World Fantasy Award winner David Drake (b.1945) died on December 10. He had announced his retirement from writing in 2021, citing cognitive health issues.
Drake is perhaps best known for his Hammers Slammers series. Beginning with the story “Under the Hammer,” in 1974, the series ran to several novels and short stories and established Drake as a major military science fiction author. Subsequent military science fiction series included the RCN series, the ARC Riders duology written with Janet Morris, The General series, written with S.M. Stirling, Eric Flint, and Tony Daniels, and The Time of Heroes trilogy.
He also wrote fantasy, appearing in three of the Thieves World anthologies and writing the Thieves World novel Dagger (1988). He wrote the Lord of the Isles series and with Eric Flint wrote the Belisarius series.
Drake mentored many authors and according to Drake, for many of the books he officially co-authored, his role was to provide outlines or plots to other authors and then to sit back to see what they did with the original idea.
In addition to his own fiction, he co-edited ten anthologies, working with Martin H. Greenberg, Charles G. Waugh, Sandra Miesel, Billie Sue Mosiman, Jim Baen, and Eric Flint. Although most of his anthologies were reprints, Armageddon, co-edited with Mosiman, contained original stories.
While studying law at Duke University, Drake was drafted into the army and served for two years in Vietnam and Cambodia. He spent the rest of the 1970s serving as an assistant town attorney in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
In 1976, Drake received the World Fantasy Special Award, Non-Professional for his work with Carcosa, a specialty publishing company he formed with Karl Edward Wagner and Jim Groce. They created the house in 1973 fearing that Arkham House would stop publishing following the death of August Derleth. Carcosa published four volumes between 1973 and 1981, including two collections by Manly Wade Wellman, one by E. Hoffman Price, and one by Hugh B. Cave.
Drake was also nominated for the World Fantasy Award for his short story “The Barrow Troll.” He was nominated for the Wellman Award four times between 2014 and 2017. In 1984, he was awarded the Phoenix Award for the work he did in support of Southern Fandom. He was a special guest at the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, NY in 2015.
His family have posted a notice on his website and details of a charity to donate to, should you wish to:
Obituary by Steven H Silver – http://www.stevenhsilver.com
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