David Drake

FORTRESS is the only solo book I’ve written when I didn’t want to write it.

When Jim Baen left Tor Books to found his own publishing house, Baen Books, I intended to continue working for both men. (They’re both friends of mine, and friends to one another.) To emphasize this, I told Tom to decide what he wanted me to write as my next book. He wanted a sequel to Skyripper (which has its own entry) that involved using the Strategic Defense Initiative (the Star Wars defense) against invading aliens.

Boy! did I not want to write that book. continue reading…

This is a collection of my humorous SF and fantasy. To my delight it sold very well. There’s really a lot of humor in my other fiction, but it tends to get lost in the other things that are going on in the story.

Quite apart from being funny, Airborne All the Way! and A Very Offensive Weapon are two of the handful of best stories I’ve written. Roger Zelazny created the milieu and heroine of the latter, and directed me as to how the story was to develop; I used his novelet The Furies as a model for my writing. In fact Roger had more to do with the story than Larry Niven did with Mom and the Kids.

continue reading…

My original title for this collection was BALEFIRES. Jim Baen asked me to change it late in the process because a big-budget book of that title was due out shortly. I may use the title on the planned Fedogan & Bremer collection of my early horror stories, but by this point I’m not sure it’s a good title.

continue reading…

I’ve had a lot of good book covers. I’ve never had a cover better than Steve Hickman’s for this volume.

The three Lacey stories are harsher than anything else I’ve written. It’s probably not a coincidence that I wrote them in the later ’70s when I was starting to raise my head up a little. For the first five years or more after I got back to the World I was afraid to do that.

By contrast, Travellers is a gentle, upbeat time travel story, and Time Safari a novella about hunting dinosaurs. Neither one has any heavy emotional baggage for me. continue reading…

THE DRAGON LORD was my first novel. There was a heroic fantasy boom in the latter ’70s. andy offutt (as he then styled himself) had a contract with Zebra Books to write novels about the Robert E. Howard character Cormac mac Art. Because andy found plotting difficult, in 1977 he asked me and at least one other newbie writer to plot novels for him. No terms were discussed, but I expected to get a few hundred dollars (and no credit).

continue reading…