A Kind of Humor
Today it’s accepted that fiction (broadly defined; I’m including film and TV) can describe war in a realistic fashion. Stories aren’t required to be realistic, but they’re permitted to be. Until quite recently, that wasn’t the case. (I rememb...
Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade: An Appreciation by David Drake
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade in the pages of Astounding magazine (later to be known as Analog that very year). In celebration, Baen Books is releasing an anniversary paperback edit...
The Classical Approach
In my previous post I discussed what the literature of ancient Greece and Rome meant to my writing generally. Here I’ll show you how the classics have specifically affected my latest novel, The Legions of Fire.
This has two parts: first, the texts a...
The Classical Background
A bookstore owner told me a few years ago that a customer had asked her, “Where do you keep the classics? You know—like Jacqueline Susann.”
What I mean by ‘the classics’ is the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. Throughout my adult life,...
