Onward, Drake! by Mark L van Name

Author:Mark L van Name [Name, Mark L van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781476780962
Amazon: 147678096X
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2015-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

T.C. McCarthy is an award-winning and critically acclaimed southern author whose short fiction has appeared in Story Quarterly, Nature, and in the anthologies Operation Arcana (edited by John Joseph Adams) and War Stories (edited by Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak). His debut novel, Germline, and its sequels, Exogene and Chimera, are available worldwide. In addition to being an author, T.C. is a Ph.D. scientist, a Fulbright Fellow, and a Howard Hughes Biomedical Research Scholar. Visit him at http://www.tcmccarthy.com or watch him on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/therealtcmccarthy/).

At my request, he provided this afterword.

This story, “Saracens,” has nothing obvious to do with David Drake. But it’s all about David Drake. The first time I met him, I had just won the Compton Crook Award and was invited to Mark Van Name’s house for a party, where tons of cool people (mostly fans and aspiring writers) showed up. But there was no sign of Drake—until a few minutes after Mark asked me to give a speech about military science fiction.

That’s when Dave showed up.

So I gave a little talk about how to write, all the while thinking why the hell am I the one giving this speech when David Drake and Mark Van Name are here, IN THE SAME ROOM? I knew all about Hammer’s Slammers; I’m a military gamer with tons of Hammer’s Slammers figures, and my basement workshop looks like a future battlefield in miniature. And I knew all about Mark; his house looks like a museum of science fiction. So that had to be the worst “speech” I’d ever given and I still have no idea what I said.

Little would I know that I’d walk away from that night as friends with Dave and that despite not being able to see him on a frequent or regular basis he would always offer help, advice—whatever I wanted or needed. He isn’t a normal human being; he’s superhuman. Dave is a thoughtful, brilliant, intelligent, guy who has no problem saying exactly what he means and who was built without fear (as far as I can tell).

And that’s why this story has nothing to do with Dave. The first ideas I had for this anthology were imitations of Hammer’s Slammers, or something equally inane, so that it eventually hit me that my story had to be totally unrelated to him; there’s nothing worthy I could write in tribute to someone like Drake. “Saracens” is the result of free association, a reflection and/or mixture of current events in the Middle East and faith, written as well as I could do it and given as an offering to one of the masters of SFF. And then as soon as I turned it in I realized: Mark had done it again. He’d asked me to give another “speech” on military SFF to David Drake.

Thanks, Mark! And cheers, Dave; anyone with half your career is a monumental success.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.