NEWSLETTER 37: February 3, 2007
Dear People,
As a brief opening note, my webmaster has just informed me that this newsletter is going out to more than a thousand recipients. That doesn’t really prove anything--but it pleases me.
I guess the big news is that The Complete Hammer's Slammers, volume 2, is out from Night Shade. I haven't (at this writing) seen it myself, but friends have gotten their copies. The dust jacket painting is an excellent job by John Berkey. (Artwork/covers which I mention in this newsletter are all on the website at http://david-drake.com/news.html.)
This volume contains the four short Hammer novels and a new story (The Day of Glory), which I wrote for the tsunami relief anthology Elemental. I'd intended the story to be collected for the first time here in HS2, but Night Shade's publication date slipped and the date for Other Times Than Peace from Baen Books didn't slip.
Besides the fiction, HS2 has a new afterword in which I offer my personal take on the ethics of writing professionally, and an erudite introduction by David Hartwell. I'm honored that David expended the considerable effort to write the intro, which pointed out things in my writing of which I hadn't previously been aware. (I'm not, I assure you, an unconscious writer. On the other hand, it's hard to get outside yourself.)
There's twenty-odd years of my life in HS2. I'm glad to be able to say that I'm proud of it.
Speaking of years of my life, Night Shade is proceeding at a good rate on Balefires, a collection of my fantasy stories, some of them very, very early. (My first four published stories are in the volume.) A draft of the Richard Pellegrino cover (based on Goya) is on the web site; I find it very effective.
For a variety of reasons (one of them being that Karen, my cybrarian/webmaster, wanted to try new software) the limited edition of Balefires will include a bibliography of the US appearances of my work (as well as British appearances when that happened to be the first publication, as was true of a number of stories in the '70s).
The result, twenty pages long in manuscript, is as complete as we could make it, though I'm sure there're things we missed. (As a matter of fact, I forgot to list one story that's actually included in Balefires. I caught that mistake, but goodness knows what I didn't catch.) It was an odd trip back through forty years of what's not only my work but my pleasure and my refuge from the bad places in my head.
It also strikes me that I'm a very lucky person. Well, I realize that every time I get introspective; which isn't terribly often, but it happens.
The Tor reprint of Bridgehead is now out. In the past, most reprints of my early titles were done by Baen Books. Tom Doherty decided he wanted to do these at Tor, which was fine with me: Tor had bought the books to begin with, after all. Mind, Jim Baen had acquired both The Forlorn Hope and Bridgehead while he was at Tor, and they were long out of print; but they're still Tor books if Tom wants them so far as I'm concerned.
A lot of writers and most agents seem to regard publishers as The Enemy. There are certainly publishers with whom I would expect to have an adversarial relationship--so I avoid them. I know that things can go wrong even between friends, but if you start from an assumption of friendship you've got a much better chance of having a pleasant working life. I've been with both Tor and Baen from before either house published its first book.
My Tor editor, David Hartwell, has always done things besides work for major publishers. For many years he published a little magazine (a technical term) called The Little Magazine . In 1988 he folded The Little Magazine (with regret) and began to publish the New York Review of Science Fiction [http://www.nyrsf.com/], also a little magazine.
NYRSF has always been eclectic. There are reviews, generally literary, of books which tend also to the literary side of the field; essays on or by writers who're generally the sort to be guests at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts; notes on pulp writers (I've contributed a number myself); and wholly unexpected stuff. I was fascinated by a recent essay comparing Trilby with an earlier literary Trilby which clearly influenced George DuMaurier's novel.
I mention NYRSF here because the February issue has a long interview with me, two essays by me, and a third on me by my friend Mark Van Name. This is not a big deal; but it's an awfully big deal in my head and heart, coming at a very good time for me.
I'm continuing to progress on the next RCN space opera, When the Tide Rises. For the past month and more I've been in the mid-book stage; in other words, I've been feeling that I'm writing crap, that my career's doomed, and that I'm a complete waste of space as a human being.
None of those things is objectively true. I know they're not true. In fact the book's going well, and scene by scene (when I give them the first-pass edit the morning after I write them) I'm really quite pleased with what I'm doing. Dunno why I'm more depressed at the moment than I usually am, but I am sure that there's no objective cause (of which I'm aware) for how I feel.
But if you wonder where characters like Ilna and Adele Mundy come from--well, I didn't have to look far to find a model.
Since I've mentioned Tide, let me make two corrections in what I said regarding Lewis Carroll's poetry in the most recent newsletter. First, a fan pointed out that the title comes from The Lobster Quadrille, not from The Walrus and the Carpenter; and second, I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls is the first line, not the title, of The Palace of Humbug.
Occasionally somebody will ask to reprint a picture from my website--once a giant ammonite, another time a Spanish cedar, and a couple people wanting the woodcut of Ovid. This always makes me feel good. I did something (or in the case of Ovid, my webmaster Karen did something) that total strangers considered exceptionally well done.
And it's happened again: an online Russian magazine on cacti, Cultivar, will be using my picture of a crowned saguaro [http://david-drake.com/leprecon.html]. I just wish I could find the CD which has the higher resolution image from which the one on the website was reduced.
There's no new Ovid, I'm afraid. I intend to do the opening 75 lines of the Metamorphoses (leading up to The Four Ages of Man), but I got buried in the middle of my novel and haven't gotten around to that yet. There are parts of Ovid which I like better than other parts, but there's no part I've read with the care required by a translation that hasn't taught me something as a writer.
I continue to think frequently about Jim Baen. Oh, I don't mean I'm pining over him; it's more a matter of not thinking of him as dead. We talked so frequently for so many years that the conversations play back regularly when I'm musing on something else. (Writers spend a lot of time looking into space. I like to call that process 'musing', but 'zoning out' would probably be as accurate a description.)
Once when he was in a down mood, Jim said he suspected that science fiction was really just a branch of aviation fiction. In the '20s and '30s aviation had been exciting and full of promise; in the '40s it'd been triumphantly important. The '50s began the process of homogenization, and now people flying are treated with contempt while crammed into miserable conditions.
I can't pretend that I didn't see evidence to support Jim's thesis; he was genuinely a visionary, and not all his visions were pleasant ones. But you know, there's still sport aviation: the folks who go up in ultralights, or who build their own kit planes, or who fly the spouse and the next door neighbors to the coast for a fish dinner just for the hell of it. There are still people who fly for fun, probably as many as the total number of those who flew in 1930.
In Baen Books, Jim created a haven for people who read and write SF because it's fun, not because it's good for them or because it's an efficient method of putting dollars in their pockets. In other words, the SF equivalent of sport aviation. I wish he were still around so I could say that to him.
But whether or not Jim still exists in a spiritual sense (that's not my line of country), he's certainly still making me think. And Baen Books is still here, helping people have fun... and very quietly, without being heavy-handed, making people think as well. That's a legacy that very few people could claim.
Back to a space opera!
Dave Drake
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