David Drake (1945-2023)
Author David Drake, 78, died December 10, 2023 in Silk Hope NC. Drake was the author of more than 80 works of SF and fantasy, best known for the Hammer’s Slammer’s series and other works of military SF.
David Allen Drake was born September 24, 1945 in Dubuque IA. He attended law school at Duke, but his studies were interrupted when he was drafted into the US Army, serving in the 11th Cavalry Regiment in Vietnam and Cambodia from 1969-71. He finished his law degree after his return, and worked as an attorney until becoming a full-time writer in 1981. Drake also co-founded small press Carcosa with Jim Groce and Karl Edward Wagner in 1973; the publisher won a World Fantasy Award in 1976.
His first story of genre interest, “Denkirch”, appeared in 1967, but his career took off with debut collection Hammer’s Slammers (1979). That series continued with Cross the Stars (1984), At Any Price (1985), Counting the Cost (1987), Rolling Hot (1989), The Warrior (1991), The Sharp End (1993), The Voyage (1994), and Paying the Piper (2002).
He wrote numerous other series as well.The Tom Kelly books are Skyripper (1983) and Fortress (1987). The Northworld series include Northworld (1990), Northworld: Vengeance (1991), and Northworld: Justice (1992), while the Reaches sequence is Igniting the Reaches (1994), Through the Breach (1995), and Fireships (1996). His Lord of the Isles series includes Lord of the Isles (1997), Queen of Demons (1998), Servant of the Dragon (1999), Mistress of the Catacombs (2001), Goddess of the Ice Realm (2003), and Master of the Cauldron (2004), and the related Crown of the Isles series has The Fortress of Glass (2006), The Mirror of Worlds (2007), and The Gods Return (2008). He wrote 13 books in the Lt. Leary series, staring with Lt. Leary, Commanding (2000) and concluding with To Clear Away the Shadows (2019). The Book of the Elements began with The Legions of Fire (2010) and continued with Out of the Waters (2011), Monsters of the Earth (2013), and Air and Darkness (2015). The Time of Heroes series includes The Spark (2017), The Storm (2019), and The Serpent (2021).
Among his numerous standalone books are The Dragon Lord (1979), Birds of Prey, Bridgehead (1986), and YA novel Patriots (1996), while his myriad collections include Time Safari (1982), Tyrannosaur (1994), From the Heart of Darkness (1983), Lacey and His Friends (1986), Vettius and His Friends (1989), The Military Dimension (1991), Old Nathan (1991), All the Way to the Gallows (1996), Grimmer than Hell (2003), Other Times Than Peace (2003), and Balefires (2007).
With Bill Fawcett, Drake created the Fleet shared world anthologies, with opening anthology The Fleet (1988) followed by five further volumes, and the related Battlestation series.
He produced many titles in collaboration with other authors, though Drake was careful to note that most were written by his named collaborators from his outlines; those co-authors include Roger MacBride Allen, William C. Dietz, Eric Flint, S.M. Stirling, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. He also contributed to shared worlds, including Thieves’ World and Heroes in Hell, and edited or co-edited a number of anthologies.
Drake announced his retirement from writing in 2021, explaining that he had ongoing health problems and couldn’t “concentrate enough to write a novel.”
For more, see his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
I was just wondering what had happened to Drake. I devoured his Slammers writing as a young teen, and it was the first space opera/military science-fiction I’d read that depicted an openly LGBTQ character, in the shape of his feared lieutenant. I’d have to re-read his work to judge it properly in the times we live in, and as an adult with (hopefully) more nuance than I had as a teen, but it was liberating, action-packed skillful writing at its best, at least to me.