Voyage Across the Stars

Voyage
Across
the
Stars

DAVID
DRAKE

The RCN Series

With the Lightnings

Lt. Leary, Commanding

The Far Side of the Stars

The Way to Glory

Some Golden Harbor

When the Tide Rises

In the Stormy Red Sky

What Distant Deeps

The Road of Danger

(forthcoming)

Hammer’s Slammers

The Tank Lords

Caught in the Crossfire

The Butcher’s Bill

The Sharp End

The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, Vol. 1
(omnibus)

The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, Vol. 2
(omnibus)

The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, Vol. 3
(omnibus)

Independent Novels
and Collections

The Reaches Trilogy

Seas of Venus

Foreign Legions,
David Drake,
ed.

Ranks of Bronze

Cross the Stars

Loose Cannon

Northworld Trilogy

Patriots

Redliners

Starliner

All the Way to the Gallows

Grimmer Than Hell

Into the Hinterlands
(with John Lambshead)

Voyage Across the Stars
(omnibus)

The General Series

Warlord
with S.M. Stirling (omnibus)

Conqueror
with S.M. Stirling (omnibus)

The Chosen
with S.M. Stirling

The Reformer
with S.M. Stirling

The Tyrant
with Eric Flint

The Belisarius Series
with Eric Flint

An Oblique Approach

In the Heart of Darkness

Belisarius I: Thunder Before Dawn
(omnibus)

Destiny’s Shield

Fortune’s Stroke

Belisarius II: Storm at Noontide
(omnibus)

The Tide of Victory

The Dance of Time

Belisarius III: The Flames of Sunset
(omnibus)

Edited by David Drake

The World Turned Upside Down
(with Jim Baen & Eric Flint)

They still call to us, the old stories. Cocooned in our air-conditioned, insulated buildings dozens of feet from the earth, the sky obscured, we still hear the ancient tales and in them we can still remember who we were. The human hero, caught between the monsters and the gods, uses courage, strength and boldness to restore the fundamental order. This satisfies our deepest sense of justice, of virtue.

That in our time, courage, strength and boldness seem to have priced themselves out of the virtue market makes this kind of exercise even more valuable. From Joyce to the Coen Brothers the story of Odysseus comes at us from all angles, and the story of the Argonauts appeals ever more to the special-effects-besotted movies.

In the hands of a master like David Drake the old tales echo with unexpected meanings and analogies, a sly reference to a rosy fingered dawn, the monster with fewer than two eyes. His own monsters are sensational, as always. Nobody does monsters better than David Drake; they are forever bursting terrifically up from the sea or out of the earth itself, all spines and tentacles and horrible teeth.

Much of the delight of these two works is the way Drake manipulates the original to fit his space-opera setting, like the evolution of the Golden Fleece into some kind of instantaneous transporter, in
The Voyage
, or any of the weird worlds in
Cross the Stars
that mark Don Slade’s desperate struggle to get home. These are gifts of a resourceful mind conversant in both worlds, and illuminate both: the magical elements of the Greek myth become a technological marvel in the space-opera and you see how both fit into their cultures’ value systems.

The deeper message is in the differences between the Greeks and us, because Don Slade may seem to be operating in some parallel universe, but these books, like all fiction, are ultimately about us, about our moral universe.

The Greek gods control what happens in both the originating myths. These gods are real, are outside human existence, are other. The moral dilemmas they represent are beyond the ability of mortals to address; the order which determines right or wrong belongs to the gods, not to men.

So the Greeks needed to purge the common mind of terror and pity, but not guilt.

The modern world has turned that all inside, and made the irreconcilable demands of life into a constant test, and one we often fail. Exchanging magic for technology makes the human hero suddenly liable for a lot more. Now we’re alone, and the monsters are still there, in the dark, rising furious from the depths. Drake roars back through his indomitable heroes, he blasts out his rockets of words, but the monsters never die. As he says of Don Slade, “they are part of what had forged him,” and all of us, those monsters from within. But we are our own gods now, and we can’t escape.

Cecelia Holland

This volume collects
Cross the Stars
and
The Voyage
, two cases where I recast an Ancient Greek epic as an SF adventure novel (a space opera). My undergraduate (double) majors were History and Latin, so that may seem an obvious thing for me to try; in fact it wasn’t. (I’ve missed seeing a lot of things that seem obvious after the fact.)

In 1980, I quit lawyering and was driving a bus for the Town of Chapel Hill. While sitting in the bus garage between runs, I wrote a letter to a friend in which I commented that the
Odyssey
could be rewritten as a Western, though of course I didn’t write Westerns. As the words came off my pen, it struck me that I
did
write SF; what was true for a horse opera would probably work for a space opera as well.

Nothing happened for a few months. Then Jim Baen called and offered me a two-book contract: a big book for $10K and a little book for $7,500. I said “Yes!” immediately. (I’ve done a lot of dumb things, but I was never dumb enough to turn
that
down. I made $6,100 during my year of bus driving).

Then, because at the time both Jim and I thought that we ought to know what the books would be about, I said the big book would be what became
Birds of Prey
(my working title was
The Warm Summer Rain
; note what I said above about doing a lot of dumb things) and the little book would be a rewrite of the
Odyssey
. That was off the top of my head, but it seemed like a good idea on reflection also. (Almost immediately thereafter I became a full-time writer, though the decision didn’t have as direct a connection as it may seem to.)

I wrote
Birds of Prey
first (I had been trying to write it for more than a decade). Then I reread the
Odyssey
(for the umpteenth time, of course), making a précis of everything that happened in it.

Until I made the précis, I didn’t have a real understanding of the way the
Odyssey
is paced and connected. Almost all the incidents which people (myself included until then) think of as being the
Odyssey
occur in one book: after dinner on the island of Scheria, Odysseus recounts to his hosts the things he claims have happened to him since he left Troy. Homer doesn’t tell the reader about the Cyclops: that’s a story which Odysseus tells to King Alcinous and his other guests.

I mentioned this development to Jim in one of our regular phone calls. “But you don’t have to do it that way,” he said.

Which took me aback. Of course I had to do it that way! It’s that way in the original.

Then I actually thought about the situation instead of just reacting. I wasn’t going to be graded on my understanding of the
Odyssey
; my present job was to tell a good story in English. That meant the
form
of the story had to be translated, as surely as the language in which I told it.

This was a typical case in which I benefited from being Jim Baen’s friend (because we were chatting as friends, not as editor and writer). There were many similar instances on both sides. Over the years, Jim and I saved one another from ourselves as a regular thing.

I already understood that I would have to adapt the incidents of the
Odyssey
functionally, not simply copy them. A one-eyed giant is a credible threat to an Iron Age chieftain, but such a creature doesn’t read the same in relation to the commander of a high-tech combat unit.

Finally, I had to allow for cultural as well as technological differences. Odysseus caps his victory by slowly strangling—the process is described in some detail—the female servants who have been sleeping with Penelope’s suitors.

This is only one example (although a pretty striking one) of normal behavior in an Iron Age culture which is unacceptable in a society that I (or anybody I want as a reader) would choose to live in. I might’ve been stupid enough to follow the structure of an ancient epic in a modern space opera, but I wasn’t going to describe a hero with the worldview of a death camp guard.

Adapting the
Odyssey
was the second most important lesson I got writing. (The
most
important was learning that I needed to outline.)

Since
Cross the Stars
I use the same process on all material, historical as well as fiction. First I consider the requirements of my medium; space opera, military SF, and fantasy all start from different assumptions. Then I look at the functional effect of every element of the original.