Newsletter #30 mailed out Thanksgiving 2005
Dear People,
As of last night I've finished the rough draft of Some Golden Harbor, the fifth RCN space opera. The initial word count was 130,307 words, not my longest book but not a short one either. I've got quite a lot of editing work left, but I regard the real effort of a book to be writing the rough draft, so I relaxed a good deal when I typed -30- last night. I think the book works, though I'll know better when I've gone over the complete text for the first time. (And maybe I'm not the one to say anyway.) Steve Hickman's cover is up at http://david-drake.com/news.html.
Writing this one was unusually hard because of the interruptions (which can be boiled down to the statement that I have a life as well as work). Stopping in the midst of my plotting to write a Hammer story for the Tsunami relief anthology, now titled Elemental, was one of those interruptions. You can see the cover (a very nice one) at http://david-drake.com/news.html and the book can be preordered from Amazon for a estimated shipping date of May 2006.
Volume 1 of The Collected Hammer's Slammers has an estimated release date of December, 2005, the nice people at Night Shade swear. A previously uncollected Hammer story (A Death in Peacetime, the one I wrote for Oceans of the Mind) will be in this volume.
The cover art is by John Berkey, an excellent artist (I think of him in particular for covers he did for Gordy Dickson's Dorsai series at Ace). I haven't seen the cover, though. (Vinnie DiFate had to back out of the commission at the last minute, so Night Shade may be cutting things pretty close.) The interior halftones by John Treadaway are extremely good.
Other Times Than Peace, a new Military SF collection, will be a Baen hc in August, 2006. The cover (by Kurt Miller) is at http://david-drake.com/news.html. Personally I like it.
The Fortress of Glass, first volume of The Crown of the Isles, will
be an April, 2006, Tor hc. I've commented on the Donato cover (http://david-drake.com/newsarchive/news29.html)
before, but a painting this good deserves more than one mention.
The pb of Master of the Cauldron, the sixth book of the Isles series, is being
released a month earlier (March, 2006). There'll be a $3.99 edition of the first
book in the series, Lord of the Isles, also. Tor is treating me very well.
The Crown of the Isles sequence, by the way, will be a true trilogy rather than three self-standing novels. My taste is for the latter (and the form is normal in, for example, the mystery genre). Fantasy readers prefer story arcs continuing over several volumes (or in the really successful series, story arcs continuing over an indeterminate number of volumes).
I don't regret experimenting with a true series as opposed to a trilogy format, but neither do I have a problem with acknowledging that I was wrong (or at least idiosyncratic in my tastes).Book two of Crown, The New Land, will stand squarely on The Fortress of Glass and itself will directly underpin book three, The Gods Return. Mind, I hope somebody picking up one of the later volumes solo will be able to have a good time with it, but this is a real change for me.
Many people, myself among them but particularly Editor Eric Flint, have been devoting a great deal of time to Jim Baen's UNIVERSE, a new online magazine. The intention is to create an SF/fantasy magazine that emphasizes story values and pays real money. Release date for the first issue will be June, 2006.
The top Baen authors involved--Dave Weber, John Ringo, Eric himself, and me--are subsidizing Universe by working for less than the published rates (and in some cases for free) because we believe in the concept, but the authors lined up for the first issue include a number of men and women who've never before worked for Baen Books. (Eric will be releasing a Table of Contents realsoonnow.)
As of this writing, we're not quite ready to take money. I'll let you know when that changes.
As for things a little farther down the pipeline, I had a discussion with Philip Rahman, publisher of Fedogan and Bremer, at World Fantasy Convention last month. Philip assures me that my fantasy/horror retrospective, Balefires, will be out by WFC 2006 in Austin, Texas. I don't give the date as a certainty (as I pointed out to Philip, I'd heard similar things before), but personally I believe it. The hope is to have art by Richard Corben, but Mr Corben's agreement with F&B was made some time in the past also.
And a comics studio doing business as Dabel Brothers Pro has licensed both Hammer's Slammers and Lord of the Isles for graphic novels. Their existing lines include adaptations of Robert Jordan and George RR Martin, so they're real. They do good work, but it's early days on these particular projects.
I've got a couple of additional Ovid translations up, linked from http://david-drake.com/ovid.html, including the lengthy description of Phaethon's disastrous outing in Dad's car. Part of that text is remarkable for the facility with which Ovid works geographical names into his verse. That of course doesn't come out in my prose translations (and is in any case a sort of game, like acrostic verse). When I got into the project, however, I was pleasantly surprised at how many vivid, colorful images I found. (Note, for example, the swans of the River Cayster in modern Anatolia.)
Also new on the website are my comments on The Sharp End (http://david-drake.com/sharpend.html) Writing them made me understand why I've waited so long to do so. It's also driven home the realization that I have an enormous amount to be thankful for, in this season and all.
Speaking of the website, my webmaster determined in July that a captured PDF file of the entire website would contain 550 printable pages. Some of those pages--from the album galleries, for instance--would show only a single picture, but even so it translates to a lot more information than I would've guessed.
The Chase-Harper company makes high quality motorcycle gear. They recently sent me a bandolier, which is an absolute delight for carrying my money, keys, etc, on my bikes. There was no accompanying note explaining why it'd been sent, but I assume it was at the behest of a fan. If you are that fan, thank you very much. I'd have bought one years ago if I'd known how handy it'd be.
A final note. At WFC Jason Williams of Night Shade told me that he'd spoken
to an editor at the Science Fiction Book Club and that the club intended to
do an edition of The Collected Hammer's Slammers. My first thought
was, 'That can't be true.'
And you know, twenty years ago it certainly wouldn't have been true. Times have
changed in a number of ways:
I think the Hammer stories have moved closer to the mainstream simply because television coverage has made more mainstream Americans aware of what war really is.
I think the attitude that soldiers are evil because war is evil has waned from its general acceptance in the '70s and often later. (My worst experience with it was a personal attack at a convention by Thomas Easton of Analog, but he and Jane Fonda had plenty of company.)
And I think that simply because the earliest stories of the series were written in 1973, they've achieved a degree of classic status which is something the SFBC has always supported. My first SFBC purchase was Triad by AE Van Vogt combining three novels from the '40: The Voyage of the Space Beagle, Slan, and The World of Null-A. The first of those was much more recent in 1960 than the earliest Hammer stories are today.
(And by the way, those Van Vogt novels repay reading today. They're part of our common heritage as well as being works by an exceptional storyteller.)
My next project will be a Hammer story for UNIVERSE, but first I have Some Golden Harbor to edit. And right at this very moment, I'm going to pause and take a deep breath.
Happy holidays to all of you!
Dave Drake
david-drake.com
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