The Army took David Drake (born 1945) from Duke Law School and sent him on a motorized tour of Viet Nam and Cambodia with the 11th Cav, the Blackhorse. He learned new skills, saw interesting sights, and met exotic people who hadn’t run fast enough to get away. Dave returned to become Chapel Hill’s Assistant Town Attorney and to try to put his life back together through fiction making sense of his Army experiences. Dave describes war from where he saw it: the loader’s hatch of a tank in Cambodia. His military experience, combined with his formal education in history and Latin, has made him one of the foremost writers of realistic action SF and fantasy. His bestselling Hammer’s Slammers series is credited with creating the genre of modern Military SF. He often wishes he had a less interesting background. Dave lives with his family in rural North Carolina. You can learn more at his 
Lord of the Isles by David Drake
David Drake has a considerable reputation as a science-fiction writer, but Lord of the Isles was my first introduction to his work. To be frank, it is not a good introduction.
Lord of the Isles begins in the tried-and-tested high fantasy tradition — ancient events outlined in the prologue, cut to the present on a bucolic location, unexceptional adolescent male character introduced, and on you go. The island of Haft in the Isles of the title is then shocked by the appearance of a ship from the past.
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Pretty challenging book. Cut by half, speed up the cadence. Trying to figure out the plot, the main point of…
Thanks for the kind words, Marion! Coming as they are from a professional writer, they are much appreciated!
Wonderful review, Sandy.
The "body count" bothered me a bit less because being dead seemed more like an inconvenience than anything else... unlike…
Detailed, thoughtful review, Bill. I'm going to read it for two reasons. First, Karen Russell wrote it, and second, it…