"David Drake - Hammer's Slammers 15 - Grimmer Than Hell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

A friend once suggested that the Lacey stories were even clearer descriptions of how I felt about Viet
Nam and what I'd become there than the Hammer stories I was writing at the same time. She may have
 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html




been right.

I don't want to get back into that mindset, but neither did I want to turn the setting into a shared universe.
Lacey is, if you'll forgive me, a more personal Hell than that.

The original collection,Lacey and His Friends (with an absolutely wonderful Steve Hickman cover, by
the way), bound in a couple novellas which showed the kinder, gentler, David Drake. Thereis a kinder,
gentler David Drake; but I'm not as defensive as I used to be about the other parts of me, and they're
real too.

The remaining pieces in the present collection are close in tone to the Lacey stories. They're military SF
of one sort or another, though "or another" covers a pretty wide range.

Three are odd-balls. Billie Sue Mosiman and I edited an original anthology titled (and about)
Armageddon . I wrote "With the Sword He Must Be Slain" for that volume.

Steve Stirling's Draka series is set in an alternate universe in which Evil wins. Steve turned the setting into
a shared universe with the volumeDrakas! and asked me to contribute.

Evil doesn't win in my books (well, I'll admit it's sometimes hard to pick the good guys) and I was a little
uncomfortable with the assignment, but Steve's a friend and has written stories for me. If I'd known he
wasn't going to do a story for his own collection, I might have begged off; but I didn't, and "The
Tradesmen"resulted. It has a very dense structure, so much so that my outline amounted to 60% of the
wordage of the finished story. As a piece of craftsmanship, I'm proud of it.

"Coming Up Against It"had a very strange genesis. Bill Fawcett got a deal for the two of us to consult on
backgrounds for a computer game, for which we'd be paid an absurdly large amount of money. Part of
the deal was that I would write a story in the game universe for binding in with the game. I wrote the
story.

We did commentary on the initial background and sent it in. The new version came back to us, not a
refinement but a totally new scenario. We did more commentary. The response was yet again a totally
new scenario. I don't recall how many iterations we went through on this, but I do remember that I was
getting steamed. (I later heard the rumor that somebody in the company was keeping the meter running
as a favor to the outside contractor doing the scenarios, a buddy who'd fallen on hard times.)

My story, "Coming Up Against It," was based on a situation that was edited out of the game early in the
process. I didn't even think I had a copy of the story (I'd tried to put the whole business out of my head;
I wasreally angry about being dicked around), but it showed up while I was searching for other things. It
appears here for the first time.

And by the way, this is a prime example of a deal that was too good to be true turning out to be too
good to be true.