Drake's work is - was - not really in a mode that I'd expect to find universal overlap with EPU fandom. He remarked once in an essay reflecting on his career that his earliest works had begun as what I'd call self-therapy, a way of processing his experience as an intelligence officer in Vietnam, and that he considered the Slammers stories in particular to be horror stories where the monster was war and the tale was how people survived and were changed. Even his most cheerful works had a bleak note to them, an awareness of how badly things could go wrong within and between human beings.

But there are a lot of people who try to do that Grim Bleak Reality pitch without actually having seen said reality - who are, essentially, poseurs. Pretentious nitwits, without either the depth to really understand their material or the talent to bring it off.

David Drake had both, and science fiction, and the world, are the poorer for his loss.