawyer we would call boilerplate: I use both English and Metric weights and measures in the RCN series to suggest the range of diversity which I believe would exist in a galaxy-spanning civilization. I do not, however, expect either actual system to be in use in three thousand years. Kilogram and inch (etcetera) should be taken as translations of future measurement systems, just as I’ve translated the spoken language.

I really wish I didn’t have to say that. I’ve learned that I do.

The situation on which I based the plot of What Distant Deeps is the crisis that overtook but did not–quite–overwhelm the Roman Empire in the 3d century AD. The extremities of the empire went through striking (and strikingly different) convulsions. For the action of this novel I’m particularly indebted to what happened in the East, but there is by no means a direct correspondence between this fiction and historical reality (even to the extent that we know the reality).

I write fiction to entertain, not to educate; but Aristophanes proved it was possible to do both, and on a good day a reader might learn something from me as well. Empires have generally used proxies to fight wars on their borders. The problem–as Rome learned with the Oasis of Palmyra–is that the proxies have policies of their own. Not infrequently, things go wrong for the principal when the proxy decides to implement its separate policies.

For a recent example, in the 1970s the US hired a battalion of troops from Argentina, called them “the Contras” and employed them to fight the socialist government of Nicaragua. The military dictatorship running Argentina at the time was more than happy to support the US effort.

Unfortunately for everybody (except ultimately the Argentine people), General Galtieri and his cronies (some of whom, amazingly, were even stupider and more brutal than he was) decided that their secret help to the US meant that the US would protect them from Britain when they invaded the Falklands and subjected the islands’ English-speaking residents to what passed for government in Argentina. Galtieri was wrong–the tail didn’t wag the dog during the Falklands War–and Argentina ousted the military junta as a result of its humiliation by Britain; but there might not have been a Falklands War if the US had not used Argentina as a military proxy in Nicaragua.

I could mention cases where US proxy involvements have led to even worse results. If the shoe fits, wear it.

Finally, a word about the dedication (“To Jason Williams and Jeremy Lassen of Night Shade Books”). I could simply let it stand (I’ve many times dedicated a book to an editor or publisher), but there’s an aspect to this one that won’t be obvious to anyone outside my head (including Jason and Jeremy).

I came back to the World in 1971 and began writing the Hammer stories as a way of dealing with my experiences in Viet Nam and Cambodia. The stories were successful, but they made me a pariah to a number of very vocal people.

Jason took me aback when he approached me about putting the series in limited-edition hardcovers. Nobody had ever suggested the stories were worthy of that before. Indeed, the people who said anything were likely to be protesting them being in print at all, even in mass market editions.

When I opened the box that contained the beautifully produced Complete Hammer’s Slammers, Volume 1, I had an unexpected emotional reaction: I’d finally come home to the America which sent me to Nam in 1970. It was something that I didn’t know I’d been missing until Night Shade Books gave it to me.

–Dave Drake

What Distant Deeps. RCN Series. 2010, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 370 p. 1439133662. $25.00.
———Paperback June 2011, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 514 p. 9781439134

Cover art: Steve Hickman

Released by Baen April 2012

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I use both English and Metric weights and measures in the RCN series to suggest the range of diversity which I believe would exist in a galaxy-spanning civilization. I do not, however, expect either actual system to be in use in three thousand years. Kilogram and inch (etcetera) should be taken as translations of future measurement systems, just as I’ve translated the spoken language.

Occasionally I think that I don’t really have to say that in every RCN book. It’s obvious, after all, isn’t it? But there’s a certain number of people to whom it isn’t obvious. They’ll write to “correct” me, and that gets on my nerves.

The plots of my RCN novels often come from classical history. Ordinarily that means something I’ve found in a Greek historian whom I’ve been reading in translation. In the present case, however, I resumed reading the Roman historian Livy in the original. I found my situation in the disruption which followed the Battle of Zama and the surrender of Carthage to end the 2^nd Punic War.

One of the advantages in going back to primary–or at least ancient–sources is that the ancient historians mention things which modern histories ignore as trivial. They weren’t trivial to the people living them, and to me they often do more to illuminate the life of the times than do ambassadors’ speeches and the movements of armies.

Northern Italy at the end of the 3d century bc was a patchwork of Roman colonies and allies; Celtic tribes recently conquered by Rome; and independent tribes, mostly Celtic. A man calling himself Hamilcar and claiming to be a Carthaginian raised a rebellion against Rome. In the course of it he sacked cities and destroyed a Roman army sent against him.

Nobody was really sure where Hamilcar came from. Supposedly he was a straggler from one of the Carthaginian armies which passed through the region, but there was no agreement as to which army.

There are two perfectly believable accounts of his defeat and death. They can’t both be true, which leads to the possibility that neither is true. All we know for certain is that Hamilcar disappears from the record and from history more generally.

The point that particularly interested me was that the Roman Senate reacted by sending an embassy to Carthage, demanding that the Carthaginians withdraw their citizen under terms of the peace treaty. This makes perfect legal sense, though appears absurd in any practical fashion.

Livy’s account got me thinking about the problems that the envoys would have had. The Romans were going to Carthage with demands which weren’t going to be greeted by their listeners with any enthusiasm.

They had it easier, however, than the Carthaginians who were presumably tasked to proceed to the chaos in Northern Italy and corral Hamilcar. Whatever the Carthaginian people thought of the situation, they were in no position in 200 bc to blow off a Roman ultimatum. There’s no record of the Carthaginian response, but I believe they made at least some attempt to comply. Otherwise there would be more in the record.

I decided that I could find a story in that. This is the story I found.

–Dave Drake

The Road of Danger. RCN Series. 2012, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 416 p. 978-1451638158. $25.00