David Drake

THE VOYAGE is space opera based on the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, with embellishments from other classical writers who touched on legends of Jason and the Argonauts. It’s a sequel of sorts to Cross the Stars–a minor character from the earlier novel is the hero of this one–and was a direct attempt to use the lessons I’d learned in a decade of writing to do the same sort of book, only better.

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. continue reading…

ROLLING HOT–the title is from military aviation, meaning the aircraft is moving to the attack with ordnance ready to fire–is based very loosely on Tet of ’68. That’s an event I’m glad to have missed, but a number of the folks I served with in 1970 had stories and even photographs of what the Blackhorse had been doing then.

For those of you who weren’t around at the time, the Viet Cong made a massive win-the-war attack on US and South Vietnamese forces during the truce declared for the Lunar New Year holiday, Tet. Politically, it won them the war: Tet proved that President Johnson and the US generals had been lying when they claimed the VC was nearly finished as a fighting force. Such public support for the war as had previously existed vanished abruptly. continue reading…

HAMMER’S SLAMMERS is a short story collection, not a novel, and my first book. It made it possible for me to become a full-time writer, though I didn’t realize it at the time.

I’d sold a story as an undergraduate, another story after I started law school, and even one while I was in Nam. After I came back I continued writing at a faster rate, in part because I became friends with two writers in the Triangle area: Manly Wade Wellman and Karl Edward Wagner. Manly and Karl suggested that I use Southeast Asian settings instead of writing historical fantasies. I wrote a fantasy, Arclight, and an SF story, Contact! and both sold. These were set in Nam (come to think, both were based on things that happened in Cambodia), but there was no military theme to the stories. continue reading…

Contents of THE TANK LORDS

• Under the Hammer
• Rolling Hot
• Night March
• Code-Name Feirefitz
• The Tank Lords
• Appendix
• Afterword: We Happy Few

–Dave Drake

The Tank Lords. Hammer’s Slammers Series. 1997, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 391 p. 0671877941 (pb). $6.99.