I haven't been able to find a full note or announcement, but both his wiki page and his personal website indicate that the author of the Hammer's Slammers stories, along with a wide range of less influential works, is no longer with us as of yesterday.

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.

Another of the old ones, at least for my generation, gone. May he find peace.

Drake curated a collection of stories called "The Eternal City" - all tales of Rome, from the fantastic to the futuristic.

I found it in my middle school library and checked it out at least 20 times because of how many amazing and fascinating stories were in it - including Drake's own contribution.

It inspired a lot of ideas inside my head that I am dearly grateful for today.

Good night, Sir. Rest well.

Rest in Peace David.

The RCN books are in my eternal reading list.

LAST EDITED ON Jan-06-24 AT 02:52 PM (EST)
 
Drake was an excellent writer. I'll miss him, and Baen Books will be lesser for his loss.

Interesting tidbit: David Drake and Brian Daley both served with the Blackhorse Cav. Their dates of service overlap. I wonder if they ever met?

If the Slammers stories are a bit too much Grim Bleak Reality for your taste but you still want to see what Drake was about, I recommend the Belisarius novels (An Oblique Approach, et seq.) These were a collaboration with Eric Flint, who provided lightness and humor. Also they're about a time and place that doesn't get much attention nowadays: the Byzantine Empire circa 500 CE and points south and east thereof. (With time-traveling space aliens for flavor.)

Having read the series, I concur with this recommendation.

There is also the earlier, and very similar, General/Raj Whitehall series, a collaboration with S.M. Stirling. While they aren't as lighthearted as the Belisarius books, neither are they as black as the Slammers books. These books take place in an alternative world where the rifle-and-saber cavalry ride dogs.
Highly recommended.
...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The
Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-
Covered Balls!"

Also a favorite of mine, and in fact I read it first and then heard of the other.

For clarity: while Belisarius takes place on an alternate-timeline version of Earth, with the divergence resulting from two rival civilizations each sending agents back in time to try to make their future come to pass, and features both historical and completely fictional characters, the General is set in the far future, on a human colony world (Bellevue) that has regressed, with a current local tech level somewhere around the 18th or 19th centuries and a geopolitical situation and characters that's legally distinct conveniently similar to the Byzantine court and their rivals.

With spin-offs that similarly mirroring the Roman civil war, WWI (and/or Stirling's Draka series) and ancient egypt.

>With spin-offs that similarly mirroring the Roman civil war, WWI
>(and/or Stirling's Draka series) and ancient egypt.

Which Roman civil war? If you go by Gibbon, civil war was the Roman national sport.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

That is not unfair. The one that Augustus won, what was later called the end of the Roman Republic.