NEWSLETTER 38: March 25, 2007
Dear People,
These newsletters aren't on a fixed schedule exactly, but I shoot for bimonthly. I was late getting one out last summer, what with being in England and life more generally. (Well, to be precise, it was death rather than life that was the problem.) This one's a bit early, because I just finished a novel.
But before I get into that, a correction: David Hartwell's little magazine dealing with poetry was The Little Magazine, not Poetry (which was a different little magazine dealing with poetry). David's little magazine dealing with SF is The New York Review of Science Fiction, which I recommend to your attention [http://www.nyrsf.com/].
And while I'm recommending things, Breakfast in the Ruins, a critical study/memoir/musing on SF by Barry Malzberg is out or on the cusp of being out from Baen Books. This is an enormous expansion of The Engines of the Night from 1982. There are worthy critics in SF (most of them are unworthy, but there are exceptions), but what Barry has done here is a unique blend of history, philosophy, and autobiography.
I'm very pleased to have been involved (I was sort of the editor as well as sort of the agent) with the publication of Breakfast in the Ruins. (They didn't send me a set of the proofs. They should have.)
Back to When the Tide Rises, the RCN space opera I just turned in to Baen Books; it ran to a hair over 125K including the front matter. It's slotted for March, 2008, and is to have a Steve Hickman cover (which pleases me enormously).
Tide is largely based on Lord Cochrane's memoirs of commanding the Chilean and Brazilian navies during their revolts against the colonial powers, but I mean that in the broader sense. That is, I've taken specific items of business from Cochrane, but the feel of the situation is actually more important.
This, by the way, is why I read more memoirs than secondary history. Understanding what people thought they were doing (and why they thought they were doing it) is much more valuable to a fiction writer than a simple list of facts and deeds.
Some things remain constant throughout history--for example, people in a brutal job like active-duty soldiering will become callous if not necessarily brutal--but many other responses differ according to the cultures of the people involved. The assumption that everybody has the same hopes and aspirations as Americans do causes many problems for US foreign policy.
My books may be cynical, but they're not as unsophisticated as Richard Cheney and they're almost always based on historical precedent. When the Tide Rises is another example of that.
The next bit of excitement is that Balefires, my fantasy/horror collection from Night Shade [http://nightshadebooks.com/], is due to ship in April. I can't swear to the publication date, but it seems solid.
It's a beautiful book. This feels weird to me. I've had a lot of books by now from major houses, sporting splendid art by the best people in the field. The two nicest books I've had are from Night Shade: the second volume of The Complete Hammer's Slammers (the first isn't chopped liver either) and Balefires. I don't know why it seems that way, but it does.
Forty years ago I dreamed of some day having an Arkham House book of my own, like Ramsey Campbell and Carl Jacobi; then Mr Derleth died. Those who ran the company after Derleth quickly threw me overboard (and in the case of the late Jim Turner, tried to club me with an oar. I've never figured out why he disliked me so much).
Balefires is a better package than ever came out of Arkham House (and I've got all the Arkham House books published during Mr Derleth's lifetime, so I have a right to make the statement). I'm very lucky.
Besides leather binding and a limitation page (every one of which I signed legibly, I'll have you know), the limited edition of Balefires has a bibliography of my US-published fiction and non-fiction, created by my webmaster, Karen Zimmerman. (Karen tells me that a version of it will go up on my website at some point also.)
I'm amazed at the fact of the bibliography (a very complex task, as you might imagine); and I guess I'm also amazed at what I've managed to accomplish in forty years. Believe me, it wasn't the result of planning on my part. It just sort of happened.
Besides stories of mine that aren't available much of anywhere else, Balefires has 12K of story notes. In their own small way, they're my equivalent of Breakfast in the Ruins: history, autobiography, and a little philosophy as well. In writing this I realize that Barry and I think about the same questions, which is why we've been friends for many years.
The Mirror of Worlds, the second book in the Crown of the Isles fantasy trilogy, is due out as a Tor hardcover in July, 2007. Donato's cover is possibly even better than Donato's previous covers for me. (I've said this before. With a cover this good, repetition is not only justified but required.) Incidentally, there will be a new map, because the Isles have become the Land (as those of you who've read The Fortress of Glass, now out in paperback, know).
I'm preparing to plot the concluding volume of the trilogy, The Gods Return. Well, as I write this--less than 24 hours after shipping off When the Tide Rises--I'm actually waiting for my brain to stop spinning. I know where the book will go and roughly how it's going to get there, but I'm going to understand the 'how' in detail before I start writing.
The next thing up is to read the second volume of Nonnos while taking extensive notes. I found to my surprise that reading classical historians wasn't helpful to me in plotting fantasies (though Dio in particular is very fertile ground for my space operas), but classical poetry gives me a lot of useful business.
Lest you wonder--because I've already been asked this a couple times--I do have a four-volume fantasy series in mind to follow the Isles series. I haven't discussed it with Tom Doherty and David Hartwell yet, but I will as I near completion on The Gods Return. I have my fingers crossed.
A Hammer's Slammers miniatures game was launched in 2004. There's now a volume of supplemental material [http://www.hammers-slammers.com/details2.htm], written and illustrated by John Treadaway (who did the graphics for the initial volume and also the interior art on the Night Shade Hammer series). John's art (and the photos of models painted by Kevin Dallimore) are just amazingly good.
There are two new Ovid translations up on the website! (Well, it excites me.) Besides a lyric I did the opening 75 lines of the Metamorphoses, mostly because I'd already done the Four Ages of Man which immediately follows [http://david-drake.com/ovid/beginning.html and amoresII-7.html].
There are also a few new photos on the album page [http://david-drake.com/album.html].
It turned out to be much more interesting than I'd remembered (I've read the whole work, but not in thirty years). In the opening, Ovid attempts real, scientific, cosmogony instead of discussing 'the Gods' as actors in little skits based on myth. I don't think the subject really interested him any more than it does me, but he felt it ought to be there; and by translating his discussion, I was forced to confront the same issues.
The result is unlike any of my previous translations. That in itself would've been a good reason to do it. The actual reason was whim, because until I got into the process I didn't know how interesting it would be.
Speaking of the website, Pair (the host) changed its software recently and our FAQ form stopped working. We didn't know about the problem till we got a polite query from a reader--who then informed me that I would have to answer to God for the bad language in my books. As I said, he was polite.
I'll close with some musing on storytelling and memory, both subjects which are very important to me. I exercise daily (nothing fancy; just a set of stretches followed by a lap around our twenty acres). I used to listen to BBC News while I did that. BBC taught me a great deal about the way the world works, but unfortunately I found that I was becoming dangerously depressed. My wife Jo got me some tapes of old radio dramas (which I'd listened to when I was a kid) and I began to exercise with them instead.
One of the series I listened to was Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. I remembered only one actual show, however: a villain has paralyzed Tom in the Venusian jungle as a tyrannosaur bears down on them. The villain runs into his space ship. The tyrannosaur ignores Tom, who's perforce motionless, and instead tears apart the ship to get the villain whose movement drew its attention.
I recently got recordings of many Tom Corbett shows, and to my delight these included the one I remembered. It's from early 1952, so I was six when I heard it initially.
To my amazement, it's much less vivid than I recalled it being. Because it's radio, Tom (who's paralyzed, remember) couldn't provide a real-time viewpoint (as I remembered). Even so, the description of events is largely in conversation between third parties days afterwards instead of being in as much immediate detail as was possible.
Does this mean my six-year-old self was a better storyteller than the pros? No, I don't think so--because the story did stick with me in its essential details for 55 years. But something exceptional was going on; I'm just not sure what it was. Or is.
Time to take Nonnos off the shelf, I guess. I'm exhausted but about as happy--well, content--as I ever am. I hope all of you can say the same.
Dave Drake
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