Essays, Comments, Book Introductions, etc.

“Accidentally and By the Back Door” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2004. 17:3(195): p. 17-18.
————– The Complete Hammer’s Slammers v.1. 2006, San Francisco CA: Night Shade Books.
————– The Complete Hammer’s Slammers v.1. 2009, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Afterword” The Cold Equations & Other Stories, by T. Godwin. E. Flint, ed. 2003, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Alien Landscape with Figures” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2005. 17:11(203): p. 6.
————– Warriors of the Steppes, by H. Lamb. H. A. Jones, ed. 2006, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

“At Seventeen” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 1996. 8:12(96): p. 1.

“A Background Note” Paying the Piper. 2002, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Becoming a Professional Writer by Way of Southeast Asia” The Butcher’s Bill. 1998, Riverdale, NY: Baen.
————– The Complete Hammer’s Slammers v.1. 2006, San Francisco CA: Night Shade Books.
————– The Complete Hammer’s Slammers v.1. 2009, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“A Belated Thank-You” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2009. 21:6(246): p. 21.

“A Brief Introduction to Karl Edward Wagner” Weird Tales, 1989. Fall 1989.

“Broken Things” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2008. 20:6(234): p. 11.

“But Why on Earth Belisarius? (Introduction)” Thunder at Dawn, 2009, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“The Cold Equations, by Tom Godwin” (with Barry Malzberg) The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2002. 14:7(163): p. 1, 4-5.

“Coming Home by the Long Way (Introduction)” Grimmer Than Hell. 2003, Riverdale, NY: Baen.
————– Grimmer Than Hell. 2004, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Costs and Benefits (Introduction)” Dogs of War. 2002, New York, N.Y.: Warner Aspect.

“The Creation of Rome (Introduction)” The Eternal City, D. Drake, M. H. Greenberg and C. G. Waugh, eds. 1990, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

Essays in “Personal Commitment” and “Combat” The American Warrior, C. Morris and J. Morris, eds. 1992, Stamford, CT: Longmeadow Press.

“Extraordinary Diplomats (Preface)” Retief! The Graphic Album, by D. Fujitake, J. Strnad and K. Laumer. 1990, Greencastle, PA: Apple Press.
————– Retief!, by K. Laumer; E. Flint, ed. 2002, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Faith, Hope, and Charity” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2004. 16:11(191): p. 8-9.

“Five Firebases” Thunder Run, 2009. 24:3, p. 1, 4-5.
————– an edited version as “Foreward” Hammer’s Slammers. [Role-playing game] G. Hanrahan. 2009. Swindon, UK: Mongoose Publishing.

“Forever Afterword” Forever After, R. Zelazny, ed. 1995, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“The Hairless Ones Come: L. Sprague de Camp” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2005. 17:8(200): p. 18.

“Heroes (Introduction)” Space Infantry, D. Drake, C. G. Waugh and M. H. Greenberg, eds. 1989, New York: Ace.

“Hickmania” Science Fiction Age, 1993. November 1993.

“How They Got That Way: Afterword to Counting the Cost.” Counting the Cost. 1987, Riverdale, NY: Baen.
————– The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, v.2. 2006, San Francisco CA: Night Shade Books.
————– The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, v.2. 2010, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“The Human Side (Introduction)” Kull, by R. E. Howard. 1995, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Intolerance” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 1995. 7:10(82): p. 21.

“Introduction” Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors, D. Drake, ed. 1987, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Introduction” The Mercenary, by J. Pournelle. 1988, New York: F. Watts
————– Reprinted as “Mercenaries [Introduction]” Caught in the Crossfire. 1998, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Introduction” A Separate Star: A Science Fiction Tribute to Rudyard Kipling, D. Drake and S. Miesel, eds. 1989, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Introduction” Heads to the Storm, D. Drake and S. Miesel, eds. 1989, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Introduction” Cormac Mac Art, by R. E. Howard. 1995, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Introduction” All the Way to the Gallows. 1996, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Introduction” Dorsai Spirit, by G. R. Dickson. 2002, New York: Tor.

“Introduction” Hammer’s Slammer’s Handbook, by J. Lambshead and J. Treadaway. 2004, Bournemouth, UK: Pireme.

“Introduction” Hammer’s Anvils: Handbook #2, by J. Treadaway. 2006, Bournemouth, UK: Pireme.

“It’s a Lot Like War (Introduction)” Men Hunting Things, D. Drake, ed. 1988, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Jim” [Jim Baen Obituary] The Complete Hammer’s Slammers v.3. 2007, San Francisco CA: Night Shade Books.
————– The Complete Hammer’s Slammers v.3. 2010, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“L. Sprague de Camp: An Appreciation” Locus, 2000. 45:6(No.479).

“Let the Games Begin (Introduction)” Space Gladiators, D. Drake, C. G. Waugh and M. H. Greenberg, eds. 1989, New York: Ace Books.

“Letter of Comment: An Interview with Tom Purdom” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2006. 18:7(211): p. 23.

“Letter of Comment: Frank R. Paul’s GoH Speech” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2006. 19:2(218): p. 23.

“Letter of Comment: Isaac Asimov” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 1999. 11:5(125): p. 23.

“Letter of Comment: John Norman” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 1996. 9:4(100): p. 22.

“Letter of Comment: John W. Campbell” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 1998. 10:9(117): p. 23.

“Letter of Comment: My Discovery of William B. Seabrook” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2003. 16:3(183).

“Letter of Comment: The Road to Science Fiction” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 1999. 14:9(129): p. 23.

“Letter of Comment: Tom Godwin: The Cold Equations” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 1995. 7:6(78): p. 23.

“Manly and the Stone Age (Introduction)” Battle in the Dawn: The Complete Hok the Mighty, by Manly Wade Wellman. 2011, Redmond, WA: Paizo Publishing.

“Manly in the Mountains (Foreword)” John the Balladeer, by Manly Wade Wellman. 1988, Riverdale, NY: Baen.
————– The Tome #6, 1990.

“Manly Wade Wellman and Alfred Bester” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 1996. 9:1(97): p. 9.

“Manly’s Stories” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2002. 14:10(166): p. 15-16.
————– Sin’s Doorway and Other Ominous Entrances, by M. W. Wellman. 2003, San Francisco: Night Shade Books.

“Mercenaries: An Introduction” Caught in the Crossfire. 1998, Riverdale, NY: Baen. (First published as “Introduction” in The Mercenary, by J. Pournelle. 1988, New York: F. Watts.)

“The Motorcycle Way of Complex Plotting” Tor/Forge Newsletter (online), May 2010.

“Musings on the Discovery of Pluto.” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2008. 20:5(233): p. 13.

“My Friend Barry” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2007. 19:6(222): p. 17.

“The New King (Shiel’s Final Novel): An Appreciation” Shiel in Diverse Hands, A. R. Morse, ed. 1983, Cleveland OH: The Reynolds Morse Foundation.

“Non-Legal Writing” The Senior Lawyer, 1996. v.6 no. 2.

“A Note on Solomon Kane” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 1998. 11:2(122): p. 11.

“A Note on the Text” Cormac Mac Art, by R. E. Howard. 1995, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Notes on Neither Brute Nor Human: Karl Edward Wagner” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2004. 16:12(192): p. 20.

“On Cover Art” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2008. 20:8(236): p. 20.

“The One That Got Away (Introduction)” The Reaches. 2004, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“One War Later (Afterword)” The Military Dimension: Mark II. 1995, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“A Personal Note on Kurt Vonnegut” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2007. 19:10(226): p.21.

“Pig Picking” Serve It Forth — Cooking With Anne McCaffrey A. McCaffrey and J. G. Betancourt, eds. 1996: Warner Aspect.

“Preface” The Complete Compleat Enchanter, by L. S. de Camp and F. Pratt. 1989, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“A Quick Look at Battle Fleets (Introduction)” Space Dreadnoughts, D. Drake, M. H. Greenberg and C. G. Waugh, eds. 1990, New York: Ace.

“A Range of Treatments (Introduction)” Other Times Than Peace, 2006, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Read This (Or Something Like It)” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2002. 16:11(167): p. 7.

“The Real Jungle: Belize 2001″ Seas of Venus. 2002, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Sea Stories (Introduction)” Seas of Venus. 2002, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“A Short Appreciation of Jim Rigney (Robert Jordan)” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2008. 20:9(237): p.18.

“The Sixty-Five Million Years Afterword (Afterword)” Time Safari. 1982, New York, NY: Tor.

“Skeletons at the Feast (Introduction)” Phantom Regiments, R. Adams, P. C. Adams and M. H. Greenberg, eds. 1990, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Soldiers’ Stories (Introduction)” A Separate Star: A Science Fiction Tribute to Rudyard Kipling, D. Drake and S. Miesel, eds. 1989, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Source Materials, By Way of Introduction” Vettius and His Friends. 1989, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Starting a Long Way From Here” Voyage Across the Stars. 2012, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Stolen Thunder” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 1998. 10:3(113): p. 16.

“Surreal Splendor: Three Novels by Mark S. Geston” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2009. 21:5(245): p. 11.
————– The Books of the Wars, M. Geston. 2009, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Thomas Lanier Williams, Protofan” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 1995. 7, no.8(80): p. 21.

“Trout in the Milk: A Cautionary Tale” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 1999. 11:8(128): p. 13.

“The Truth Insofar as I Know It” Exorcisms and Ecstasies, 1997, Minneapolis: Fedogan & Bremer.
————– Karl Edward Wagner, ed. by Stephen Jones, 2011, Lakewood CO: Centipede Press.

“Three or Six Passages to India (Introduction)” Storm at Noontide, E. Flint and D. Drake. 2009, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“We Happy Few (Afterword)” The Tank Lords. 1997, Riverdale, NY: Baen.
————– The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, v.2. 2006, San Francisco, CA: Night Shade Books.
————– The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, v.2. 2010, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Welcome to the War Zone (Introduction)” The Military Dimension. 1991, Riverdale, NY: Baen.
————– The Military Dimension: Mark II. 1995, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Well It Happened This Way (Introduction)” Foreign Legions, D. Drake, ed. 2001, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“What’s for Sale” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2006. 18:11(215): p. 10-11.
————– The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, v.2. 2007, San Francisco, CA: Night Shade Books.
————– The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, v.2. 2010, Riverdale, NY: Baen.

“Where I Get My Ideas” (Afterword) Cross the Stars, 1984, New York, NY: Tor.

“Why I’m Here” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2007. 19:6(222): p. 20.

“Writer’s Pay in the Pulps: An Exchange” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2006. 19:1(217): p. 15.

“Writer’s Pay in the Pulps: The Conversation Continues” The New York Review of Science Fiction, 2006. 19:4(220): p. 12.

“The Year of the Sex Olympics by Nigel Kneale” Horror: Another 100 Best Books, S. Jones, K. Newman and P. Straub, eds. 2005, New York, NY: Carroll & Graf.

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.)

In 1980, I quit lawyering and was driving a bus for the Town of Chapel Hill. While sitting in the bus garage between runs, I wrote a letter to a friend in which I commented that the Odyssey could be rewritten as a Western, though of course I didn’t write Westerns. As the words came off my pen, it struck me that I did write SF; what was true for a horse opera would probably work for a space opera as well.

Nothing happened for a few months. Then Jim Baen called and offered me a two-book contract: a big book for $10K and a little book for $7,500. I said “Yes!” immediately. (I’ve done a lot of dumb things, but I was never dumb enough to turn that down. I made $6,100 during my year of bus driving).

Then, because at the time both Jim and I thought that we ought to know what the books would be about, I said the big book would be what became Birds of Prey (my working title was The Warm Summer Rain; note what I said above about doing a lot of dumb things) and the little book would be a rewrite of the Odyssey. That was off the top of my head, but it seemed like a good idea on reflection also. (Almost immediately thereafter I became a full-time writer, though the decision didn’t have as direct a connection as it may seem to.)

I wrote Birds of Prey first (I had been trying to write it for more than a decade). Then I reread the Odyssey (for the umpteenth time, of course), making a précis of everything that happened in it.

Until I made the précis, I didn’t have a real understanding of the way the Odyssey is paced and connected. Almost all the incidents which people (myself included until then) think of as being the Odyssey occur in one book: after dinner on the island of Scheria, Odysseus recounts to his hosts the things he claims have happened to him since he left Troy. Homer doesn’t tell the reader about the Cyclops: that’s a story which Odysseus tells to King Alcinous and his other guests.

I mentioned this development to Jim in one of our regular phone calls. “But you don’t have to do it that way,” he said.

Which took me aback. Of course I had to do it that way! It’s that way in the original.

Then I actually thought about the situation instead of just reacting. I wasn’t going to be graded on my understanding of the Odyssey; my present job was to tell a good story in English. That meant the form of the story had to be translated, as surely as the language in which I told it.

This was a typical case in which I benefited from being Jim Baen’s friend (because we were chatting as friends, not as editor and writer). There were many similar instances on both sides. Over the years, Jim and I saved one another from ourselves as a regular thing.

I already understood that I would have to adapt the incidents of the Odyssey functionally, not simply copy them. A one-eyed giant is a credible threat to an Iron Age chieftain, but such a creature doesn’t read the same in relation to the commander of a high-tech combat unit.

Finally, I had to allow for technological as well as cultural differences. Odysseus caps his victory by slowly strangling–the process is described in some detail–the female servants who have been sleeping with Penelope’s suitors.

This is only one example (although a pretty striking one) of normal behavior in an Iron Age culture which is unacceptable in a society that I (or anybody I want as a reader) would choose to live in. I might’ve been stupid enough to follow the structure of an ancient epic in a modern space opera, but I wasn’t going to describe a hero with the worldview of a death camp guard.

Adapting the Odyssey was the second most important lesson I got writing. (The most important was learning that I needed to outline.)

Since Cross the Stars I use the same process on all material, historical as well as fiction. First I consider the requirements of my medium; space opera, military SF,  and fantasy all start from different assumptions. Then I look at the functional effect of every element of the original.

Only when I’ve completed those basics do I begin to plot my novel. Paying the Piper is Military SF based in Hellenistic history; The Voyage (included in this volume), is space opera based on the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes. I developed both of them and many other stories by using the technique I learned by writing Cross the Stars.

There’s one other thing to mention: I don’t forget the original while I’m writing. In Cross the Stars you’ll find hints of Homer’s words as well as his story. I’ll never be the writer Homer was (nobody else will either, but that’s another matter), but I’m better for having read him than I would have been without his example.

–Dave Drake

Voyage Across the Stars. Hammer’s Slammers Series. Riverdale, NY: Baen. 612 p. 978-1451637717. $13.00.

Written for the Tor/Forge May 2010 Newsletter

THE MOTORCYCLE WAY TO COMPLEX PLOTTING

Writers use various tools in their work. One of my tools is my motorcycle.

Well, plural: my motorcycles. Bikers learn quickly that if they expect to ride every day, they’d better have two. (And that’s if they’re Japanese, as both of my current rides are. More exotic bikes tend to be two-wheeled versions of owning a Lotus Elan.)

It’s a bit of an overstatement when I say I ride daily, but most weekdays I make a run from our home in the country to my post office box in the center of Chapel Hill, about a 40-mile round trip. My wife has a car and drives it whenever we go somewhere together, but I haven’t driven a car since 1986 or ’87. That was to carry Larry Niven and his luggage to the airport, something I couldn’t do on a motorcycle.

And there’s the real beauty of a bike for a writer: you’re alone. You know how rare it is to be really alone and how valuable that can be.

People who drive cars can do a lot of things that engage their intellects beyond their immediate physical surroundings. Cell phones and texting are modern examples, but fiddling with the CD changer, reading a newspaper (really), and chatting with a passenger (or screaming at the kids/dogs in the back seat) all take you out of the experience. A serious-minded driver can even zone out listening to recorded lectures on Greek philosophy.

A biker can get a helmet with a cell phone (or CB), just as most bikes will carry a passenger…but nobody expects you to do that. Windrush makes even an MP3 player doubtful at best. (My hearing loss from Nam makes it impossible.)

A (surviving) biker is in the moment at all times. Is that car at the intersection ahead going to start across? Will there be a garbage truck stopped around that curve, like there was last week? Is this rain starting to freeze?

Or even: Holy Crap! The woman beside me is pulling into my lane to get around the bus ahead of her!

Even when riding on a lovely day and a familiar road, my conscious mind is wholly focused on my immediate physical surroundings. It’s amazing how much complicated work your subconscious mind gets done under those circumstances. It’s even better than sleeping on problems.

I create complex plots and my prose structure tends to be very tight. Part of the reason I can accomplish those things is that when I pull off my helmet, I suddenly see how to combine three clumsy sentences into two clear ones, or I realize that if I transfer a bit of business from Hedia to Alphena, everything will work.

Cover art: Donato

Hedia to Alphena? They’re two of the four viewpoint characters in my new Tor fantasy, The Legions of Fire. This novel uses a setting very similar to that of Ancient Rome–and by that I mean the real Rome, not the cardboard fakery you get from Hollywood or HBO. I know the background pretty well (you can find my translations of Latin poetry on my website), but fitting my usual considerable amount of action into a world so complicated took all the help I could get. My bikes provided a lot of that help.

But besides those practical reasons, a long sweeping curve on a bright Spring day makes me a much happier writer than I would be otherwise.

–Dave Drake, May 2010

The Legions of Fire (0-7653-2078-9; $25.99) is available from Tor.

A BELATED THANK-YOU

Eugene Olson, my 11th grade American Literature teacher, read and wrote fantasy fiction. I really wanted to read fantasy, but in 1961 the genre was hard to find in Clinton, Iowa. (I didn’t dream of writing professionally at the time.) Over the Christmas holidays, Mr Olson loaned me a copy of the September, 1950, issue of Weird Tales (a legendary magazine which I’d never seen).

The magazine changed my life. It wasn’t the fiction (though that issue included The Pineys, the subject of my first contact with the author, Manly Wade Wellman) but rather the small display ad for Skull-Face and Others by Robert E Howard.

I’d read Conan the Conqueror, the abridged version of Howard’s Conan novel, and I really wanted to read more of his work. It didn’t seem likely that Skull-Face was still available, but it would only cost me a stamp to learn: I wrote the publisher, Arkham House, in Sauk City, Wisconsin.

I got back an immediate reply on Arkham House stationery, saying that Skull-Face was long out of print but that many other titles were available in the enclosed catalog. The note was signed by August Derleth, a name I was familiar with as editor of anthologies which I’d read in the library.

There were indeed other titles available. I bought some, then bought more; and I began to buy new books as they were published.

I exchanged occasional notes with Mr Derleth. For example, I translated a distich by Lovecraft (That is not dead which can eternal lie/And with strange eons, even death may die) into Latin (I was a Latin major). Mr Derleth thanked me and said that the only way he’d passed Latin at the University of Wisconsin was by blackmailing the instructor. “I didn’t care that he was homosexual, but I needed a passing grade.”

Sauk City wasn’t far from Eastern Iowa, where I was born and raised. In the summer of 1965 I gathered my courage and asked Mr Derleth if I could visit. He agreed, so shortly before the start of classes in the fall my fiancée and I drove north to Sauk City.

Finding Sauk City was easy enough, but then what? We stopped at the post office. I went in and asked in a loud voice, “Excuse me? Can someone direct us to Arkham House?”

The handful of people present stared at me blankly.

“Ah…,” I said. I remembered that Mr Derleth had named his house, so I said, “That is, Place of Hawks?”

More blank looks.

Wondering if somehow I’d gotten to the wrong town after all–Sauk City’s present population is about 3,000 people, and it didn’t seem larger then–I said, “Ah, Mr August Derleth’s–”

“Oh!” said the clerk. “You’re looking for Augie Derleth’s place!” And gave us very simple directions to the house.

April Derleth–she would have just turned 11–opened the door to my knock; her brother Walden, a couple years younger, stood behind her. Mr Derleth boomed for us to come upstairs; he was in the office. (I won’t keep repeating the word ‘boomed’, but feel free to substitute it any time I say, ‘Mr Derleth said.’)

The office was to the right of the stairs. Bookshelves were built around the outer curve of the vast semicircular desk, and the top was littered with more books and papers.

Mr Derleth had just gotten up from a huge typewriter. I asked if it was an electric (I’m not sure I’d ever seen an electric typewriter, but I knew they existed.) Mr Derleth said (boomed, remember) that it was an Olivetti manual machine, the only decent typewriter made; electric typewriters didn’t hold up!

Mr Derleth gave us a capsule tour, displaying his files of comic strips as well as Lee Brown Coye’s art for Three Tales of Terror and the cover proofs for Colonel Markesan. I commented that I didn’t like the color of the latter (Musk Green). Mr Derleth assured me that it was the correct color; and that since he’d written the stories, he should know.

We then went into the stock room (to the left as you came up the stairs) where we chatted further. He waved a copy of the Ballantine paperback of The Survivor and Others (stories which Mr Derleth had written from plot germs gleaned from Lovecraft) and said he didn’t plan to bother with more paperbacks: “There’s no money in it for us.”

And he showed me the book that had just come in from the printers: The Inhabitant of the Lake, by J Ramsey Campbell. He gave me the background.

A British teenager named John Campbell had sent Mr Derleth a Mythos story set in Lovecraftian New England. He’d written the youth back, telling him to change his name (the famous SF editor and writer John W Campbell was still very much alive) and not to use an American setting of which he was ignorant. Campbell (he dropped the J also after this first book and has for more than forty years been simply Ramsey Campbell) had rewritten the story as directed. It still had serious problems, but Mr Derleth had done a massive edit and bought it for an original anthology he’d published through Arkham House.

The next thing he knew, Campbell had sent him a book-length collection of stories. Mr Derleth said he’d groaned, “… because I simply didn’t have time to edit all those stories.” To his surprise and delight, the stories didn’t need editing. Mr Derleth had taken one for the next AH anthology, and he’d published the rest as the book which I now held in my hands.

I looked at the biographical sketch on the back flap. Ramsey was a year younger than me (he was eighteen at the time; sixteen when he’d sold his first story) and looked no more than fifteen in the accompanying photo. I’d always told myself that when I was old enough, I’d sell a story; quite obviously, I was more than old enough.

I didn’t say anything at the time, however. I went home with the books I’d bought (I’d set aside fifty dollars for the purpose) and started my third year at the University of Iowa. Only then did I write Mr Derleth a note, asking whether I might send him a story for the series of original anthologies he was doing. He agreed, though without enthusiasm.

I prepared to write the story by reading Mr Derleth’s third collection of fantasy short stories, Not Long for This World. (I’d bought it before I visited.) I figured that was an ideal way to learn what the editor really thought a fantasy/horror story ought to be.

On its face that was a clever notion, but I ignored the forward to the collection in which Mr Derleth stated explicitly that the stories were fillers intended for the back pages of Weird Tales. They were mediocre pieces which he’d rejected from the two previous AH collections of his work. I read the forward, but the clear meaning of the words doesn’t seem to have penetrated my understanding.

I wrote with determination until I’d finished my story. It was 1,800 words long (roughly seven typed pages) and titled Post Mortem. (Remember, I was a Latin major.) Mr Derleth sent it back, saying that all right, I had a pretty good plot outline: now I needed to write the story. And by the way, the title was terrible.

I buckled down to expanding the story to 3,500 words. (I don’t think it was really quite that long, but I told myself that it was.) I changed the title to After Death.

The story came back again, but this time Mr Derleth said that I was almost there. I should edit out the purple passages and then he would buy it.

At that point I hit a brick wall: I didn’t know what a purple passage was. Remember, I was modeling the story on Mr Derleth’s own work; as a fillip, I even concluded with a line of Italics.

The letter this time didn’t accompany the returned manuscript. Mr Derleth told me that the story still wasn’t right; that he’d have to give it a heavy edit. I should compare the printed version with my carbon and learn how not to write a story the next time. He was enclosing a check for $35 for this purpose; if that wasn’t acceptable, he’d return the story and have nothing further to do with it.

I was devastated. I accepted the offer, but it was over a year before I tried again to write for publication. The final insult was realizing that I was so naive that I hadn’t known I was supposed to keep a carbon.

To this day I don’t know what Mr Derleth changed (not much, I suspect) beyond cutting a reference to The Bride of Frankenstein and (again) the title. The story came out as Denkirch, the name of the lead character, in the 1967 anthology Travellers by Night.

All this should have been a sidelight to the career of a moderately successful attorney. I sold Mr Derleth three more stories, the last on July 3, 1971–the day before he died of a heart attack. If things had gone in a normal fashion, that would probably have been my last fiction sale.

Things weren’t normal for young American men in the late ’60s, however, especially after Mr McNamara, the Secretary of Defense who had been overseeing the Viet Nam War, provided a final gift to the American people by eliminating the draft deferment for graduate students. I was drafted out of the middle of Duke Law School.

Like many other veterans, I came back to The World with no physical injuries but in a very disordered frame of mind. Mr Derleth had given me the tool which I’ve used to keep myself between the ditches all of those years since: the ability to write.

Sure, he was rough as a cob–but if Mr Derleth hadn’t given his time to the incredibly naive kid (which should be obvious to anybody who reads this account) who visited him in August, 1965, I don’t know what would have become of me. The result wouldn’t have been as good, and it might have been very bad indeed.

So thank you, Mr Derleth. If we’d become friends over the next fifteen years (as I did with Manly Wade Wellman) I might call you Augie, but we weren’t on informal terms in life. I’m not going to change that now.

There’s nobody who has done more to earn my thanks.

–Dave Drake, October 2008

THE FORGOTTEN PLANET

When I was 13 in 1958, I was enrolled in the Teen-Age Bookclub (TAB) in my 8th grade speech class. TAB sold mass market paperbacks in regular publishers’ editions through a monthly catalogue distributed in schools. One selection each month was SF; and it was through TAB that I found The Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster.

Though the book I bought was published by Ace, it was nonetheless a school edition: one half of an Ace Double. It had ads more Ace SF in the back, however, and gave an address from which to order an Ace catalogue–which I promptly did.

Before long I had resold my original copy to a classmate and bought the double version with The Contraband Rocket by “Lee Correy” on the flip side.

Decades later I met G Harry Stine (AKA Lee Correy) and told him truthfully how much I’d enjoyed The Contraband Rocket, but it was The Forgotten Planet that, well… changed my life. It was great, and it was great in fashions that I could appreciate

The book is a fixup of three novellas, two of them published before there were SF magazines, while Murray Leinster (whose real name was Will F Jenkins) was still in his early Twenties. (They appeared in Argosy in 1920 and ’21.) The third was written more than 30 years later… but with light editing they fitted together in seamless fashion. The Stanley Melzoff cover shows a youth using the horn of a giant stag beetle as a spear while he faces a bumblebee [actually a wasp] as big as a cow.

In the novel version a boy struggles to survive on a world in which insects–arthropods; spiders are a particular threat–and plants have grown to giant size. He successfully battles varied monsters, welds together a tribe, and starts humanity back on the road to civilization (just in time to meet envoys from the society which seeded the planet with live millennia in the past).

This was a great adventure story, and it was hard SF–though not of the usual sort. Leinster’s monsters come from the French naturalist Henri Fabre’s Life of Insects but Really Big. It brought SF into my own back yard–literally.

I owe so much to that Ace Single of The Forgotten Planet. Its double replacement is still on my shelves; but more important, it has never left my heart.

–Dave Drake, August 2009

If you decide to write about far-famed Achilles, make him active, hot-tempered, inexorable, and fierce; let him deny that laws were made for him, let him think his sword rules all. –Horace, The Art of Poetry (lines 120-2)

My undergraduate double major was history and Latin, and I continued to take Latin courses while I was in law school in a laughable attempt to stay sane.  Reading Latin centers me. (Note “laughable” in the previous sentence.)

A story doesn’t depend on the language in which it’s told, and a story that’s been around for several thousand years is likely to be a very good story.  While rereading The Odyssey (in translation; Ben Jonson would be even more slighting about my Greek than he was about Shakespeare’s) I remarked to a friend that the story would make an excellent Western.

And as I said that, a light dawned.  The Odyssey would make a heck of a space opera as well, though translating Homer’s story to an SF idiom would take some subtlety if I were to avoid being absurd. For example, I couldn’t just have my hero land on a planet of one-eyed giants who shut him and his crew in a cave. But what about an automated city that . . . ?

I did a precis of The Odyssey and plotted my story around that armature, focusing always on situations that would serve the same structural purposes that Homer had achieved in his medium.  Then I wrote Cross the Stars.

By the way, the Cyclopes appear twice in The Odyssey: once in direct conflict with Odysseus (which everybody remembers) and once as the creatures whose savage attacks drove the Phaecians out of their original home. If you’ve just finished reading Cross the Stars, you may recall a passing reference to giant one-eyed mutants. The latter, like the local creature called the argus and other asides in my novel, is homage to the man/men/woman who wrote The Odyssey; and who is, for my money, the greatest literary genius of all time.

As I was writing Cross the Stars I commented to the same friend that while The Odyssey translated easily to other media, The Iliad (perhaps an even greater achievement) was too fixed in its own cultural idiom to be used the way I did the other. For a long time I believed that I couldn’t use The Iliad at all in my fiction.

One day I was rereading Horace’s Ars Poetica and came to the quotation I’ve translated as the epigraph to this essay. Homer is the only source for the character of Achilles (which Horace summarizes with his usual succinct brilliance), but the character can have a life outside the cultural confines of The Iliad. There are and always have been men (and here I mean “male human beings”) like Achilles; Alexander the Great made a conscious attempt to model his life on the character (and succeeded, in my opinion, only too well).

So I thought about the problem for a long while, then wrote The Warrior. I set the piece (a short novel) in the Hammer universe, as I had Cross the Stars before it, but The Warrior was straight military–as surely as The Iliad is. I used the milieu of modern warfare, of tanks rather than armored spearmen, and the background has no connection with the Siege of Troy.

But remember, Homer didn’t say he was writing about the Siege of Troy: I sing the wrath of Achilles. . . .

Not all of my plots come from classical (or even historical) sources, but most of them do. That’s not only because of my personal taste, but because I believe (with Shakespeare) that literature wich survives the buffeting of time is worth a second or thirty-second look.

I opened with a quote from Horace. I’ll close with another one:  I have builded a monument more lasting than bronze. . . . Horace did; and Homer did, and Apollonius did, and so many others did. I’m proud to be able occasionally to stand on their magnificent structures.

–Dave Drake, 1994

Cross the Stars. Hammer’s Slammers Series. 1984, New York, NY: Tor. 342 p. 0812536142 (pb). $2.95.
————– 1994, New York, NY: Tor. 342 p. 0812509994 (pb). $2.95.
————– 1999, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 309 p. 0671578219. $1.99.

Photo by Roger Brownell.

This picture was taken in July of 1970 when I was in the field with the 1st Squadron of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. I was at a firebase somewhere in Military Region III. The place didn’t have a local name that I ever heard; it was just a chunk of jungle bulldozed open to hold maybe fifty armored vehicles including six 155-mm self-propelled howitzers. I was an enlisted interrogator, part of the six-man Military Intelligence team accompanying the squadron.

The greatest single influence on my life was the Vietnam War. I wish that weren’t true, but it is. 

In a normal world I’d have graduated from law school and gone on to be an attorney who’d sold a couple stories when he was in his twenties. Instead I was drafted out of law school in the middle of my second year; sent to basic training (Ft Bragg, NC), Vietnamese language school (Ft Bliss, TX), interrogation training (Ft Meade, MD); and Southeast Asia, just in time for the 1970 invasion of Cambodia which the 11th Cav spearheaded. There was a time that I’d actually spent twice as long in Cambodia as I had Vietnam.

I then came back to the World, finished law school, and (though I had a job as Assistant Town Attorney for Chapel Hill) wrote a great deal more fiction than would otherwise have been the case.

Frequently I write about soldiers or veterans: military sf. Because of that I’m accused of writing militaristic sf by those who either don’t know the difference between description and advocacy or who deny there is a difference. I wrote the following essay as an afterword to a collection of military sf stories, attempting to explain exactly where I’m coming from. I’m reprinting it here for the same reason.

Afterword to The Tank Lords

I wouldn’t have—and couldn’t have—written these stories without being a Nam vet. Because of that and because I’m sometimes accused of believing things that I certainly don’t believe, I’ve decided to state clearly what I think about Viet-Nam and about war in general. I don’t insist that I’m right, but this is where I stand. The speech Shakespeare creates for Henry V to ­deliver on the morning of Agincourt (the Speech on St. Crispin’s Day) is one of his most moving and effective. The ­degree to which the sentiments therein are true in any absolute sense, though—that’s another matter.

My own suspicion is that most soldiers (and maybe the real Henry among them, a soldier to the core) would have agreed with the opinion put in the mouth of the Earl of Warwick earlier in the scene. Warwick, noting the odds were six to one against them, wishes that a few of the men having a holiday in England were here with the army in France. One of the leader’s jobs is to encour­age his troops, though. If Henry’d had a good enough speechwriter, he might have said exactly what Shakes­peare claims he did.

A soldier in a combat unit may see the world, but he or she isn’t likely to “meet exotic people” in the sense implied by the recruiting posters. (Mind you, one’s fellow soldiers may turn out to be exotic people, and one may turn into a regrettably exotic person oneself.) I travelled through a fair chunk of Vietnam and a corner of Cambodia. My only contact with the locals as people came on a couple MedCAPs in which a platoon with the company medics and the Civil Affairs Officer entered a village to provide minor medical help and gather intelligence.

My other contacts involved riding an armored vehicle past silent locals; searching a village whose inhabitants had fled (for good reason; the village was a staging post for the North Vietnamese just over the Cambodian border, and we burned it that afternoon); the Coke girls, hooch maids and boom-boom girls who were really a part of the U.S. involvement, not of Viet-Nam itself.

And of course there’s also the chance that some unseen Vietnamese or Cambodian was downrange when I was shooting out into the darkness. That doesn’t count as meeting people either.

I was in an armored unit: the 11th Armored Cavalry, the Blackhorse Regiment. Infantrymen probably saw more of the real local people, but not a lot more. The tens of thousands of U.S. personnel working out of air-conditioned buildings in Saigon, Long Binh, and other centers saw merely a large-scale version of the Coke girls, hooch maids and boom-boom girls whom combat units met. The relative handful of advisors and Special Forces were the only American citizens actually living among the Vietnamese as opposed to being geographically within Vietnam.

I very much doubt that things were significantly different for soldiers fighting foreign wars at any other period of history. Sensible civilians need strong economic motives to get close to groups of heavily-armed foreigners, and the needs of troops in a war zone tend to be more basic than a desire to imbibe foreign culture.

Soldiers aren’t any more apt to like all their fellows than members of any other interest group are. In school you were friends with some of your classmates, had no particular feelings about most of the rest, and strongly disliked one or two. The same is true of units, even quite small units, in a war zone. The stress of possible external attack makes it harder, not easier, to get along with the people with whom you’re isolated.

11th Cavalry Rear Base at Di An, 1970

And isolated is the key word. We changed base frequently in the field. One day we shifted an unusually long distance, over fifty miles. The tank I was riding on was part of a group that got separated from the remainder of the squadron. We had three tanks, four armored personnel carriers modified into fighting vehicles (ACAVs), an APC with added headroom and radios (a command track), and a light recovery vehicle that we called a cherrypicker though it had just a crane, not a bucket. We ran out of daylight.

By this point three ACAVs and the command track had broken down and were being towed. The remaining ACAV and one of the tanks were going to blow their engines at any moment. All the vehicles were badly overloaded with additional weapons and armor, and the need to pack all the squadron’s gear for the move had exacerbated an already bad situation.

We shut down, trying by radio to raise the new base camp which had to be somewhere nearby. The night was pitch dark, a darkness that you can’t imagine unless you’ve seen rural areas in a poor part of the Third World. We were hot, tired, and dizzy from twelve hours’ hammering by tracked vehicles with half of the torsion bars in their suspensions broken.

And we were very much alone. So far as I could tell, nobody in the group would have described himself as happy, but we were certainly a few. Personally, I felt like a chunk of raw meat in shark waters.

The squadron commander’s helicopter lifted from the new base, located our flares, and guided us in. No enemy contact, no harm done. But I’ll never forget the way I felt that night, and the incident can stand as an unusually striking example of what the whole tour felt like: I was alone and an alien in an environment that might at any instant explode in violence against me.

Don’t mistake what I’m saying: the environment and particularly the people of Vietnam and Cambodia were in much greater danger from our violence than we were from theirs. I saw plenty of examples of that, and I was a part of some of them. I’m just telling you what it felt like at the time.

So Shakespeare was right about “few” and wrong about “happy.” The jury (in my head) is still out about folks who missed the war counting their manhoods cheap.

Summer, 1970: Dave in the field with 1st Squadron. Disposal of human waste in the field, AKA shit-burning. Photo by Roger Brownell.

I’d like to think people had better sense than that. The one thing that ought to be obvious to a civilian is that war zones are an experience to avoid. Nonetheless, I know a couple men who’ve moaned that they missed “Nam,” the great test of manhood of our generation. They’re idiots if they believe that, and twits if they were just mouthing words that had become the in thing for their social circles.

I haven’t tested my manhood by having my leg ampu­tated without anesthetic; I don’t feel less of a man for lack of the experience. And believe me, I don’t feel more of a man for anything I saw or did in Southeast Asia.

The people I served with in 1970 (the enlisted men) were almost entirely draftees. At that time nobody I knew in-country:

• thought the war could be won;
• thought our government was even trying to win;
• thought the brutal, corrupt Saigon government was worth saving;
• thought our presence was doing the least bit of good to anybody, particularly ourselves.

But you know, I’m still proud of my unit and the men I served with. They weren’t exactly my brothers, but they were the folks who were alone with me. Given the remarkably high percentage of those eligible who’ve joined the association of war-service Blackhorse veterans, my feelings are normal for the 11th Cav. Nobody who missed the Vietnam War should regret the fact. It was a waste of blood and time and treasure. It did no good of which I’m aware, and did a great deal of evil of which I’m far too aware. But having said that . . .

I rode with the Blackhorse.

All US Cavalry regiments use this patch with variations in color. This is the version of my unit--the 11th Armored Cavalry, the Blackhorse.

FIVE FIREBASES

I was very pleased when I got the materials for the Hammer’s Slammers role-playing game. The text had been written by someone familiar not only with my fiction but also with life in the military (which to me is a much more important consideration).

I like the art as well, but that leads to a different question: does it look the way I meant it to? The truth is that I write from the mental pictures I formed in the field in 1970 with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, and I wasn’t thinking much about US equipment then. 

An M48 tank (for example) was something I rode on, having generally mounted by climbing the bow slope. I spent much more time looking from tanks than at them. Therefore I write from the viewpoint of people who don’t think much about the appearance of their own vehicles or fellow crewmen, and whose view of the surrounding landscape is primarily concerned with potential ambush sites and whether the fellow with the hoe in the rice paddy has a Kalashnikov hidden nearby.

The art in this booklet is fine. In a way, you’re seeing more of an armored cavalry regiment than I describe in my stories–and more also than I saw when I was a part of one.

I was an interrogator at squadron level (what would be battalion level if we’d been infantry or armor instead of armored cavalry). That meant most nights I was in the firebase with however many of the six self-propelled howitzers (Hogs) were operational, along with Headquarters Troop (which included support as well as combat vehicles) and one of the squadron’s line troops or (more often) the tank company for additional security. (Technically, this was a Fire Support Base, an FSB; I never once heard any term except firebase used until long after I’d left Viet Nam.)

I was very shut down in 1970 (and for that matter, for a lot of years after I came back to the World). I didn’t keep a journal nor did I own a camera (there’s one picture of me at the time, taken by a buddy when I was with 1st Squadron).

You see things in the field that you don’t expect until you’ve been there. Very little got through the mental shields I had up, but I’m going to mention five things that did. You won’t find them or their like either elsewhere this booklet or in my own fiction.

I don’t know where they happened or even in what order they occurred. Some were probably in Cambodia, with the rest after we withdrew into Viet Nam.

1.

Particularly during the monsoon season, the sunsets in Southeast Asia were gorgeous, although they were extremely brief compared to those I was used to in higher latitudes. One evening I was sitting outside our six-man tent, writing a letter. The sky directly above was clear, but there were low clouds on the western horizon and a huge bank of thunderheads in the eastern sky.

As the sun set, it shone through holes in the clouds to the west to throw three enormous keyhole-shaped patches of red on the eastern cloudbank. Then it went below the horizon. The sky almost instantly became blacker than you can imagine if you haven’t been in a Third-World jungle.

2.

We generally travelled by road, occasionally on four-lane concrete highways built by the US government, but we always placed our firebases in undeveloped country. Bulldozers, some with Rome Plow land-clearing blades, cut a path through the jungle and then cleared a circular area large enough for the number of vehicles involved. After clearance, the engineers threw up an earthen berm around the whole area.

The combat vehicles were placed around the berm with their bows facing outward. The command group, the Hogs, the support vehicles, and tents for people like the intelligence section (we had a trailer for the tent and gear but no vehicle of our own) were inside that ring. Everybody was pretty close together.

Each firebase was on bare dirt (generally clay; rain forest soils are very shallow) which minutes before had been a thriving jungle. The local wildlife didn’t vanish, but every new firebase seemed to have a different fauna.

One night I walked out of the tent in the dark to take a leak at the piss tube. This was a metal casing that had held the bagged charges of 155-mm howitzer propellant. Ideally the lower end was sunk into a box of gravel, but realistically nobody worried about that in the field. We displaced frequently, after all.

I could see the path by moonlight. As I approached the tube wearing flip-flops (shower sandals), something jabbed the big toe of my left foot. I yelped and hopped back inside to lantern light: there was a cut an eighth of an inch long in the toe. I was sure I’d stumbled into a coil of barbed wire.

I pulled on my boots and took care of my business, but the next morning I checked for the obstacle. There wasn’t any barbed wire, but large ants had worn a visible trail in the clay (which here had a purple cast like no dirt I’ve seen anywhere else). The trail went all around the berm.

I followed it with a can of insecticide, squirting each ant I came across. It made as much sense as anything else I was doing while I was In Country.

3.

One of our firebases had rats. Our tent was very crowded, with three cots the long way on either side and our personal gear (generally packed in boxes that had held mortar shells) underneath them. Nobody mentioned a rat coming through the mosquito netting onto him, but at night they’d crawl over the boxes, forcing their way against the canvas where the cots sagged with the weight of our bodies.

We weren’t fastidious but this was pretty unpleasant, so we set rat traps (ordinary spring traps, but much larger than the mousetraps I was familiar with). It didn’t do any good, but one afternoon while we were playing cards a trap snapped. (Banged, actually; these were big.)

We checked it. It had flipped upside down, but there didn’t seem to be anything in it. It was back in a corner behind lots of gear, and because the interior of the tent was sunk two feet down for protection we couldn’t get at it from the outside. We didn’t bother to reset it, figuring the wind had blown netting into the trigger.

Normally the squadron displaced every week, but we remained at this site three or four weeks; for all we knew, we’d still be there when we DEROSed (Date of Estimated Return from Over-Seas). Nobody tells the guys in the field anything.

The tent started to smell musty. Then very musty. We weren’t, as I say, fastidious, but very musty. Eventually we took everything out to find where the smell was coming from.

We found nothing until we removed the last item, that overturned rattrap. Beneath it, in a liquescent pool, were the delicate, still articulated, bones of a rat’s severed tail. Apparently it hadn’t been netting that set off the trap after all.

4.

One of the firebases was full of wolf spiders with leg spans of three inches and more. These spiders run down their prey like, well, wolves: they don’t use webs like most spiders or hide in holes like tarantulas.

Three of the six guys in the intelligence unit went by Mitch, so I won’t embarrass anybody by saying that Mitch said he was really afraid of spiders. I thought, well, who isn’t? I sure was.

An unusually large spider ran across the dirt floor of our tent. We all–except Mitch–jumped to our feet and shouted. Mitch froze in his folding lawn chair.

The spider ran up the inside wall of the tent, onto the sloping roof, and then stopped–directly over Mitch. We laughed. I said, “Better move, Mitch. He’s getting ready to jump on you.”

Then I realized Mitch was crying and mumbling, “Please, please. I’ll die. Please.”

I grabbed my steel pot–my helmet; they weren’t Kevlar then–and swiped the spider to the floor, then crushed it. Mitch thanked me, but I felt bad about joking. I’d never met anybody face to face with a full-blown phobia before.

5.

During the days in the field, I often sat outside the tent reading or writing letters. It was the closest thing to privacy I had at the time. There were people and moving vehicles all around, but nobody was likely to bother me. That was good enough, because it had to be.

One firebase had many praying mantises in it. I was reading a book on the roof of a trailer of some sort–it wasn’t the stake-bed that held the intelligence section’s gear, but as I said above, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to our own equipment in the field. I was probably as high a point as anything for twenty yards around.

A mantis at least six inches long landed on my left shoulder. Her body was bright green, but her wings were brown and barely translucent. I turned my head to look at her, but because of the angle I had to close my right eye to focus on her with my left: otherwise I got a headache.
She cleaned herself and waited. Eventually I went back to reading. It was painful to try to look at something so close, and nothing much was happening. She flew away after a few minutes.

So; there are five memories I brought back to the World with me. When you prepare your campaigns, keep in the back of your mind the fact that each setting has its own unique natural features. They’ll come to you even if you’re not looking for them.

I wish the only vivid memories I had of that time were those involving the natural phenomena of Southeast Asia.

–Dave Drake, March 2009

Cover art: Steve Hickman

COMING HOME BY THE LONG WAY

A few years ago I collected my humorous stories in All the Way to the Gallows.” In my introduction I admitted that I wasn’t best known for writing humor.

This is what I’m best known for writing.

The impetus for this book was a fan suggestion that with surveillance cameras becoming increasingly prevalent all over the world, it would be a good time to get the Lacey stories back in pring.  I thought about the notion. 

I only did three stories in the series, in the late ’70s.  Lacey is a man with all the ordinary human feelings–which he suppresses ruthlessly, as he suppresses everything else that might prevent him from accomplishing his task. He has no goals, no dreams, no friends; but he’s very, very good at his job.

A friend once suggested that the Lacey stories were even clearer descriptions of how I felt about Vietnam and what I’d become there than the Hammer stories I was writing at the same time.  She may have been right.

I don’ want to get back into that mindset, but neither did I want to turn the setting into a shared universe. Lacey is, if you’ll forgive me, a more personal Hell than that.

The original collection, Lacey and His Friends (with an absolutely wonderful Steve Hickman cover, by the way), bound in a couple novellas which showed the kinder, gentler, David Drake. There is a kinder, gentler David Drake; but I’m not as defensive as I used to be about the other parts of me, and they’re real too.

The remaining pieces in the present collection are close in tone to the Lacey stories.  They’re military SF of one sort of another, though “or another” covers a pretty wide range.

There are odd-balls.  Billie Sue Mosiman and I edited an original anthology titled (and about) Armageddon.  I wrote “With the Sword He Must Be Slain” for that volume.

Steve Stirling’s Draka series is set in an alternate universe in which Evis wins.  Steve turned the setting into a shared universe with the volume Drakas! and asked me to contribute.

Evil doesn’t win in my books (well, I’ll admit it’s sometimes hard to pick the good guys) and I was a little uncomfortable with the assignment, but Steve’s a friend and has written stories for me. If I’d known he wasn’t going to do a story for his own collection, I might have begged off; but I didn’t, and “The Tradesmen” resulted.  It has a very dense structure, so much so that my outline amounted to 60% of the wordage of the finished story. As a piece of craftsmanship, I’m proud of it.

“Coming Up Against It” had a very strange genesis.  Bill Fawcett got a deal for the two of us to consult on backgrounds for a computer game, for which we’d be paid an absurdly large amount of money. Part of the deal was that I would write a story in the game universe for ginding in with the game.  I wrote the story.

We did commentary on the initial background and sent it in. The new version came back to us, not a refinement but a totally new scenario. We did more commentary. The response was yet again a totally new scenario. I don’t recall how many iterations we went through on this, but I do remember that I was getting steamed. (I later heard the rumor that somebody in the company was keeping the meter running as a favor to the outside contractor doing the scenarios, a buddy who’d fallen on hard times.)

My story, “Coming Up Against It,” was based on a situation that was edited out of the game early in the process.  I didn’t even think I had a copy of the story (I’d tried to put the whole business out of myhead; I was really angry about being dicked around), but is showed up while I was searching for other things.  It appears here for the first time.

And by the way, this is a prime example of a deal that was too good to be true turning out to be too good to be true.

Bill Fawcett sole the Battlestation shared universe with me as co-editor.  I’d been doing a lot of work in shared universes by that time, and I decided that the two volumes of the original contract would be my last for a while.  I wrote my two stories, “Facing the Enemy” and “Failure Mode,” so that they’d give closure to the series. You don’t ordinarily get that with life, but it’s something I strive for in fiction.

And that brings me very directly to the six stories which open this volume. They come from a slightly earlier shared universe that Bill developed and I co-edited: The Fleet. They follow a special operations company in a future war against aliens. (Parenthetically, most of my Military SF doesn’t involve aliens; possibly because I don’t recall ever being shot at by an alien when I was in Vietnam or Cambodia.) Each story is self-standing but they have a cumulative effect and are, I believe, some of the best Military SF I’ve written.

What the Fleet stories don’t have is closure; that too, I think, has something to do with me and Southeast Asia. The series ended and I thought I’d walked away from it, just as I thought I’d walked away from a lot of other things in 1971.

Then, years later, I wrote Redliners, a novel about a special operations company fighting aliens until things went badly wrong . . . except that in Redliners they got a second chance.  They and their society got a second chance.  They got closure, and in a funny way so did I. Since Redliners I’ve been able to write adventure fiction that’s a little less cynical, a little less bleak, than what I’d invariably done in the past when I wrote action stories.

I don’t think I’d have been able to write Redliners if I hadn’t previously written the Fleet stories.  I’m awfully glad I did write them.

–Dave Drake

Contents of Grimmer Than Hell :

*Introduction : Coming Home By the Long Way
*Rescue Mission
*When the Devil Drives
*Team Effort
*The End
*Smash and Grab
*Mission Accomplished
*Facing the Enemy
*Failure Mode
*The Tradesmen
*Coming up Against It
*With the Sword He Must Be Slain
*Nation Without Walls
*The Predators
*Underground

Grimmer Than Hell. 2003, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 373 p. 0743435907 (hc). $23.00.
————– 2004, Riverdale, NY: Baen. 435 p. 074348830X (pb). $7.99.

April 18: We left for RDU Airport at 3 PM for a 6 PM flight. Better safe than sorry, and I was nervously reading various things to keep from thinking about what was ahead. (Basically, the nebulous discomfort. I’m not a good traveller.)

Just before leaving, Jo checked the weather channel. It said we could expect seven days of rain. John Lambshead e-mailed that we should have a fast flight because a gale had just blown in from the southwest. I sighed and said we were going anyway.

We got aboard a full USAir 737 with no real problems, though security was badly worried by what turned out to be my tube of toothpaste. Was it the first time somebody had brought toothpaste through their fluoroscopes? (I seem to be one of the people who invariably bothers airport security. I’ve for years stripped off all metal so that I don’t set off the magnetic detectors, but they always get concerned about some utterly innocent thing.)

The Airbus 330-300 at Philadelphia was jammed (overbooked) also–they were asking volunteers to go the next day. The RDU flight had been forced to circle Philadelphia a couple times so by the time we arrived at the international gate our row had been called. Airbus aisles are wider than those of a 737, and both going and coming Jo and I had seats in an outer (two-seat) row; which, as these things go, was better than it might’ve been.

We’d packed very lightly for the trip, limiting ourselves to carry-on only. Most international flights I’ve taken with checked luggage have had a problem–something doesn’t arrive with me (and a number of times nothing at all arrived). I took two extra pairs of slacks (one of them a lightweight nylon pair that rolls up very small), ten t-shirts, ten pairs of socks, a heavy long-sleeved silk shirt, a heavy wool sweater (handmade by an Icelandic housewife; a purchase on a previous trip); a nylon poncho (a Christmas gift from Tor) and a rain hat which I’d gotten for Belize. This was sufficient for our purposes (which didn’t include formal dining, though the silk shirt was adequately dressy.)

For personal items I’d gotten a moderate-sized belly pack, having learned not to trust cargo pockets alone in Belize. In it I carried documents, money, my digital camera and the book I brought for the trip–Gregory of Tours History of the Franks. I’d read it decades ago (actually, I read most of it in Latin, a Monumenta Germaniae Historica folio volume, as an undergraduate), but it’s the sort of work you can always find new material in. I took the old (mass market) Penguin edition, which fit neatly.

My camera was a Canon A70. I went digital (having resisted) because of the problems getting film through airports. I had a 256M card in it and carried a 128M card as backup. I wound up filling the first with 227 photos, and took five more with the smaller card. I’d bought a new set of NiMH batteries for the camera and charged them fully for the trip.

I considered but didn’t take a computer to download the photos into. It struck me as too much of a hassle for the number of pictures I would take. (Remember, I’m the guy who gets hassled over a toothpaste tube.)

I’m happy with the gear. I would do exactly the same thing again.

To my amazement I slept about four hours on the flight. I think it helped a great deal. I wasn’t as cripplingly stiff as I expected to be either.

April 19: We deplaned in Gatwick. Customs and immigration were no problem–in contrast to my past experiences with Canada and the US, for what it’s worth. We followed directions to the bustling baggage and waiting area, where I looked for John Lambshead. He’d told me he’d be wearing a red yachting jacket, which I visualized as something semi-formal along the lines of a blazer. There was a man in a red nylon windbreaker, who turned as I followed him wondering–and recognized me. British English is not the same.

Thence to the car which he’d rented to drive us around in. I’d given him carte blanche, but he wasn’t happy with the Nissan Primera he’d gotten. It appears to have the body of an Altima but a stiffer (and quite good) suspension and a smaller engine. John drives with skill and determination. The Nissan has a wide turning circle, gauges in the center of the dash instead of in front of the driver, and a peaky engine that frequently lugged when he tried to accelerate as he’d have done in his own Vauxhall (which apparently has a broader powerband).

He took us to the hotel he’d booked for us, the Maidstone Hilton. It’s a relatively new place, built about ten years ago when the Channel Tunnel was completed, but could’ve passed for much older (in a good way). The walls are brick, the roof tiled, and there was quite a pleasant central courtyard with awnings and external gas heaters.

Parenthetically, gasoline is much more expensive in England and cars tend to be lighter, more efficient, and have smaller engines than US models. (1.6-1.8 liter displacements are normal.) However natural gas from the North Sea fields is much cheaper than gasoline and is used widely in external heaters to heat open (unroofed) courtyards.

I also saw many more SUVs in Britain than I’d been led to expect. Pickup trucks are very rare (I only recall seeing one), but that appears to be a response to frequent rainfalls rather than a desire for efficiency.

After we’d checked in and showered, John picked us up for lunch at a pub–the White Rabbit (I honestly don’t know whether it was technically in Maidstone–as I think it may have been–or a closely neighboring community). It was converted from the officers’ billet of the 7th Dragoons when that regiment was eliminated. It was a friendly place with parking and good food. I had an open-faced sandwich of bacon, mushrooms and other good things under melted cheddar cheese. (Parenthetically, we ate well at every meal in England, and unfortunately I gained a few pounds.)

We then headed for Leeds Castle, where we met John’s wife Val and their younger (16-year-old) daughter Kirsten who’s studying for the exams which under the English system will decide her academic future. (She’s holding up well under what must be enormous stress.)

It’d been warm and sunny when we left the hotel. I’d worn my raincape on whim but hadn’t bothered with my hat. It clouded up and spattered most of the later afternoon; not serious, but the hat would’ve been a better idea.

Leeds is a picture-perfect castle in lovely grounds. There were peacocks in the trees and a (fenced and gated) duckery on the entrance path. It’s of Norman construction, entered through a fortified mill (of which only one wall remains, showing the arrow slits), to an outwork, then the mott and bailey. The entrance to the house proper is through the dog collar museum, showing four hundred years of dog collars. (The British reputation for eccentricity is earned.)

In the wine cellar John noted that the breweries have been suffering lately as the British are becoming a nation of wine drinkers. The interior is quite attractive and remains in active use as a conference center. It’s a secure location where (say) a G7 conference can be protected by a relatively small number of security people. That’s what it was built for nearly a thousand years ago, after all.

I noted with interest that the owners ca. 1800 were connected with the Fairfax and Culpepper families, nobles who left their mark in Northern Virginia and with whom George Washington was closely associated. The last private owner (it’s now in public hands), Lady Baillie, had a large portrait of the 19th century adventuress Lola Montez in her sitting room. No one was sure why.

We had tea and scones in the tea shop, and chatted very pleasantly among the five of us. The Lambsheads are bright, friendly people whom it’s a delight to be with.

Then to the aviary, which specializes in good-sized, colorful birds (and a kea, which isn’t very colorful but was neat to see in the flesh. Feather.) It’s quite noisy; John mentioned a colleague called him while he was standing there and wondered which country he was in (as it’s a cell phone, that wasn’t certain). There was also a maze, but we didn’t try it as John wasn’t sure of the time it would take.

We went back to the hotel. We didn’t bother with dinner. I found the business court, hoping there’d be a computer for guests so I could check webmail to see how things were at home. There wasn’t, but a very nice staff person let me use hers for the purpose. The English keyboard is subtly different from the US version, which made the task difficult–particularly, I suppose, for those trying to decipher my notes. All was well, or adequately well.

I tried to read a bit in the courtyard but the book kept dropping from my hand as I fell asleep. I crashed and slept like a log.

April 20: We got up and had breakfast in the hotel. I felt stiff but not as bad as I feared, and we seemed to have avoided jet lag.

John picked us up at 10 AM and took us into Maidstone (the county town) so I could cash traveller’s checks. I expected to use credit cards for most things, but I got $800 cash (413 pounds; the dollar is very weak) to pay John for the car and so both of us had money for taxis, post cards, etc.

We started out at John’s bank, Barclay’s, but the lady there sent us to a travel agency in a nearby shopping precinct. I’d gotten American Express checks. Barclay’s handled Visa checks and the other high street banks were Master Card, but to cash mine without a fee required going to the travel agents. (Not a problem, just a comment.)

We visited a Games Workshop store on the way to the car. This is the largest of the miniature wargames companies and is listed on the London Stock Exchange. They’re very heavily promoting Lord of the Rings material, which for a time had even outsold their own Warhammer games.

From Maidstone we headed north through the Green Belt over back roads. After WW II it became obvious that London would absorb the whole region if it were permitted to grow unchecked. With the support of all parties, a Green Belt in which no new houses could be built was set up around the city. There are working farms in the area, but they draw most of their income from tourism. Houses–or anything that could be rebuilt internally as a house–are very expensive. The area is green and lush and lovely, though of course the region beyond it is now a bedroom for London.

We saw a fox cross the road–probably no more unusual than seeing a deer where we live, but neat for visitors. There were–here and generally–vast fields of rape in golden flower; probably what the EU is paying for this year in the incredibly (and criminally) inept Common Agricultural Policy. (Still, it was nice to see why the golden-haired Rapunzel was named after the field of rape growing outside her mother’s window.)

On the way we got gas. The Primera requires high test (another penalty for a high performance engine), so it cost me just under $50 to fill the tank. The owner, by the way, pumped the gas–it wasn’t self service–in a coat and tie; he had an upper class accent.

Our first stop was Penshurst Place, originally owned by the Sidneys. Elizabethan history isn’t my period, but I’d heard of Sir Philip Sidney, the courtier-poet and one of the people who make aristocracy sound like a good idea. (Very shortly I’ll be discussing the Sackvilles, a useful antidote.)

Penshurst is much larger than Leeds Castle and has very extensive formal gardens. The sections are arrayed according to a variety of styles: early, Italian, French, and the later English style pioneered by Lancelot Brown, nicknamed Capability. Near the entrance is a blind garden–a garden of odors and for all I know textures–which won an award at the Chelsea Flower Show.

Entrance to the house itself was through the Banquet Hall, the original Great Hall. It’d been modified over the centuries by closing the vent in the center of the roof and adding fireplaces.

In the crypt below was a display of militaria from the later owners. These included Lord Gort, who took the BEF to France in 1940, then–after Dunkirk, which can’t be called a victory but was certainly a brilliantly managed defeat–commanded Malta against very serious German attempts to capture it. (One of the gardens is a Union Jack, but only the red [tulips] had come into bloom when we arrived.) The displays included Gort’s field tea service, including a cigarette lighter to start the gasoline stove to heat the tea kettle.

Looking down on the Hall (literally–through a squint, a hidden window) was the ladies’ salon. The variety of items on display in these two rooms included 15th century trestle tables, 16th century paintings, clocks (one dating back to 1520), armor (including leather helmets from Cromwell’s Ironsides), guns–mostly matchlocks but with a few firelocks (fusils) mixed in, and (which particularly struck me) a gaming table from 1740 with a petit-point top.

We left the house by the Lime Walk–that is, a corridor of linden trees–and went to the Toy Museum which turned out to be an unexpected lot of fun. There was a copy of the first ABC book (which was American, the guide pointed out), many varieties of coloring book (often martial, with bold Britons running Frenchmen through), paper theatres (one with the sets of Sleeping Beauty), dolls, toy soldiers, skittles, Noah’s Arks (some carved by French prisoners during the Napoleonic Wars).

There were also spellicans, the British equivalent of pick-up-sticks. They differ by having complex carvings on one end instead of being simple poles, and also in being made of ivory. (Which, I’ll admit, took me aback. Sometimes very simple objects have an impact that no number of words can match.)

Because it was late, we didn’t try to see Hever Castle but instead stopped at Sissinghurst, a 14th century manor with gardens laid out in the late 1920s by Vita Sackville-West. I correctly recalled her as being a member of the Bloomsbury Group; in fact she was Virginia Woolf’s lover. Her husband, Harold Nicolson, was an associate of Oswald Moseley but broke with the latter when he founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932. Nicolson later became a Labour MP (!) and a member of Churchill’s wartime cabinet.

I suspect it was in an attempt to claim proletarian sympathies that the gardens were opened to the public in 1938. The charge–a shilling–raised 25 pounds, which wasn’t money the couple would’ve bent to pick up off the floor.

The brochure quotes Sackville-West as follows: “These mild gentlemen and women who invade one’s garden after putting their silver token into the bowl … are some of the people I most gladly welcome and salute.” Either the folks editing the brochure were unaware of the snobbery (they note as well that Sackville-West referred to the visitors as “shillingses”) or they approved it.

While I obviously didn’t warm to the couple, the gardens they built were wonderful. A four-story structure–which I believe is a folly, built to look old, but may actually have been the gatehouse of a building demolished in the 18th century–has Sackville-West’s library and study, and from the parapet a view over a wide region.

Below, sheltered nooks allowed early rhododendrons–including a lovely violet one–to bloom, along with many other flowers. (I liked the wallflowers, here and elsewhere in England. I’d heard of them but hadn’t previously seen them in the… hmm; cytoplasm?) Bluebells were out this week, here very strikingly.

I was particularly taken by an Italianate feature: two yew hedges planted within 30″ of one another, forming a narrow aisle across a path. At the end of the aisle was a bust.

There are writers whose work I greatly respect despite my feeling that they’re reprehensible human beings. I guess I can apply the same standards to gardens and their designers.

We met Val and Kirsten at the White Rabbit for dinner and further pleasant conversation, thence to the hotel. While we could’ve seen most of the same things had we come to England on our own, we probably wouldn’t have–and it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun.

April 21: We got up in a drizzle. I checked e-mail again and gave the office staff signed bookmarks, which thrilled them. People in general think writers are a bigger deal than I think writers are.

John took us through the towns of Medway and Rainham, pointing out the flower boxes at intersections. These are paid for by taxes. Americans wouldn’t consider it value for money; the British do. It isn’t a matter of who’s right: the cultures are different, in this and many other ways.

As an aside, John was an ideal guide: intelligent, knowledgeable, and enthusiastic. The trip was many times what it would’ve been without his hospitality.

We followed a section of the Pilgrims’ Way, leading to Canterbury. ‘The Bull’ is a common name for old pubs. It refers not to the animal but to the Papal Bull the innkeeper had purchased to permit him to traffic with pilgrims. The area is also where Tolkien came from, and the gnarled treeroots twisting out into sunken lanes certainly suggest a possible genesis for the ents.

We passed the 11th century church in Rainham, on Watling Street–the Roman road running through the region in a northwestern diagonal. These evidences of antiquity are omnipresent in Kent, a very different thing from what ‘old building’ meant when I was assistant town attorney in Chapel Hill. I don’t really have a frame of reference for it.

We then stopped in Gillingham, on the shore of the River Medway. What I’d thought were water towers were actually the gasometers which feed North Sea natural gas through the whole region. There’s a replica of a beacon identical to those used in series to warn of invasion from before the Armada till after Napoleon, and a view across the marshes to Sheerness. This is the region where Beowulf was composed and very probably set; on a gray morning, one can see why.

Thence to Cooling Castle and Cooling Church, way off the tourist routes. Both are made of Kentish rag, flint nodules chipped from the chalk matrix. The castle’s small and mostly ruined, but very picturesque. Wallflowers grew from it and the crows wheeled about. The parish church is nothing special–but it was the setting for the opening of Great Expectations: Pip meets Magwich for the first time in Cooling churchyard. As I learned shortly in Rochester, this is very generally Dickens country.
We then went via back roads to Upnor Castle on the Medway shore, past apple trees which are common in the region. For some reason, they’re invariably polled here. (I didn’t meet any orchardists to ask why.)

Upnor Castle lies just downriver from Chatham Dockyard. When the Dutch under de Ruyter attacked the British fleet laid up in the Medway in 1667, Upnor was the only place the British fought back.

Seeing the situation first hand suddenly brought the utter failure of the Stuarts home to me. Charles II, who was in French pay, went to war with the Dutch to aid France. This I knew. The Dutch attacked and burned or captured the British fleet at anchor; this too I knew.

What I hadn’t fully appreciated was that the British fleet wasn’t manned because Charles was spending his French bribes on whims rather than paying sailors, and that de Ruyter didn’t launch a hit and run attack but rather spent three days coming up river, systematically burning all military and naval installations without facing any resistance. Finally at Upnor Castle somebody shot back, and de Ruyter turned around–carrying with him the British flagship. The Dutch weren’t really driven away, they just decided not to press their luck.

Charles II is a very romantic figure, but he wasn’t just a bad king: he was in the literal sense a traitor to his country. A visit to Upnor Castle made me understand what forty years of study hadn’t taught me.

Then to Rochester, where wandering around the downtown we saw Dickens’ summer house (moved from neighboring Gad’s Hill) and many other buildings whose signs noted that Dickens used them in this or that book. (It’s a tourist town, of course.) The gatehouse in which Edwin Drood lived is among them.

Rochester Castle is the oldest stone castle in England. King John captured it by undermining, but the fallen tower was rebuilt on a sturdier foundation. The castle is ruined in the sense that all the floors and woodwork are gone, leaving only the walls and the passages built into them–but those remains are massive and awe-inspiring. The view of Rochester from the battlements is marvelous.

Here as with Cooling Castle I very much wished my son Jonathan could’ve been along (work and parenthood made that impossible). He particularly likes castles, and these were some honeys.

Rochester Cathedral is adjacent to the castle. It’s the oldest English Christian church (as opposed to Roman Christian church in what is now England). It’s impressive in itself, and had a particular fillip for me: there’s a plaque in the wall to Colonel Chard, who as Lieutenant Chard commanded the scratch force holding Rorke’s Drift against the Zulus after the disaster of Isandhlwana.

Late but enthusiastic, we then headed for Chatham Dockyard where we met Val and Kirsten. This is a huge area with many displays, in the open and in the covered docks. Perhaps most interesting to me was the sloop Gannet, built in 1878 and here restored. This is precisely the sort of vessel which made up the bulk of the North America/West Indies Squadron when Mrs. Brassey visited Bermuda in 1881. I’m using that situation (and those colonial policing vessels) as the matrix on which I’m writing The Way to Glory–the fourth RCN space opera, about 80% complete at the point we left for England.

I ran into something here that made me do another doubletake (this kept happening to me in England). There was a large picture of Chatham Dockyard in 1777-8, basically a landscape view. I examined it with mild interest. Suddenly I realized that I wasn’t looking at a photoprint as I’d thought, but rather the five-by-seven foot painting itself.

The last thing we viewed was the Commissioner’s Garden. It wasn’t in itself impressive, but I got a very powerful vision of a Commissioner pottering about in his garden. There was a very old (half-rotted) tree which (after studying the guidebook) turned out to be a 400-year old mulberry. Oliver Cromwell sat beneath it as he watched his troops capture Rochester.

Then to dinner in an upscale restaurant with the Lambsheads. On the way, John pointed out the monument to Gillingham sailor Will Adams, whom Clavell used as the hero of Shogun, and a palm tree growing beside a house. Palms don’t flourish in Kent (as they do in his home country, Cornwall), but they grow. It’s hard to believe that we’re in the same latitude as Labrador.

And to the hotel after another thoroughly delightful and informative day.

April 22: We headed for London, getting a taxi into the train station (Maidstone East) without difficulty. The train to Victoria was more or less on time.

The landscape along the route is a very prosperous one. The farms have horses, cows, and at least one herd of deer. Crops are largely hops, apples, and the omnipresent rape (which is processed into rapeseed oil, AKA canola oil, by the way).

I was struck by the fact that most buildings have chimney pots. There were a few in Dubuque when I was growing up, but I’ve rarely seen them since. (Incidentally, coal fires–and thus the need for chimneys–were replaced by electric grates in London in the late ’40s, so the chimney pots became a matter of historical record. Which was fortunate, of course, because they’re back in use now for gas fires.)

Roofs are generally tiled, and even those that’re shingled have tiles covering corner seams. Brick appears to be the most common building material, though I won’t claim to have made a scientific survey.

From Victoria we took a taxi to our hotel, the Holiday Inn Kensington. It’s located close to the Natural History Museum where John works and is reasonably located for many of the other places we hoped to visit. The room was comfortable, though it had twin beds rather than a queen sized as I’d have preferred.

The best feature of the hotel was the garden behind the building. There’s a single open space common to it, St Stephen’s (C of E) Church, and a third structure whose identity I couldn’t determine. There are several large sycamores, a number of fruit trees (in flower; this was a very good time for flowers, though John says May is even better), and extensive flower plantings. It was an excellent place for me to sit and relax, a thing I really need to do daily if I’m to keep it between the ditches.

After checking in we went just down the street to the Victoria and Albert Museum (of the decorative arts). I’d been there in 1977 but Jo thinks she was out shopping that day and I’d gone alone.

I couldn’t find the pair of six feet tall vases of blue john–fluorspar from Derbyshire, which the Romans called myrrhine and valued highly–I’d seen in 1977, but there were some blue john candlesticks with a legend explaining that the material had gone out of fashion till the mid 18th century. Then French craftsmen began importing it, and British craftsmen started using it again also. It’s a striking material, which I first learned of in an Arthur Conan Doyle story: The Terror of Blue John Gap. (Though the story has nothing to do with the mineral; a cave bear climbs out of a cavern and wreaks havoc until a local sportsman shoots it with his express rifle. Karl Wagner swore he hadn’t read Doyle’s story when he wrote Two Suns Setting.)

While decorative arts don’t have the same fascination for me that I find in, say, tanks, there were any number of striking items that I jotted down and may well use in my fiction. As a few examples: a silver tabletop engraved with Venus giving Aeneas his shield, trimmed with tortoiseshell; a cabinet set with thirty-odd painted glass plaques which reminded me of the decoration of a carousel; testimonial silver, sculptures two feet high of camel riders and elephants….

And so much more, of course.

It was late afternoon by now, so we went next door to the Museum of Natural History and Jo called John Lambshead from the information desk. He came down and gave us a behind-the-scenes tour.

The original building–John’s office is in the addition, the Darwin Centre–is in a way as striking as any of the exhibits. When we were there in 1977 it was black with a century of soot; it was cleaned in the ’80s and is stunningly beautiful, the stone richly decorated and picked out with layers of contrasting blue. I took many pictures of it this time, but the massive edifice should be seen to be fully appreciated.

The Darwin Centre contains the Spirit Room where… well, the NHM has a total of sixty to eighty million specimens total; the millions preserved in alcohol are kept here. It’s the largest such collection in the world.

Each department set out a number of jars in the corridor for easy view, while the enormous ranks of other specimens are visible through the glass walls. I noted that those responsible had obviously picked striking items: entomology had huge spiders and centipedes, for example. The fellow in charge of mammals had a sense of humor: if you read the card on one specimen, you learned it was a brown rat which had been found dead outside the old Spirit Room (in a rat-infested building which had been the cause of numerous complaints).

We viewed the working labs. The NHM does analysis for people who want not only the truth but the truth in an unimpeachable fashion. They’re expensive, but nobody argues with their findings. If you already know the answer (for example, your oil spill did no permanent damage to the environment), or you really want to know the answer whatever it is, they’re the choice.

I learned something about studying nematodes. I won’t go into detail, but they’re very small and you spike them with a titanium harpoon under strong magnification. John said on one project he looked at 10,400 of them, and a PhD student working there was already up to 12,000 while studying the effects of the 1st Gulf War on the Persian Gulf. (The museum is hoping for a repeat order, of course. The way our foreign policy decisions are trending, Gulf War aftermaths may turn into a cash cow for the foreseeable future.)

We then went down to the tank room where large specimens are kept and processed. (For example, stranded porpoises–which are generally killed by French fishing boats and wash ashore dead rather than being stranded.)

I was interested to learn that one of the main problems is the fumes from the goodness-knows-how-many gallons of denatured alcohol in which the specimens are preserved. Before a big tank is opened, the fumes are drawn off with an extractor; otherwise there’s a risk not only of fire but of the person involved being knocked unconscious. The large dissection table has not only a drain but a downdraft system.

John showed us how to use the Underground and pointed out what turned out to be a very good Italian restaurant, where we ate before walking back to the hotel. There we found a new problem–the lights wouldn’t go on. I started for the desk but met a maid on the way; she showed me the slot you put your room key in to arm the lights.

This is a perfectly good design–it means guests don’t waste electricity by leaving the lights on while they’re gone–but nothing in the room explained that nor had the staff mentioned it on check-in. As I get older, stupid failures to give necessary information strike me increasingly as grit in the bearings of existence. We were paying about $275/night for our room, so they might’ve been a little more forthcoming.

Still and all, another full and informative day.

April 23: Up and breakfasted in the hotel as usual, then got day-pass tickets to the Underground and went off to the John Soane House on Lincoln Inn Fields, which Jo had found while reading John Morton’s In Search of London. Soane was a neoclassical architect working in the sixty years around 1800. The house was his working base and his legacy in both figurative and literal senses: he left it to the nation on the proviso that it and the collection be kept as they were.

The result is unique and wonderful. Soane had two of the finest Hogarth sets of oils, The Rake’s Progress and the Election series (which Jo says Dickens mined directly for a segment of The Pickwick Papers). He also had some striking Canalettos and an unusual piece by Turner (who was a personal friend and fishing companion).

The house itself, though, is the greatest wonder. The best-known Soane work is the exterior of the Bank of England, but his real genius was in creating usable, externally lighted, spaces of very limited compass. This is something I’d never thought about because nowadays electric lighting makes it unnecessary. Soane’s house shows his principles at work. A domed lantern above the striking staircase (a flattened oval) lights the interior; there are windows onto the interior courtyard, and internal walls have glass panels and mirrors in corners to open up and expand rooms.

Soane’s library was extensive and a real, working collection rather than books-by-the-yard to create a glamour of learning. (Actually, I was struck by how similar the impression was to my own library–though the subjects differ.) Soane was self-taught (a brickmason’s son); almost everything I saw was in English or French, though the folio Pliny may well have been Latin.

In addition to the books were the rooms of specimens–statues, plaques, sections of moldings and columns, and other decorative features. This wasn’t (as I’d thought from the description) a collection for its own sake: Soane used the items as a library of design, putting his apprentices to drawing and measuring them as he had done himself in learning his trade.

His tour of Italy in 1778-80 had been greatly influential on him. A number of items reflected this directly, including a model of the Temple of Vesta (which he adapted to a corner of the Bank of England) and his own painting of men digging in a bath vault, both from Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli. I’d recently set the opening of Master of the Cauldron (the sixth Isles fantasy, due out in November) in that ruined vault; for that reason and others I found myself unexpectedly in harmony with Soane.

Among other items, an 1820 sculpture (I didn’t recognize and don’t recall the name of the artist) of Camadeva and his mistress riding on a crocodile caught my fancy. That may show up in my future writing; it was just too neat to pass by.

Because his collection of paintings and drawings was so extensive, Soane layered them on hinged panels. The piece that most impressed me was on one of the back panels: a painting (by an employee) of Soane’s greatest accomplishment, the Bank of England–as a ruin in a thousand years time.

Soane was a determined and often abrasive fellow who didn’t allow weakness in himself nor make allowance for it in others; but in my terms, he was a man. I have no greater praise to offer.

I bought quite a number of books, on Soane and the contents of the house. It’s the only place we visited where I felt a need to do that (though of course I did get many individual guidebooks).

When we’d dropped things off at the hotel, we headed for the Wallace Collection. I’d been remiss in my planning for this one. A friend had mentioned how much she’d enjoyed it. Jo checked Morton, who called it ‘a mini Louvre’ and described it as being on the edge of the streets and squares around Oxford Street. I misheard that as ‘on Oxford Square’, which I found in London A-Z, and we set out.

In fact it’s on Manchester Square some distance away, which we learned when a helpful lady on her way shopping saw us looking puzzled. It was just a frustration, not a big problem–as the lady said, “You’re obviously strong walkers.”

The trip was interesting in an odd way, though. On the Central Line of the Underground I was watching the map across the aisle when somebody behind me said, “Everybody in the car, show me a valid ticket for this train.” I didn’t think much about it, just dug the ticket out of my pocket and held it out–my concern was getting to the right stop, not whether I’d paid for the trip.

Then I looked at the fellow: craggy features, about 30, short hair, and wearing a polo shirt over jeans. He had no discernible body fat and the muscles of his bare arms had muscles of their own. He was holding a book bag by the strap: I suspect the only thing in it was a Browning Hi-Power, because that’s what the SAS carries. He sure as hell wasn’t a transport inspector, and if the Metropolitan Police have anybody that fit, they’re unique among the world’s police forces.

He got out at Notting Hill Gate. I don’t know what was going on, but something certainly was.

Parenthetically, British security struck me as professional and unobtrusive. What passed for security at US airports was neither of those things.

We eventually found the Wallace Collection. A large number of students were lunching on the lawn in front, but the building wasn’t unpleasantly crowded.

The huge Bouchers looking down on the entranceway create the initial impact. Their cotton-candy classicism does nothing for me. Still, there were paintings to virtually any taste, mine included. (A woman told me she’d come for the Lucien Freuds, but that exhibition had ended a few days earlier. I must have looked startled, because she then said, “Or aren’t you familiar with his work?” I assured her that I did know of Lucien Freud’s work, and I certainly hadn’t come to see more of it.)

Frans Hals’ Laughing Cavalier is in the Wallace. There are a number of Turners, though I believe most of them were in a room that was closed for lack of staff to watch it. I was interested to run across a couple David Roberts paintings. I’d never seen his work apart from his extensive series of paintings of sites in the Holy Land (which I’ve used for terrain settings in my fiction).

I found quite a number of paintings evocative and jotted down notes for possible story use. Two in particular struck me: Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time, (an allegory which I completely–but usefully–misread, as I learned from the booklet I bought regarding it); and a Watteau titled A Fete in the Park in which a number of cavaliers and ladies walk and dally in an open woodland. Thus far any number of paintings in the building–but there was also a larger-than-life-sized nude female painted in silver-gray, watching unnoticed from the top of a ruined wall. Is she Love? Lust? A ghost from a former age? Darned if I know, but she stuck in my memory.

One final piece deserves comment: a miniature painting of Emma, Lady Hamilton, garbed as a Bacchante. From the picture she was a plump, pretty woman, but not to my mind a captivating beauty. Her husband, the Duke of Hamilton, bequeathed it to her lover Admiral Nelson in 1803.

The courtyard is under glass and serves an excellent tea with Devonshire clotted cream. This differs from butter by being thickened on low heat instead of being churned.

On our way back toward the hotel we stopped to view the dinosaurs and mammals in the NHM till closing time. Then for a salad (we ate well in England, but we didn’t get as much roughage as we would’ve at home) and pizza in the same restaurant as the night before, and to the hotel to write up more notes.

Saturday, April 24, the day of Salute and the venue at which the Hammer’s Slammers wargame rulebook would be launched, my reason for being in England. It turned out to be a darned good reason.

I was nervous, and initially there were frustrations: some of the Underground lines were closed for repairs so John Lambshead was late, and then we misconnected at the Underground station (Gloucester Road). There were two entrances, and we picked different ones to meet at.

We got to the Olympia 2 convention center at last, and then things got amazing. Ground Zero Games, the outfit which makes the Hammer’s Slammers figurines (OK, toy soldiers in 15 and 25-mm sizes) was set up beside the entrance. I walked in, met Jon Tuffley and his staff, and was completely bowled over when they handed me a professionally-painted 25-mm figurine of me in a Hammer’s Slammers uniform (with sub-machine gun). I couldn’t have been more surprised if the whole hall had started singing, “For he’s a jolly good fellow.”

John Treadaway, the book’s graphic designer, basically runs Salute. He’d set things up with the publisher, Pireme (Iain Dickie) facing the entrance; GZG kitty corner across the aisle; a display of professionally-painted vehicles and figurines to the left of Pireme with the artist, Kevin Dallimore, working on more; and to Kevin’s left, Old Crow (Jez) who casts the vehicles. I was given 15-mm vehicles, which I hadn’t seen before. (They were hot out of the molds.)

Furthermore, John T had come up with the notion–understand, I knew nothing about this–of giving everybody a 25-mm David Drake if they bought the rules book. Thus people went across the aisle from Pireme and saw the figurines for sale as they waited for their freebie.

I signed the bookmarks I’d brought; they proved an even better icebreaker here than they do in bookstore appearances. John L (who wrote the text and rules) enthusiastically discussed the playing system. We made a good sales team, and the professional models in front of us were stunning.

Iain had made up some starter packs: rules, four vehicles in 15-mm scale, and a quantity of Slammers and opposition figurines. The package cost 57 pounds, and he sold all fifteen that he’d brought. So did all the vehicles Old Crow had in stock and a sufficient number of figurines to make Jon Tuffley very happy. The launch was a triumphant success.

A word about the display models. Kevin is an amazingly skilled artist, but the Slammers vehicles in bare metal went beyond that. Jez dusted the inside of his molds with powdered aluminum, then cast the resin on top of it. Kevin buffed what was actually a metal finish before doing the detail painting (rust on the skirts, oil stains, dirt, etc). Even I could see the difference in comparison to vehicles which’d simply been (expertly) painted.

A number of people asked me if it was strange to see my mental images as physical reality. In fact it’s stranger than that, because I had only the sketchiest images before the start of this. I didn’t really look at the tanks and ACAVs I was riding in 1970: I was looking from them, watching for problems at the tree line. It wasn’t till John T started asking me questions that the visuals coalesced.

I met a lot of fans who knew me through their interest in wargaming, not SF. There were a few Americans also, mostly military personnel. They’re real people doing a real job; and the fact they’re my fans helps convince me of the thing that I never quite believe: I’m real too.

Jo went off with Val to Kensington Palace and Garden in the afternoon. John T took me around the whole show. It’s huge–three levels full of stands and people–but in the order of 5K people rather than the 50K I was afraid of. (It’s Olympia 2, not the combined complex.)

Salute is basically a trade show where wargamers come to buy and sell books and equipment, but there are club displays and also demonstration games put on by manufacturers. I won’t try to describe a fraction of the displays, but there was an amazingly detailed one of an action in the British breakout from Normandy in 1944; a multi-level game (run unusually by a group of women) involving flying pigs and armed sheep; a club from Dortmund, Germany, with a game based on the 1942 battle for Henderson Field on Guadalcanal; and the one that absolutely blew my mind: the 1644 Battle of Naseby in the English Civil War, done in 6-mm scale at one to one. That is, there were 3000 individually painted figures on a board about six feet by twenty.

I picked up a few books and took a few pictures–none that really do justice to the displays, I’d have to say. I had a remarkably good time and got many positive strokes. The team involved in the Hammer’s Slammers game couldn’t have been nicer or more pleasant to be around.

John and Val had to go back to Kirsten, so Jo and I found another good restaurant (also Italian, as it chanced) and had dinner. When we wandered out I found an internet cafe (for the first time in my life) and learned that all was still well. (We have pets and I worry about them.)

April 25: We had an adventure. When I was 14 or so I’d read of the concrete dinosaurs built by Waterhouse Hawkins in 1854 when the Crystal Palace was moved from Hyde Park to SE London (technically in Kent, as a matter of fact). They still exist, and I decided to go see them.

This doesn’t look difficult in London A-Z, but London is a huge city. More important, the SE is a poor area (Jo pointed out that you could judge the district’s economic status by the fact that closed shops were covered by locked steel shutters–unlike those of Kensington) and the Underground doesn’t run to it. John L got me a (surface) railway timetable, however.

The problem was that not only the Underground but the rail net was being worked on. We were put out at Balham to take a bus the rest of the way. We were completely befuddled, but so were the Londoners caught in the same bind. The transport officials in Balham gave short, non-communicative, answers.

But the bus came and very slowly trundled its way toward Crystal Palace. It was a lengthy journey, but not uninteresting. Eventually we were put out near the station where we’d have normally gotten off the train.

Which left the problem of how the hell to get into the grounds, to where my webmaster, Karen, had determined the dinosaur court to be. Crystal Palace has a huge soccer stadium, and the grounds are separated from the train station by chain-link fence. We walked, asked questions, walked more, and eventually got to where we wanted to be.

Which was well worth the considerable effort. There were more, and more varied, critters than I’d realized. Besides the dinosaurs they included Ice Age mammals looking much like modern restorations, and labyrinthodont amphibians restored as viciously toothed toads instead of salamanders as they’d be today. For that matter, I hadn’t realized there was a hyleosaur (a European dinosaur akin to the North American stegosaur) as well as the iguanodonts being threatened by a megalosaur. I wonder if the hyleosaur isn’t mentioned because the restoration is basically accurate, while Hawkins (and Richard Owen, his expert) got the other two dinosaurs wildly wrong.

I took many pictures and basically had a wonderful time. (I also got a picture of a moorhen nesting on a branch in one of the site’s water features.) We went through the restored maze (the only hornbeam maze in England!) and then took the bus slowly back to Balham and the train.

We wound up walking from Victoria because the crowded Underground made Jo too uncomfortable to ride. We got briefly off course but managed to find Cromwell Road eventually.

On the way to the hotel we stopped at the NHM and stayed till closing, going through among others the invertebrate and some of the mineral sections. Much of the museum has been modernized with interactive displays and lots of bill-board type information, teaching the visitor about (say) primates or evolution. The mineral sections are old-style, with ranks and ranks of specimens in glass cases.

I think the old way is better. The modernized sections do nothing that can’t be done better and more easily with books or on-line. Nothing but a museum case will show you the variation in a hundred specimens of aragonite. (But I’m personally conservative, which I’m sure biases my attitude.)

I finished the 256M card in my camera here and changed it for the 128M card I brought as a backup. The batteries (four AAs) held up fine.

We relaxed in the room, then went out to find another (as it chanced) Italian restaurant. We got there at 6:30, which appears to be early for England as we had the place to ourselves till we were almost ready to leave. One of the specials was squid, which of course I had; and quite good it was.

Despite the predictions, the weather in Kent was occasionally drizzly and that in London warm and sunny. We couldn’t have asked for better, though we’d have managed regardless.

April 26: We’d packed the night before, so it was just a matter of carrying our bags to the Glouchester Road Underground station to catch a cab (which was impossible in front of the hotel at 9:30 AM). We arrived at Victoria and got the Gatwick Express, expensive but very simple and therefore worth what it cost. There was no problem with British security, and the flight (though full) was on time and without incident. A Trans-Atlantic flight isn’t ever going to be my idea of a good time, but I read the illustrated biography of John Soane and have no complaints about anything till we arrived in Philadelphia. Then it got unpleasant.

Passengers are dumped off with minimal direction and proceed through lengthy corridors and slide belts. No one from US Airways or the airport itself was present to give guidance. We suddenly arrived at Security, though we hadn’t been out of security since arrival in Gatwick. I was instantly told to take off my shoes–which hadn’t been necessary in Britain–and was the subject of lengthy concern, this time over my antique shaving kit (from which I’d removed the razor blade). I guess it’s my karma; perhaps in a former life I was an unusually stupid and officious security person.

After another lengthy walk carrying our baggage, we got to the gate for the flight back to RDU. The flight left at 5:30 PM; it was 4:30 in Philadelphia, according to the way I’d reset my watch (back five hours from London). I handed the clerk our boarding cards, deeply thankful that we’d made it in time.

The clerk typed silently for a while, looking unhappy. He then tore up our boarding cards, telling us we’d missed the flight. We could get on the 7:20 PM flight.

I was flabbergasted and horrified. I protested that it was 4:30 and the flight shouldn’t have left for another hour. He then actually looked at our tickets for the first time and told us he’d thought we were on a different flight, that he’d reissue our boarding cards. I had a vision of Emily Littela reincarnated as a flaming queen, saying, “Never mind.”

He then took serious offense when I said, calmly but disgustedly, that his actions were in keeping with the callous disregard the rest of the US Air staff in Philadelphia was showing for its passengers. Without wishing ill to another human being, I hope he’s treated in the fashion he treated us after he gets off an 8-hour flight.

The flight to RDU was unexceptionable. We caught the shuttle to the lot where we’d left the car. Jo drove us home, which was sparklingly clean–our housesitter had outdone herself.

It was a wonderful trip, but it’s good to be back.