I loved the RCN series, buddy stories loosely inspired by Jim Baen’s favorite Napoleonic naval novels by Patrick O’Brien, written after Redliners, and thus after some demons had been, if not laid to rest, at least come to terms with. If you want to read one book to get a feel for his work, this is it. Redliners, another the quintessential volume of military SF, and Dave in a very different mode. The standalone novel Starliner was one of them, pure adventure science fiction and as light and carefree as Dave ever got. Still, I had my favorites among his literary works. I enjoyed everything Dave wrote, from his chatty reports on foreign travels, to his thoughtful Christmas cards. Jim continued to publish Dave everywhere he went: first Ace, then Tor, then Baen. The modern subgenre of military science fiction accreted around the core of Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers stories, those that Jim Baen first published in Galaxy magazine, and then at Ace, with an introduction by Jerry Pournelle. Of course, that wasn’t what he was best known for. He was appreciative of gallows humor we published two volumes of his humorous stories at Baen starting with All the Way to the Gallows. If he were here, I’d be tempted to tell him that he took that whole “day of rest” thing a little too far. . . . He passed away peacefully this weekend, on Sunday, in fact. A note on the passing of David Drake, from Baen Publisher Toni Weisskopf:ĭave Drake was my friend, and my colleague, for more than three decades.
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