Contents of THE TANK LORDS
–Dave Drake
The Tank Lords. Hammer’s Slammers Series. 1997, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 391 p. 0671877941 (pb). $6.99.
I’ve always found it easier to use real settings and cultures than to invent my own. No matter how good a writer’s imagination, the six or seven millennia of available human history can do a better job of creating backgrounds.
More than ten years ago I finally took the advice my friends Jim Baen and Mark Van Name had been giving me and did an afterword, explaining where I got the details of the book I’d just completed. I’d resisted this, feeling that it was bad art–the book should explain itself–and anyway, it was unnecessary. It was obvious to any reader that I was using historical and mythological backgrounds, so why should I bother to tell them? continue reading…
This volume features all of the Hammer’s Slammer short fiction, as well as all of the interstitial material from the original Slammers collection, new artwork and new interstitial material. Volume 1 also features an introduction by Gene Wolfe and an original Slammers story, “A Death in Peacetime.”
This volume features the first four Hammer Novels: At Any Price (1985), Counting the Cost (1987), Rolling Hot (1989) and The Warrior (1991) as well as new artwork and new interstitial material. Volume 2 also features an Introduction by David Hartwell and an original Slammers story, “A Day of Glory”.
This volume contains the last two Hammer Novels: The Sharp End (1993) and Paying the Piper (2002) as well as new artwork, and a new Slammers story, “The Darkness.” Volume 3 features an introduction by Barry Malzberg and includes Jim Baen’s Obituary.
“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…
Vierziger is named in a manner of speaking after the Mifune character in Sanjuro where he takes an obvious alias from the chrysanthemum trees growing in the garden. My intent was to do something that had no obvious natural explanation in a work that was otherwise straight SF/adventure. In a degree I was playing off the myth of the Vegan Orbital Fort in Blish’s Earthman, Come Home.
The other part of what I was doing there was offering a chance at redemption to a very damaged person. I was finally able to address that directly in Redliners; I guess I was working up to it.
I’ll probably do more, but I don’t have current plans.