Hammer's Slammers

Hammer's Slammers #1

by David Drake

When a planetary government faces threats from guerillas, insurgents or terrorists, the men they hire are Hammer's Slammers - known throughout the galaxy for their cold, ruthless ferocity, their ability to defeat overwhelming forces, and their willingness to go up against impossible odds.

The Governor, to whom Raj Whitehall has sworn absolute loyalty, nourishes a paranoid envy and mistrust that grows with every victory. Can even a battle computer of the Galactic Age be enough to counter the fury of Raj's enemies - and the treachery of his "friends"?

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Military Fiction, Military Science Fiction, War, Short Stories, Science Fiction Fantasy

318 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1979

About the author

David Drake is an American author of science fiction and fantasy literature. A Vietnam War veteran who has worked as a lawyer, he is now one of the major authors of the military science fiction genre.

Reviews

[Sleepy Boy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good series with a few slips and perhaps a few "Didn't age wells" thrown in.

The action and most of the interaction between characters are good to great. I did find myself surprised at the emotion at times of some characters. There are quite a bit of over-the-top reactions that seem to come out of the left field.

On the whole, it's enjoyable even if the writing is starting to show its age.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was wrong about David Drake.

I shallowly judged him on the covers of his books and pegged him as Military Science Fiction (MilSF) of the cheesier variety.

If you haven't read any cheesy MilSF you've missed out on all sorts of fun dialogue that reads like this:

"Damn the capacitors - overcharge the light-cannon/beam weapon/luminosity-ray!"

"Load a full drum of similies for 'laser' into the multi-barrelled photon blaster!"

"Captain! The hull can't hold up under the relentless barrage of the don't-call-it-a-laser, laser!"

You get the idea. I've largely kept me away from this sub-genre of SF, with a couple of notable exceptions.

David Drake should have been one of those exceptions long before now. This is military tinged SF of the best kind, full of nuance, thoughtfulness and explorations of the nature and impacts of war, intended and otherwise.

There's a lot to love here.

Like Joe Haldeman, another gifted writer of his generation, David Drake is a Vietnam veteran. Both he and Haldeman have to my reader's eye a rare skill in depicting the realities of war in ways with a greater degree of verisimilitude than many other SF writers. The Forever War is the classic example that comes to mind for Haldeman, but other stories of his, such as A Mind of His Own from the collection Infinite Dreams have a poignancy and impact that few mil-sf stories have.

So it is with Drake. Drake's battlefield is a full-spectrum sensory overload of an experience. Soldiers bake in the heat radiating from their weapons, they choke on the chemical tang of spent propellant that wafts through their vehicles and their retinas pulse with the blasts of light that devastating attacks burn into their eyes.

They sit uncomfortably at their posts, itching in armor they dare not remove, deathly bored with surveying expanses of enemy territory that they dare not lose their focus on. Violence, when it comes, is sudden and vicious, death the same, and both pick their targets arbitrarily.

A soldier in Drake's world can be a born warrior, a leader of men and a master of all the military arts... and a random bullet can cut him down just as easily as it fells a first-day greenhorn trooper with no idea. Here art imitates the life that Drake witnessed in Vietnam I suspect.

Even when things do go well, unintended consequences abound. Collateral damage, the destruction of priceless cultural treasures, everything up to and including accidental genocide. Again, art imitates life.

There are a whole heap of stories in here, and honestly, there isn't a bad one. They all have something to say and an interesting and engaging way of saying it. I could go through and summarise them but I think you'll enjoy them more if you go in as I did - with no expectations and no spoilers.

If you're in any way interested in MilSF, or in stories about the experiences of soldiers at war, read this book. I enjoyed Hammer's Slammers waaaaaaay more than I expected to and I'm really looking forward to reading more of Drake's work.


Four and a half overloaded laser cannons (they're going critical, Captain!) out of five.

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a seminal, maybe even archetypal, work of military science fiction, and as such it ranks up there with Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Haldeman's The Forever War, though it doesn't get into civics like the former, or social commentary like the latter. It's the story of a mercenary regiment organized by Alois Hammer, a former colonel in the military of the powerful colony Frisia, in the late 26th (I think) Century--a period of fragmenting societies and rebelling colonies, analogous to the 15th and 16th Centuries in Italy when mercenaries were in high demand by all sorts of factions. The Slammers are different in that they are an armored regiment, which--by virtue of their iridium-armored hovertanks--is a much more expensive proposition than a leg infantry unit. In this collection of stories, they have to fight against rebel farmers, alien freedom fighters, and the perfidy and betrayal of their employers. The anthology spans a period of at least ten years, from the formation of the regiment to Hammer's marriage and retirement. Later volumes in the series, I assume, fill in the gaps in the chronology with additional tales of the regiment's adventures.

There are several recurring characters in the collection beyond Col. Hammer himself: Joachim Steuben, his closest confidante and psychopathic assassin; Margritte, the war-widow turned mercenary communications officer; Danny Pritchard, an enlisted man who worked up through the ranks to become a trusted officer; etc. These people give connective tissue to an otherwise disconnected series of vignettes that feature a little background and lots of well-described combat--based on Drake's own experiences in Vietnam.

The stories are interspersed with small explanatory essays that deliver background material regarding the universe in which they are set: the organization of the Slammers, the political history of Earth colonies that led to the current era; and so on. They are a tantalizing way of revealing details about the events that led to the formation and employment of the Slammers, without having to insert a stilted conversation between characters in the main narrative.

I first read this book in 1985, and dusted it off and re-read it in 2013. It held up beautifully across the intervening decades.

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

An uneven collection of barely-connected short stories/novellas with a shockingly bad opening and a sudden, strange ending--but some of the stuff in the middle is quite effective.

Drake's prose varies wildly from awfully amateurish to quietly effective between the tales. Most of the characters are lifeless; motivations and setting are often left unexplained, or else alluded to in bafflingly circuitous language; there's a jarring tense shift in the first story; and Drake spends a lot of time and space avoiding characters' names (it's always 'the tall man,' 'the tanker,' 'the colonel's aide,' 'the blonde,' 'the black,' 'the Oriental'--at several points he even switches between a character's first name and surname mid-paragraph). There's a lot of terminology that only makes sense after 200 pages of repetition, and the combating factions in the final showdown (in fact, in most of the many combat scenes) are never clearly defined.

Despite this, there are some brilliant ideas here (aliens show up for a couple of stories, but are quickly forgotten about), and there are some surprisingly effective moments towards the end dealing with the moral ambiguity of violence. The prose improves drastically in the chapter titled "Hangman," which makes up a third of the book's length. One wonders if Drake could have improved the product overall by cutting the extraneous stuff (the first two stories, and the last), and focusing entirely on the Slammers' exploits on Kobold.

A book that's as entertaining as often as it is tedious, lacking any memorable human characters, with no proper denouement, is difficult to recommend to anyone. Nevertheless, there's something about it that just works--barely, but enough--so I'll give it half marks.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first version of the first volume of Drake's famous military sf series. I'd read many of the sections before when they appeared in magazine form, but enjoyed them again in this format. His style was not as well-developed nor as well-crafted as it became in later works, but the sheer emotion and sincerity of these early works is really exemplary. The Hammer stories are still the best of modern military sf.

[Chris Gager · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just got on inter-library loan from the Boston Public Library. I think I've read one of these stories already in "Machines That Kill." That one was good so I'm expecting more of the same. David Drake is identified as a writer of military science fiction.

Two stories down and several to go as the theme is brute force future contract warfare and tactics. Mr. Drake's prose is a sort-of cryptic short hand English and it can be a challenge to follow. I think it's getting better as I get more accustomed to it. VERY VERY graphic and violent.

I've been working my way through this one story at a time over the last week or so. Each story is accompanied by an explanation of various aspects of the cultural context in which all the battling takes place. Drake is a capable writer and the stories are entertaining(and brutal) enough, though DD is not above having things "whip around" and describing the presence of "steaming mugs" of whatever. ICK! Right now I'm in the middle of a long story-short novel, the penultimate story. Then one more shorty after that.

- "savagry" s.b. "savagery"

Finished up last night with this entertaining read, a collection of shrty stories wihich share common characters. Fred W. Saberhagen has the same thing going with a collection of "Berserker" stories. The only drawback was the steady challenge of understanding what was being communicated in the cryptic/abrupt style of language the characters used. A sort of future military-speak in the extreme.

- 3.5* rounds down to 3*

[Peter Tillman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this many, many years ago -- the collection/fixup dates from 1979, the stories earlier, when Drake's Vietnam War experience was still fresh in his memory. Reading the story titles now, I recall liking the book (and other Slammers books) back in the day. These are solid books, but not for the faint of heart -- I can't say that I've ever felt the need to reread them. But for younger, diehard mil-SF fans, you may as well start at the beginning....

Ah, here's JD Nicolls' retro-review, just published at https://www.tor.com/2020/05/19/five-r...
"David Drake’s mercenary troupe, Hammer’s Slammers (commanded by Friesland’s Colonel Alois Hammer), was formed to suppress an uprising on Friesland’s colony-world Melpomone. The foreign mercenaries were offered settlement on wealthy Friesland in exchange for their services, as well as a chunk of cash. But after the mercenaries crushed the rebellion, Friesland’s government decided that it wasn’t such a great idea to settle battle-hardened mercenaries in their midst. Nor did it seem like a good idea to let the mercenaries sell their skills to other employers, since said employers could well be Friesland’s enemies. Best idea: kill off the now-superfluous soldiers. Friesland expects that their own Colonel Hammer will acquiesce. They are wrong. Hammer sides with his soldiers. Forewarned, the Slammers obliterate their would-be assassins and become the very destabilizing force that Friesland had feared."

[William Sariego · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decent short stories with over riding story arch. The added on tale of the new edition doesn't fit, but is still entertaining.

[Wampuscat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like with most of Drake's books I have read, afterward I find myself thinking... 'Well, that was almost good.' It's just on the border of OK and Good. This one was good in premise, and it had its moments of intensity, but for the most part I have to call it lackluster. Something about it just felt like I was thrown into the middle of a story without enough context to understand what was happening. You eventually get the info you need, but it's like having someone explain an inside joke after everyone is done laughing about it... it falls flat.

One word of caution to anyone reading these as part of the Complete Hammer's Slammers omnibus… ORDER MATTERS. I suggest you read in the order shown in the original, and not the order of the omnibus version. I did not realize this, and I think this is why I felt contextually lost as I mentioned above.

Anyway, I'm going to write about the individual stories (but not the interludes) in detail and give them ratings. I'll try not to get spoiler-y, but be cautious reading from this point forward. Overall I give the book a rating of PI - 22 stars over 7 stories – (3.14 stars) and call it an OK Read.


But Loyal to His Own (4 stars)

An introduction to the origins of Hammer's Slammers. General Hammer must defend his troops from political plotting of the Friesland President who sent them out to fight in the first place. Now that they have won (at any cost) he fears they are too powerful and can't be redeemed. His solution to that problem is not something Hammer will let happen.
This is a good story. It should be read first before anything. It is key to understanding the background for all the others.

The Butcher’s Bill (2 stars)

Introduces a recurring character, Danny Pritchard, who serves as a conscience (albeit maybe an ignored one) to Hammer's Slammers. In this story, the client who's hired the Slammers is naïve to the costs of war. They want to stop once they realize what's coming, and Mercenaries live off their reputations, and blood has already been spilled.

Under the Hammer (3 stars)

This is a decent story introducing another minor recurring character, Rob Jenne, who gets his first taste of combat on his first day on the job.

Cultural Conflict (5 stars)

This is the best story in the book IMO. A tanker crew whose boring assignment is canceled runs afoul of local flora/fauna. A sentient hive mind tries to defend itself, but the supertanks of Hammer's Slammers are not a natural enemy. There is another minor recurring character intro in this one also, Sgt. Horthy.

Caught in the Crossfire (4 stars)

A competing Merc group is trying to set a trap for Hammer's convoy. They are using a village populated by women and children (whose men-folk – save one too injured to go - have been conscripted) to do it. One of the women, Margritte, is made a widow and has nothing left to strive for except revenge. She too becomes a recurring minor character in later stories.

Hangman (3 stars)

A competing merc company and the Slammers have been transition from fighting on either side of an ethnic war to keeping the peace in it. Unfortunately, the opposing mercs have too many cultural ties to one side and surreptitiously begin to aid them, while the Slammers can do nothing that won't jeopardize their own contract. That's why Danny Pritchard and his crew must allow one atrocity to trigger a reaction that will prevent a larger one. This story highlights Pritchard's conscientious but loyal personality, and the dichotomy of war as a means to peace.

Standing Down (1 star)

While this story puts a period to the quest for a home for the Slammers, it is scattered and not very memorable. Hammer returns his company to Friesland to help put a dictator in power… the dictator 'dies'… Hammer becomes ruler and is about to marry the daughter of former President Tromp to cement a political alliance. Holdouts die mercilessly.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

The original version of short stories about Hammer's Slammers by David Drake has everything you really need to know to learn about whether you will like military SF. If you like history or action then you should read this book, it will definitely make you feel like you were in on the tale.
Contains stories along with world building information: shown with Star*s:
But Loyal to His Own
Supertanks*
The Butcher's Bill
The Church of the Lord's Universe*
Under the Hammer
Powerguns*
Cultural Conflict
Backdrop to Chaos*
Caught in the Crossfire
The Bonding Authority*
Hangman
Table of Organization and Equipment, Hammer's Regiment*
Standing Down

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is nothing I cna say to do David Drake's series justice. It was the first military science fiction I ever read (I was around 10 I think and reading one of my brother's books; this was around the time I read First Flight by Claremont too). Drake, at least in this series, always treated his characters as nothing more, or less, than just regular guys having a job to do. Many of them liked the job and many of them hated it, but it's what they were paid to do. Going back to these stories was like curling up with a childhood stuffed animal, comforting and nostalgic.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author introduces an intriguing future universe and situation; the book is about a mercenary military unit traveling from world to world, all human - no alien cultures here - selling their services to the highest bidders in local wars. His characterization of combat is intense and his action sequences are fast-paced. Neither utopian nor dystopian, it presents a complex social situation that is more believable than the homogenous visions, either light or dark, of a lot of writers.

[Benjamin Espen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't really enjoy this book. I was expecting something like Falkenberg's legions, which is reasonable since Jerry Pournelle blurbed this one, but I found that Hammer is a harsher, more brutal man than Falkenberg. This is probably an accurate portrait of many such soldiers, but I found it unpleasant to read about. I think there is a place for such stories, I just don't want to read them.

[Karl Schaeffer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Better than i thought. Another cheap pick-up from the Library used book sale. First couple short stories were very detailed fog-of-war stories. latter stories showed some non-fighting plot and character development.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trying to understand my illogical interest in tanks, I recalled reading this when I was a kid in the SciFi book (of the month) club. The men were mercenaries, foreshadowing the movie "Soldier" or at least overlapping that, in my mind.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent military pot-boiler. I was REALLY intrigued by the chapter describing a battle from the point of view of "animals" whose sensory systems were directly linked with those of the plants in the forest where the battle was under way.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very military, but very human too.

[Little Timmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the best military SiFi book series written. Drake is a superb writer of future military SiFi. Very recommended

[Valerie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good story, well written & interesting to those of us not particularly thrilled with military hardware.

[Darren Goossens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review from darrengoossens.wordpress.com.

After the interesting We all died at Breakaway Station and the quite dreadful Come, hunt an Earthman , volume 3 of the Venture SF series is Hammer's Slammers by David Drake. It is actually a collection of linked short stories, despite Venture's blurb bravely proclaiming 'no short stories, no fantasy, no boredom'. It is a solid example of military SF, with a well-balanced mix of human story, weapon pornography and military tactics that will keep its core constituency happy -- as it must have, because many more 'Slammers' books followed, and in fact this was very much the launching pad of Drake's very successful career.

The book shows the waste and the casual and collateral destruction of lives that fighting causes. It shows the loyalty and toughness of fighting men and women, and in doing so obliquely advertises the military life as one of a kind of virtue. For the better, it avoids the higher-level, dehumanised oversight level of story and instead puts the reader in tanks ('blowers' -- massive, hovering, nuclear-powered monsters) and in commandeered dwellings, waiting for said tanks to pass by.

Hammer's mercenaries take the money, do the job, and go, leaving destruction and death behind them. They try to make no judgement on whether they are on the 'right' side of the conflict, though sometimes they find themselves asking too many questions. They are on the side that pays them. Thus, we have a sort of foregrounded decency (individual grunts doing the best they can in tough spots, too busy staying alive to worry about rights and wrongs -- though some of them do -- kind of thing), against a background of venality. In desperate situations people can be brave, tough, brutal, resourceful and so on, yes; but often those situations need not exist. Often, the mercenaries are pure parasites -- taking the money from a government funded by the taxes paid by the struggling workers, destroying livelihoods in the fighting, and then leaving.

Yet the machinery of war is shiny and brilliant and sleek and seductive.

Anyway, I feel like I am thinking about it too much. It's a military SF adventure. If you like that sort of thing, you'll like the book.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actually read these stories in a larger and much less chic volume entitled The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Volume One but I'm not sure what the odds on my picking it up to read the later ones are so I will drop this here. That edition has a phoned in foreword by Gene Wolfe and a less phoned-in one--'Becoming a Professional Writer by Way of Southeast Asia,' originally for a whole other compilation of the same stories--by Drake himself; I'm not sure I'd have left off well-disposed towards him if it weren't for that. ("I didn't quite lawyering 'to write'. I quite lawyering because lawyering was making me sick.")

You can feel Drake teaching himself to write as the stories go on; about four stories in, he discovers semi-colons. In the first story I had to go back and reread patches several times because the narration assumes I am understanding a lot more things about military customs, military strategy, military technology than I actually will on first pass; by the last couple I had to do this only once, if at all. The last story--Hammer marrying into the ruling caste of one of the planets the various small conflicts mapped in the other stories--was written for this collection, and is one of the clearest bits of fix-up writing I've ever read. Most of the others are about bullet holes in the chain of command. One is about a woman treated poorly by a resistance army killing her kidnappers to throw her lot in with the invading army: which feels rather different depending on which real-world conflict you want it to be an analogue too, and what side of that conflict you feel was on the right side of history. I'm not sure if any of the stories pass the Does It Need To Be In Space sniff test, even the one with the hive-mind apes; Drake points out explicitly in an afterword (in, again, that other edition) that the thoughtless destruction of an intergalactic architectual relic in his first published story is just a galactic transposition of something that happened to him when he was serving in Cambodia. The afterword is from 2005; you can tell it's the same guy who wrote the foreword in 1988; that the same guy wrote those early stories in '74 and '75 I felt like I had to take on trust.

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this counts as "old-fashioned military sci-fi". It was amusing, but the format felt a little odd since it was basically a set of (slightly) interconnected short stories. Overall, the storylines were simpler and more down-to-earth than I'm used to reading: usually even ground-pounder military sci-fi still includes stuff like the boredom of riding on a spaceship, some depiction of orbital entry, futuristic communications and new cultures, etc. These stories are pretty much modern-day combat except with laser guns and colony worlds (and BIGGER TANKS). Fun in it's own way, but a little simplistic, I think.

I try to individually rate short story anthologies, so here goes for this one:
But Loyal To His Own - 2 Confusing.
The Butcher's Bill - 2. Yikes.
Under the Hammer - 2. Didn't like the idea of the flirts.
Cultural Conflict - 2. Sad that this is the only alien contact story.
Caught in the Crossfire - 4 This woman feels more like an actual character than the others.
Hangman - 4 Complex and nuanced, but interesting.
Standing Down - 2. Seems like an odd move to me.
The Tank Lords - 3 Okay.

[Eamonn McHugh-Roohr · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Things They Carried in space.

I read this book because I wanted to see the origins of Hovertanks as a sci-fi trope, nut what I got was a meditation on war.

It's technology is an analogy for what we had in Vietnam, but it's also a power fantasy... if only we'd had more powerful tanks. More deadly guns. If only the Colonel could have told civilian leaders to stuff it, to grab the knife before it was stabbed in the back and twist it the other way.

But I don't begrudge drake his flights of fancy, or the fact that the Slammers violate the Geneva Convention at least once per vignette. He's telling war stories, through a lense of scifi, sure, but telling them nonetheless. He's not asking for forgiveness here. The foes aren't mindless alien bugs, they're (mostly) humans who had the misfortune of not being the highest bidder. We rarely get insight into which 'side' of these conflicts is right or wrong, and not in the mealy mouthed 40k way.

I would have rated it higher if the narrative was glued together better, and the exposition dumps aren't really necessary. It also includes a short novel 'the tank lords' which I gave up on because I was tired of hearing about gelding.

[Scott Schmidt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't know it was a "short story" style of book and by the end I wish it would have been a full-fledged novel. I think the biggest draw here is the tanks. They're a very cool piece of science fiction and I really enjoyed the story "Hangman" because of the description of the hover tank combat. But, overall, I wasn't blown away (no pun) by much regarding the characters, plot, style or the world Drake created.

[Elizabeth Thacker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not for me. This is everything that was promised and I can appreciate the prose and the power of the gritty realism , however, not the kind of space opera I enjoy. The wartime violence removes much of the escapism for me and it's heavily planetside instead of in space. I definitely know people I would recommend Drake's work too from reading this, but I am absolutely not the intended audience here.

[Adam Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vicious and uncompromisingly nasty. Did not expect the structure to work as well as it does at stringing the vignettes of violence together. The explanatory interludes are a welcome reprieve from the cynicism and brutality, but said nastiness isn’t without a point. Unsurprisingly, a book by a Vietnam veteran is anti-war from the perspective of the perpetrators of war’s attendant horrors. A propulsive classic, even if some of its social politics are decidedly 70s. Read!

[E.R. Everett · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first David Drake. The writing—especially at the beginning—was elliptical and full of “military” jargon unique to the book itself. That threw me off. It got better, but I don’t much like it when I have to infer every other situation or memorize lots of subtle political points. Otherwise, it was a fun read, very dark, full of action.

[Frantick Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the fun era of war sci fi. So many books and stories that are lost in bargain bins that can excite the imagination and would most likely make better television shows and films than what we have today.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Early military sci-fi short stories from the 1970's, gritty and raw, that set the standard within the sub-genre. The Slammer's aren't perfect, with some definitely morally gray actions, but that adds great depth to all the characters. I'm looking forward to working my way through the series.

[Frank Ormond · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was really hard to follow.