"David Drake - Hammer's Slammers 10 - Paying The Piper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

813'.54тАФdc21
2002018522

Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH
Printed in the United States of America

DEDICATION
To Larry Barnthouse, who long ago as another 96C2L94 was
missed by all the same bullets that missed me.


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book involved computer adventures unusual even for me, The Man Who Kills Computers. (Three
dead within two weeks.) My son Jonathan, Mark Van Name, Karen Zimmerman, Allyn Vogel, and my
wife Jo, were of particular importance in making it possible for me to continue working.

This book required a lot of attention by Dan Breen, my first reader. I'm very fortunate to have him.



A BACKGROUND NOTE
I've always found it easier to use real settings and cultures than to invent my own. No matter how good a
writer's imagination, the six or seven millennia of available human history can do a better job of creating
backgrounds.

More than ten years ago I finally took the advice my friends Jim Baen and Mark Van Name had been
giving me and did an afterword, explaining where I got the details of the book I'd just completed. I'd
resisted this, feeling that it was bad artтАФthe book should explain itselfтАФand anyway, it was unnecessary.
It was obvious to any reader that I was using historical and mythological backgrounds, so why should I
bother to tell them?

It still may be bad art, and I may have been correct about readers in general seeing what I was doing
without me telling them explicitly, but reviewers suddenly discovered that my fiction utilizes literary,
historical and mythological material. I've kept up the practice, though generally not with straight Military
SF like the Hammer seriesтАФbut in this case I thought it might be useful, because the background I've
used is from a backwater of history.

The Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the 3rd century bc was a very complex region. The three
empires founded by the successors of Alexander the Great were collapsing. They were locally powerful,
but none was a superpower. Usurpers and secessionists complicated their politics.
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