
David Drake died this week.
I never knew the man, missed my few chances to meet him, and never made use of my contacts to pass along the simple "thank you" that I should have.
And I should have. Virtually every book the man wrote was a masterclass in storytelling. While I certainly have not read all of his books (he was admirably prolific), I have yet to read one that did not teach me something about writing or storytelling.
His prose style is one that every writer should study and understand, and most should aim to emulate it. Drake did not write flowery prose, nor the sort of show-offy prose that sets academic hearts all a-flutter. He wrote clear prose, and almost always managed to put entire scenes into the reader's head in fewer words than should be possible. With a sentence or a short paragraph, he could put an entire city or landscape into your mind's eye.
He generally credited his clear, efficient style to his knowledge of the classics. In one interview, he explained how Ovid could, in a single line of poetry, give you the entirety of a character, then do it again the next line for another character. He then, rather humorously, noted that studying Ovid was why he could write "the spaceship blew up real good" so many different ways, and the readers always liked it.
By all rights, David Drake should have been given the Damon Knight Memorial Grandmaster Award.
He also should have had a Hugo or two, and a Nebula or two, sitting on his shelves. But he was never nominated for either award, let alone the Grandmaster. He did get nominated, twice, and won once, for the World Fantasy Award. But that was in 1975 and 1976. After that, nothing.
Drake was an early victim of the political infestation of the culture by the toxic left. (And it is worthwhile to note, I have read any number of his books, and have no idea what his personal politics were.) The sin that Drake committed was to present soldiers sympathetically in his Hammer's Slammers series of stories, when the Only Acceptable Portrayal at the time was soldiers as mindless baby-killers.
Drake sometimes mentioned this in interviews, saying that the book publication of the first Slammers collection was what destroyed his chances of ever winning any awards. He never mentioned any names, not even oblique hints, as to who was responsible. But it is clear that it was not an accident.
Still, he kept on writing, because at the very least Jim Baen knew his books would sell. And it got to the point that snobbish Brit John Clute, in his Encyclopedia of Science Fiction in 1993, lamented:
Today there seems very little to stop [Drake] from writing exactly what he wishes to write.
You know. Just in case you thought the will to censorship on the left was something recent.
If you've not read Drake before, there are a lot of books where you could begin. For pure entertainment, I recommend either Lord of the Isles if you like high fantasy, or With the Lightnings if your tastes run to space opera.
Or, if you want to see most of his major concerns in one "accidental masterpiece" (he insisted he was only writing a space adventure story, but it is so, so much more), read Redliners. It's brutal, but excellent.