One of the greatest writers of all time.
Basically created modern military SF. And the Man's sheer RANGE, in writing extremely grounded stories based on his time in vietnam, to his Old Nathan fantasy work, his horror wiriting, his humour! Gods, the man's humour work!, more conventional SF and fantasy and everything in between, plus his work through his small press keeping the pulp alive. What a loss.
The man was an example to Veterans of dealing in a healthy way with your trauma and even turning it to make a profit in a way that reached so many others. His love of the classics, translating latin for *fun* for crying out loud, the man was a legend. His writing inspired me in so many ways and his Hammer's Slammers stories brought me into literary adulthood; they really bring home how tame and sedate most supposedly adult and gritty military SF is in contrast.
As a former interrogator with the 11th ACR in Vietnam, Drake brought a weight and gravitas to his writing that few even approach.
He had this *tic* in his writing, where his characters say "I don't guess" instead of "I don't know". It used to annoy me, but I figured it was a product of where he grew up and how he learned to speak and think and it's grown on me over the years.
One of my favourite BT what-ifs is what if David Drake had written some of the novels in the BTU? Oh, what depth and grounding he could have brought to the canon of fiction here.
But what I'll be forever grateful to David Drake for is that his writing helped me personally get over my own childish distaste for homosexuals through the way he wrote such characters in his various works. To that point, I only saw gay men portrayed as shallow purse-puppies, devoid of any character flaws. They were grating, but also boring. As an autistic person, this new-fangled idea of "Gay-coding" went totally over my head, i'd never have got it. But Drake showed me gay characters with a depth of character I'd never seen before. Real people who could have flaws and even be legitimately feared for the prowess of their character, rather than silly caricatures or untrustworthy fops.
And now I'll never again have the pleasure of another Drake story. This touches me in a way that the deaths of famous people rarely do. One of my greatest joys in plumbing used book stores was to find an anthology with a previously unknown Drake story in it. Those experiences must be all but gone for me now and there will be no more new ones.
Sad, so sad.
I hope only that the man can finally rest and find relief from the last of his demons.
