"David Drake - RCN 05 - Some Golden Harbor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

them. (See above. This was areally good book to archive in distant parts of the country.)

Dorothy and Evan Ladouceur then went over the completed manuscript for mistakes that'd survived my
first two passes. (And believe me, I caught my share of stupid errors).

Besides picking up replacement keyboards (yes, two of them) and the like and feeding me superbly, my
wife Jo provides someone to whom I can burble about the plot problem I'm facing or the neat thing I've
just learned. This is enormously helpful.

Even thoughSome Golden Harbor is a solo novel, it would be significantly less good if I didn't have a
support structure which you literally couldn't buy. This is a blessing whose full extent can be appreciated
only by those few who are similarly fortunate.

Dave Drake
david-drake.com

AUTHOR'S NOTE
I've based the setting ofSome Golden Harbor on political and military events taking place during the
early 5thcentury BC in Southern Italy (Aricia, Cumae, and the Etruscan federation). All right, that's a little
obscure even for me, but I found the discussion of Aristodemus of Cumae in an aside by Dionysius of
Halicarnassus to be an extremely clear account of the rise and eventual fall of an ancient tyrant.

There's more real information here than in the lengthy, tendentious, and generally rhetorical disquisitions
on Coriolanus (a near contemporary, by the way). I suspect that's because Aristodemus is unimportant
except as a footnote to Roman history, whereas Gaius Marcius Coriolanus provided one of the basic
myths of Rome. The real Coriolanus and the real events involving him are buried under a structure of
invention, but nobody had a reason to do that in regard to Aristodemus.

While the basic politico-military situation comes from ancient history, I took most of the business on
Dunbar's World from the South during the American Civil War and the Republicans during the Spanish
Civil War. I've enormously simplified what went on in both cases.

Every time I really dig into a period I learn that what a secondary history gave two lines to was an
incredibly complex business that could've as easily gone the other way. I'm pleased when I meet people
who know any history at all, but I do wish that people who've read only secondary sources (or worse,
have watched a TV show on the subject) would keep in mind that there's a lot beneath the surface of any
major historical event. I want to scream every time I hear someone say something along the lines of,
"Whatreally caused the Roman Civil War was—"

No, it didn't. Nothing that complicated has a single, simple causation. When somebody frames his
statement in those terms (those doing so have invariably been male in my experience), he proves that he
doesn't know enough to discuss the subject.

The scattered human societies I postulate for this series would have many systems of weights and
measures. Rather than try to duplicate that reality and thereby confuse readers without advancing my
story, I've simply put Cinnabar on the English system while the Alliance is Metric. I don't believe either
system will be in use two millennia from now, but regardless: my business is storytelling, not prediction.

Dave Drake