NEWSLETTER 33: May 13, 2006

Dear People,
The Fortress of Glass, first book in the Crown of the Isles trilogy, is now out as a Tor hardcover with the most lovely cover painting ever put on a novel. (This cover and the other things I mention in this newsletter are at my news page, http://david-drake.com/news.html. ) At least stare at the dust jacket for a while. Donato has done consistently marvelous work for my books (starting with The Voyage), but this is a new high point.

The Crown of the Isles is a true trilogy that'll close the Isles series. The previous six books have been self-standing: that is, you should be able to pick up any of them without knowing there were or will be additional books and have a complete experience, just as you would if you read a randomly chosen Poirot novel by Agatha Christie.

I intend this final trilogy to be a very different animal which will encourage (if not exactly demand) the reader to read the three volumes in order. I'll complete aspects of the action within each individual book, but there'll be continuing themes arcing across the trilogy. I won't wrap those up till the end.

I changed my technique because fantasy readers apparently prefer trilogies to open-ended series of the type which I write in space opera (the RCN series) or military sf (the Hammer series). I don't know why that is, but I'm not required to know. I am required to tell stories that people want to read if I expect that people will read me (a fairly obvious fact which nonetheless seems to have escaped quite a number of writers).

Tor is pushing Fortress pretty hard. This is really good but it involved me going on tour for a week, one of my less favorite things. For those of you who want an inside view of the romance of being a jet-setting writer, I did a trip report at http://david-drake.com/booktour.html (linked from the news page.)

The tour has a happy ending: I'm home and busily at work on The Mirror of Worlds, the second volume of the Crown of the Isles. (Some of you may recall that the planned title was The New Land. I changed it.) As of this writing I've got 35K in draft, and the book is proceeding at a good rate.

Not only is The Fortress of Glass out, Master of the Cauldron, the previous book in the Isles series, has appeared in paperback. It too has a fine Donato cover with a strong central image. Throughout my career I've been fortunate with my covers, but never more so than on the Isles series.

The next two Drake hardcovers from Baen will be the collection Other Times Than Peace and the RCN space opera Some Golden Harbor. I've read the proofs on both volumes.

The stories in the collection include two of the three most recent Hammer stories, but there are also earlier works including several from the 1970s when I was just starting to write seriously. In fact I wrote Safe to Sea in 1972, before the first Hammer story, though it wasn't published till 1988. (Joe Haldeman took it for one of the collections of military sf he headlined for Marty Greenberg; Joe stopped doing the collections and I headlined several; then I stopped doing them, but now Joe is headlining military sf again for Marty. The more things change, the more they stay the same.)

I have ambivalent feelings when I think back to the '70s. I'm successful now beyond what were then my wildest dreams. Actually, at the time I didn't dream about becoming a full-time writer, let alone a successful one. That would've been like dreaming I'd become the Dalai Lama: it just wasn't something I thought could happen in the world I lived in.

But thirty years ago, my nearly complete ignorance meant that almost everything was possible. Knowledge brings with it limitations. While I've fought ignorance, particular my own ignorance, all my life, I nonetheless regret losing a lot of my innocent hopefulness.

Reading the proofs of Some Golden Harbor was a completely good experience. I worried about the novel all the way through the process of plotting and writing, because I was experimenting with new things. I didn't have a body of work to assure my subconscious that of course it was all going well.

But it did go well: the proofs convince me of that. The next time I try these techniques, I'll have an underlying confidence that of course I can use them effectively.

Which means, based on my past history, that I'll push myself in a different way. Sure, I may fail, but I learn things from my failures too. A writer can either grow or die, and I'm not ready to die yet.

The trade paperback of The World Turned Upside Down, the anthology Eric Flint, Jim Baen, and I edited, should be appearing right about now (I've got my author's copies). These are the stories that made the three of us SF professionals. I can just about guarantee that we've included things which you haven't read, and I will guarantee that we've included stories which you'll be glad to reread now. Get this book for yourself, but besides that give it to friends with a bright 13-year-old in the family.

Eric and I also edited Transgalactic, a fat collection of AE Van Vogt's work. It'll be coming out from Baen in October as a paperback (or possibly trade paper; I should check) with a nice Eggleton cover. The first SF books I bought for myself were a novel by Andre Norton and Mission to the Stars (AKA The Mixed Men) by Van Vogt. The latter's in this volume, along with the complete Clane of Linn sequence and the two ezwal stories (Cooperate or Else, and The Second Solution).

Van Vogt, better than anybody else I can think of, managed to hint at infinite possibilities. That was never a common talent, and it's virtually unknown in current fiction. (I certainly don't suggest it's something I do myself). You ought at least to be exposed to it, and Transgalactic is a good (and inexpensive) place to get that exposure.

I don't have any new Ovid translations on the website, I'm sorry to say. The book tour was a huge disruption, and the proofs of Harbor arrived just as I started to get back to proper work: writing. Still, I've started to type up a rough translation of Echo and Narcissus and hope to finish it before long. It's not that crowds are baying at the website's little electronic doors for my translations, but it's one of the ways that I keep my mind flexible.

Besides, I'm amused at the frequency with which I shock people when I mention my translations. I spent far longer as a classics major than I did as a soldier, and it's good to remind folks of the fact from time to time. Okay, the Aeneid wasn't as intense an experience as Cambodia, but it was an important experience for me.

Now to get back to The Mirror of the Worlds, where Cashel is meeting a perfectly nice girl who's been dead for ages longer than she herself can remember.

All best,
Dave Drake
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