David Drake's Blog

DrakeNews #-1 September 2024

Even after 9 months it is difficult not to imagine that Dave is outside downstairs on the lower deck with his books and computer. If he were writing this newsletter he would probably report how Hurricane Debbie brought enough rain to fill our pond, which has a respectable frog population. He would probably also mention the number of hummingbirds that have found the feeders this year.

He would also happily report that Audible renewed contracts for 35 titles and Baen still has most of his books available in print. Other publishing news this year is “The Complete John the Balladeer” in a very nice two volume edition from Haffner Press. These are the “Silver” John stories by Manly Wade Wellman.

It is still a bit of a shock to feel responsible for Dave’s literary estate and also Manly’s. The University of Iowa will be accepting some of Dave’s manuscripts and correspondence for the Archive that had been started a number of years ago. Manly’s papers are archived at Brown University.

There was no meteor; Dave died quietly in his sleep December 10, 2023. The family and a small number of friends will be gathering September 22 for a Celebration of Life. This is the Sunday closest to his birthday when he would have invited his friends to celebrate with a pig picking. Dave’s ashes will be scattered as he wished under the oak tree near where Jim Baen’s ashes were scattered in 2006. He often said he never wished to leave this place.

We all miss him. We thank everyone who remembers him and enjoys the many books and stories he has written.

As he would say, “Ride easy!”

All best,
Jo Drake
PO Box 904
Chapel Hill NC 27514

DrakeNews #137 November 2023

Dear people,

The long view: covid and my series of mini-strokes have caused me to revisit items from my past.  For example, the Library of America recently reprinted crime novels of the fifties. Some of them were books or authors I’d read at the time.

In addition, I noticed that at my recent 78th birthday dinner an awful lot of those present have been friends for forty years. It is significant that I don’t change a lot over the years. I don’t claim that as a virtue, though I feel it is one. I have a long memory. This certainly isn’t a virtue when somebody else remembers another way and I refuse to change my belief. Sometimes it’s clearly a good thing though, being able to remember events in the army. Not so much because they gave me a career, not so much because of specific incidents as by giving me the feel of a war zone. That’s really different from normal life.

In the ’80s we as a family watched Moonlighting on TV and I thought now I would like to stream old episodes. It turned out that the episodes weren’t available for streaming. A few days ago, Jonathan told us that Moonlighting is available now. The change may have something to do with Harvey Weinstein’s legal problems. We’ve started watching it again. It is witty and fast- moving, just as I recalled.

–Dave Drake

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DrakeNews #136 October 2023

I just turned 78 (September 24). I used to have a big pig-picking at our house in the country, but Covid made a large gathering a bad idea. So, for several years I took family and friends to a restaurant I like. I did that again this year and had a great time with people who got along with each other.

I wore a Blackhorse shirt, nothing fancy, but it’s a long time since you could qualify for one and I did back in 1970.

But that does bring up a good point. Can you write military sf if you never served? Of course you can. People will be able to tell the difference, though. I wouldn’t have written about the military if I hadn’t been there. You can learn a lot of things by study, but you can’t get the feel that way.

–David Drake

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Dear people,

I don’t go to many movies in theaters, but recently I saw Oppenheimer and Barbie and I found both excellent. They both address major issues: nuclear weapons and gender equality respectively, but the films are about people.

The characters in Oppenheimer developed concepts I’d been reading about in sf for many  years. It isn’t a heavy movie. There’re no blocks of math to wade through but it does get across the fact that the people who built the bomb were people first. As a result of the movie, I’m reading the book it was based on– American Prometheus. It’s a fine job.

The film rightly emphasizes that the scientists involved were concerned about beating the Nazis to the bomb at a time most Americans wanted to see America take vengeance on Japan for Pearl Harbor. But Germany was a scientifically advanced country that could have built a bomb before we did. Japan was not. The biggest handicap the Germans had was that they’d expelled their Jews, which meant most of the theoretical physicists in Europe. The decision to use it on the Japanese was simply because the Germans had already surrendered while the Japanese were saying that they were going to fight to the end and take subject people with them as they had done on Okinawa.

Even after Hirohito had surrendered, it was by no means certain that the Japanese peoplewould accept the decision. The US immediately landed a company of the 22nd Marines without ammo in their weapons at Yokohama where they watched the formal surrender a week later. They had just watched the Japanese murdering the Okinawan natives, so they knew whatthe risk was. But they were Marine riflemen and taking the risk to save a million of their buddies.

One of those Marines was Ed Livingston who became my friend. The country is better for men like Ed.

Try to make the world better yourselves.

Please use the contact form to send email to Dave.

 DrakeNews #134 August 4, 2023

Dear People:

One of the things a father is likely to think about is what field of work should my child go into? My answer was ‘whatever he pleases.’ I didn’t advise my son Jonathan. If he had obvious mathematical ability, I’d probably have said IT. But the only thing he seemed interested in was athletics which I knew nothing about and didn’t find interesting. When he told me he wanted a degree in sports medicine and wanted to stay in school another year to get education courses, I said I’d pay for it but I wasn’t thrilled that he hadn’t thought of this sooner.

So, he got his degree and a job teaching physical education to kindergartners. He liked teaching, but he and the janitor were the only males on the faculty. This got old pretty quickly and he quit to become a freelance personal trainer. I thought this was a very bad idea but the gym he was working at pretty quickly hired him as manager. Another gym in town was rumored to be getting a franchise as a Gold’s Gym. Jonathan researched what it would take to bring the place he was working at up to Gold’s standards. He came up with an answer that the owners thought was doable. They went out to Venice beach where Jonathan met with the guy in charge of franchising for Gold’s and got the franchise. After they completed the improvements, Jonathan was manager of a Gold’s Gym. When the owners divorced, he was out of a job again.

He volunteered for a friend repairing computers and then got a fulltime job testing them with my friend. It was always a good bet for someone with that aptitude. He is working in the field now. Red Hat– another firm in the area–recently sold for 238 billion dollars which means quite a payout for somebody. Jonathan isn’t expecting anything like that in the future–but he’s made out well through many changes and will probably do well the next time also. Sports medicine wasn’t a great field for him but learning to deal with life for himself was.

Also, he’s one of the strongest men you’re ever going to meet.

Dave Drake
Chatham County, NC

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Dear People,

In the 1960s when I was just starting to write fiction, I was drawn to ancient history as a subject. I liked ancient history and knew nothing about the writing business, but it struck me at once the modern writers in the fantasy genre, particularly Thomas Burnett Swann, were gay (or in my parlance of the time) queer. While teaching bible school in Cincinnati, I found and read a novel by Bryher and was pleased to find that the author was not openly homosexual. (Maybe not but Bryher was gay all her life.)

I did begin writing stories set in the ancient world. I switched to modern settings because ancient settings didn’t have a market in short stories. I switched to military sf because the setting was as exotic to civilians as the third century AD. Roman empire. These short stories worked, and therefore I wrote no more work set in the ancient world. When I decided I was a fulltime writer, I needed to make a living off novels. That required me write a novel, so I started to do so. I didn’t try to use an ancient setting but rather set one in 1692 and studied up on India in 1692. Jim got me to write book length sf for him at Ace before I tried to market the novel.

I therefore set no more stories in the ancient world. I did use an Indian setting for some of the Belisarius series. The development of that series was mostly by Eric Flint, however.

The ancient world fascinated me though. Even though I didn’t write historicals set then, I did use events of ancient history as models for events in the far future. This made me a good deal of money, but it didn’t have the wonder and softness that I’d found and loved in the books I’d been reading in the ’60s.

One more thing.

I have ridden a motorcycle since 1972, basically since back I came back to the world and decided I didn’t want to kill somebody unless I meant to. I was a bad driver. But I was unlikely to kill anybody else on a bike. Giving motorcycles up was very difficult for me. I couldn’t ride one safely anymore. That’s the thing with my problem (not Parkinson’s but rather a series of ministrokes): it isn’t going to get better.

I thought about selling the bikes. Then I realized I didn’t need the hassle or the money, so I just gave them to my friend Dave. He’s a biker and had been thinking about getting a small one for knocking around town. He was glad to get mine.

Because I socked it away in stocks when I was making it, I don’t have to work anymore. Now that’s good, but I’d surely like to go on writing. Still, being in comfortable circumstances allows me to do favors for friends without worrying about where the next meal is coming from. I don’t know of a better use for extra money than helping a friend.

I’m not happy about life but I’m getting on with it and hope others are doing the same.

—Dave Drake

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DrakeNews #132  May 24, 2023

Dear People,

A couple of things happened to me around 1970 that changed my future in major ways. I was drafted in 1970 and sent to Nam. I hadn’t expected that. I was in the middle of Duke law school and had a deferment while in school. But Mr. Johnson’s lack of any plan for ending the war and Mr. McNamara’s series of bad plans that extended it led to the cancellation of most deferments, including mine. I didn’t get any physical harm in the army but it sure messed me up mentally. Then, after I got home, I fathered a son (Jonathan).

I didn’t spend a lot of time or thought on Jonathan and I didn’t think he got much from me but an education. Certainly, his athletics were no doing of mine. I didn’t encourage him to read SF and fantasy though that was what I read. I certainly didn’t try to make him become a writer. I just wanted him to be himself, not a copy of anybody else, certainly not me. As he approached high school graduation, he got recruiting letters from armed services. I was afraid he was going to accept one of them. I was proud of my military service, but it isn’t something I wanted and it wasn’t something I wanted for my son. It was an unpleasant experience. It messed up my head a good deal in 1968 when I got my draft notice and later when I was shipped to Vietnam in 1970. After I did return to the World, I became a father against my conscious desire. I was crazy as hell.

I thought both the army and fatherhood were unmitigated disasters. Nowadays, there’s a lot of personal good in both. They turned my life over in unexpected ways. I wasn’t injured in Nam and Cambodia. On the other hand, I came back a different and less good person than the guy who went over. I was very angry, sort of generally. Mostly at the army, at North Vietnam for defending itself, and a certain amount at Americans who were actively supporting the NVA for their own reasons (Jane Fonda among them) but mostly angry at myself at what I’d done and become in the army.

As for fatherhood, I basically didn’t trust myself. As it turned out, I didn’t kill anybody, including my son. I didn’t start drinking or doing drugs, So I kept all the control I had left and I started writing seriously. I had something real to write about now. This gave me a socially acceptable way to deal with my anger. I was very angry though.

I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be an involved father (I hadn’t been an involved son either). Jonathan had an involved mother, however. My job was to provide a family income. Greatly to my surprise I was able to do that by my writing.

That really was a surprise, because I didn’t have money as a major goal of my writing. I wanted to put food on the table for my family. I didn’t get good reviews or much of any reviews, but I was making a living wage which was the important thing to me. Occasionally a review struck me as unfair, but I was a Nam vet and didn’t expect the world to be fair.

Tom Easton the Analog reviewer described me in public as a pornographer of violence and told me before a panel which he moderated that I was going to hate his printed review in Analog. In fact, I didn’t like it but Nam wasn’t a popular war and Easton wasn’t the only civilian to take his displeasure with the war out on the draftees who fought it.

Jonathan didn’t join the military, but he did become a practicing Christian. I was not because my mother had a very restrictive view of Christianity and I was afraid he’d go the same way.

He didn’t.

Jonathan is a delight to know. He is pleasant to everybody and respected by everybody at the gym. It struck me that he got to where he is the same way I had: doing the job in front of him as well as he could he could. He didn’t get any special breaks. He got a job with a friend of mine but had to do the work set him. My friend cultivates a cult of personality. Jonathan never bought into that. There would have been job benefits if he had but he didn’t think the tradeoff would be worthwhile any more than I had wanted to be an officer in the army. Jonathan has a stable marriage and a son to be proud of, as I am of him.

I wasn’t much of a father. But I raised a man, by God.

–Dave Drake

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Dear People,

The pond has frogs, but nothing more exciting so far. That’s okay, and if it continues to hold water we’ll consider stocking fish.

I continue to train with Dave Colisanti who was Jonathan’s work-out partner thirty years ago. He continues to be Jonathan’s friend and has become mine also.

Dave was a high level weight-lifter, which meant using steroids. He blames this for the fact that he tends to be scattered now. A thoroughly nice person and extremely good at training. I used to think that that steroids made muscles grow faster; they just make you heal faster so you can train more. You’ve still got to do the work yourself.

It’s like a lot of things. Smart people tend to think there ought to be short cuts. Jim was sure he could lose weight without exercise and eating less. He was wrong. I listened to his repeated spiels on this or that wonder drug that would lead to health and long life with no work–and then ignored the recommendation. Occasionally Jim’s advice was actively harmful as with Seldane. More often they just struck me as something for nothing with unknown side effects as with the pill that made fat pass straight through without being absorbed so you couldn’t get fat if you took the pill before eating the fat meal. I told him that eating less kept me from getting fat, and that anything that interfered with digestion had to have wide-ranging effects. I didn’t hear any more about that one, but Jim’s ashes were scattered in our grove. I miss Jim a lot, but he didn’t always show good judgment.

I was very glad that Jonathan got his size and strength by normal exercise without trying shortcuts. Even if they worked without side-effects a picture demonstrates they aren’t necessary if you’re willing to put in the work.

I guess the same is true in a way about writing in any special field including military sf. Being smart and careful isn’t going to give you the feeling of what it’s like to be under fire.

I couldn’t with understanding write about running a company. I could read heavily about the subject but it wouldn’t convince somebody who really did it.

Best to all of you I hope you’re all doing better than I am.

–Dave Drake
Chatham county NC

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Dear People,

We have a pond and also have redone the gravel drive after construction equipment drove over it. This has been a long run but we seem to have gotten somewhere. I joked with my trainer that as soon as I’m dead it’ll be broken up into half acre lots but that’s somebody else’s choice, but while I live I’ll have a pond. Maybe even migratory water fowl.

When we started the project years ago, we planned to have fish but the bottom didn’t hold water. I’m hoping that what we’ve got now will, but I’m not jinxing it by making assumptions.

That does make me think about what’s worth while. Writing well was important to me but writing as a vocation wasn’t. It became important after I came back from Nam and I needed writing to deal with my anger.

I am very proud to be a Nam vet but believe me I didn’t want the experience. I thought it was my duty as a citizen. I also think the war was very badly run in a military sense. There were guys who opposed the war for good moral or religious reasons. I had a good friend in high school who fled to Canada. I didn’t feel that way at the time. I just wanted to avoid having my life disrupted and maybe get killed. After I’d been there a while, I came to believe that the US involvement was a very bad thing for everyone involved, but I hadn’t cared enough to really learn about the situation before I got there.

I wouldn’t have become a writer if I weren’t a Nam vet. I’ve been asked if you can write military sf if you’ve never served. Of course you can, but I don’t know why you’d want to. John Scalzi was explicit that he thought there was a market. I suspect the same is true of other people. The result is rarely fully satisfactory as military sf. (It may sell fine and enhance the writer’s status (Mr. Scalzi became President of SFWA.)

The thing is, I had never had a dream of being a fulltime writer. I came back from Nam really screwed up and knew I was. I wanted to place stories. There was no market for historical fantasies, so I began writing military SF because that was another unususal background I knew well.

When I started writing seriously, military sf wasn’t a commercial subgenre. Joe Haldeman–writing at about the same time as I was–created it. I wrote it seriously to try to make sense of my experience. Maybe Joe did the same. If so Joe and I have good reasons to write military sf. The folks who do it for a paycheck don’t have a good reasons. They may be good writers–Kuttner is one of the field’s best–but as a general rule, I wish they wrote something else.

There’s an aspect to this that I hadn’t considered at the time: folks who want to write msf but don’t have personal experience to draw from have a moral right to do so and they may be very good writers, but somebody who’s been there will be able to tell the difference. I even know cases where a careful writer gets something right but folks in the field always got it wrong.

I’m reading a biography of J Edgar Hoover. It was well known in the underworld that Hoover was gay. This doesn’t bother me one way or another. I’m straight, but who somebody else screws is his own business. Hoover hit on his own staff though, and this does bother me. The difference in power makes this unfair even if it’s consensual. Friends of mine have hit on their staff so I know it happens, but it’s wrong and overspent a lot of time posing as a moral authority to America.

Don’t be full of yourselves, people, and be nice to other folks.

–Dave Drake

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DrakeNews #129 December 20, 2022

Dear people,

Life hasn’t changed a lot for me personally since #128. I continue to be much less smart than I used to be. I can no longer hold a complete idea in my head. I don’t want to write crap, which turning out inferior stories would be in my opinion.

I haven’t managed to figure out how to get smarter, though I continue to take geneaire rebuilder. Maybe it helps.

Strength training definitely works.  I’m getting stronger though, I’m not what I ought to be. My balance is still off and I have to be driven by somebody else. My wife (and main driver) doesn’t think that matters, as I didn’t like driving anyway. It matters.

We had a quiet and very nice thanksgiving with old friends and walked around the 20 acre yard before dessert but Jonathan and family were in Norfolk with her family. We’ll see them another time.

Chicks in Tank Tops came out with a sequel to Airborne All the Way. The story is a  good

job but it’s very hard for me to write without being sure of my typing. My brain works well, but I no longer can hold a whole work in my head before I start working. It was and remains a considerable loss to me. I have enough money, but I liked to write.

Several years ago my wife told me she wanted a pond on the lower west end of the property and that our yard man could build it. I told her I knew nothing on the subject but if she would plan it I would pay for the construction.

This turned out to be a very bad idea. I should have refused unless she got it professionally planned first. We got a big pond but it didn’t hold water. Jo said it was “shit!” Recently we connected with a neighbor whose nephew is a contractor. He is now reworking the pond starting with clearing the saplings that had sprouted. He plans to rebuild it with a proper core. I still don’t know squat about pond design and construction, but it seems to be in good hands. I’ll hope.

Incidently I’m not complaining about the yard man. He worked hard for long hours, and dug a nice hole in the ground. He just didn’t know how to make it hold water

Have a great holiday people. It hasn’t been an easy year and I’ve lost friends, but people are really great and supportive in general

Be nice to other folks, people.

–Dave Drake

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