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.

Last year when Tor asked me for an essay to accompany the publication of The Legions of Fire, the first of my Books of the Elements fantasy series, I explained that riding a motorcycle focuses my conscious mind and thus frees my subconscious. Plotting isn’t simply an intellectual activity for me. The really subtle, really complex structures come from my subconscious.

For this year’s essay to accompany Out of the Waters, the second book of the series, I’m going to write about how translating Latin helps me plot.

Okay, I know that motorcycles are sexier than Latin translation. Bear with me, though, because where I’m going with this may not be the place you expect.

I like to base my fiction on existing literature and historical events. Because I read Latin (basically to take myself out of the present) I frequently use classical settings. Sometimes I do it directly, as when I turned the Odyssey into the plot for the space opera Cross the Stars, but mostly it’s indirect. For example, Philip the Fifth’s invasion of Southern Greece at the end of the Third century bc became the template for my Military SF novel Paying the Piper.

But that sort of thing is minor: my interest in history and literature isn’t limited to the Classical Period. I based the Northworld Trilogy (an SF—basically space opera—series) on the poems of The Elder Edda, and many other non-classical sources have given me plots and settings.

Because The Books of the Elements are set in a world very similar to Rome in 30 ad, it’s only reasonable to assume that there’d be a direct connection between the plot and the Latin translations I’m working on at the same time. With a tiny exception, though, that hasn’t been the case.

Ovid is the only author I’m translating on my website. Specifically, I’m working with lyric poems from the Amores and also with sections of the Metamorphoses.

The lyrics are witty and often self-mocking. They’re not so much love poems as poems about love (broadly defined). They show the first-person viewpoint character (he certainly isn’t a hero) courting a woman, watching her go off with another man after a night of hard drinking, seducing the woman’s maid, and many similar slices from the life of a man who likes women.

Now, this gives me bits of business for my fiction (and not just my Rome-based fiction). Clearly, though it doesn’t help with plots for the action/adventure stories that I write.

The Metamorphoses is a wonderful ramble of epic length through Classical mythology. The title comes from the fact that the stories generally involve a change of some sort, but Ovid allows himself as much leeway in definition as the editor of a modern theme anthology would. For example, the attempt of Nessus to carry off Deianira, the wife of Hercules, doesn’t involve any change whatever (unless you want to count Nessus changing from centaur to fertilizer).

The Metamorphoses contains many connected narratives of some length. The Hercules Cycle runs for almost three hundred lines, and there are a number of longer threads. Even so, none would serve as the plot for an entire novel.

The unique thing which I gain from translating Ovid over reading an author in English of comparable quality (Kipling, say; or if I were a different person, Henry James) is the concentration which the task demands. When I put translations on line, I’m displaying my level of skill for the world to see–and to mock me if I screw up.

That doesn’t mean I won’t screw up, but it does mean that I’ll put everything I’ve got into the job. I kept working for a week on the description of Arachne’s tapestry until finally I realized that the rainbow wasn’t a literal image: Ovid was using it as a simile for the subtlety with which the weaver blended colors together.

When my conscious mind is focused that sharply on a translation, my subconscious can get on with working out plot problems. That’s how the Hercules Cycle helped me to plot Out of the Waters.

I said there was a tiny direct connection between my plot and the translation I was doing at the time. I needed an opening scene for Out of the Waters to set up the action to come. It occurred to me that I could use a stage show, a lavishly expensive mime of the sort that was popular in the Early Empire… and come to think, episodes from the life of Hercules–though not the same ones as in the Metamorphoses–would work perfectly for the purpose.

And so they did. Thank you, Ovid.

–Dave Drake

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.