Robert_A_Woodward wrote:Saknussem wrote:Greetings all,
I've been out of touch (and out of the world) for a long while. But now I'm back home. At last. And permanently! My brother gave me the reissue of "Oath of the War God" with the add-on novella by Brian Dal . . . oops, I mean David Weber. LOL
Unsure how often Mr. Weber reads the boards, but, and if I'm incorrect, please correct me, there was no mention of Brian Daley's wonderful novel "The Doomfarers of Coramonde" as the inspiration for the novella "Sword Brother". Mr. Daley passed away many years ago, but he was a Vietnam veteran, and managed to write several truly excellent pieces of fantasy before he moved on.
Best,
Saknussem
I believe this came up before and, IIRC, David Weber said that he hadn't read _Doomfarers..._. Besides, I believe that the idea wasn't original to Daley.
I hadn't read
Doomfarers then; I have since it was pointed out to me, and I can certainly see where the question arose.
I can't tell you where the idea for my own story originated any more than I can tell you where a great many of my story ideas originate. I doubt most authors could tell you that in every case. Sometimes I can, of course. For example, I well remember sitting on my front steps on a Fall evening and looking up at an absolutely stupendous orange moon near the horizon. And as I looked at it, I thought to myself, "Boy, wouldn't it be cool if Earth didn't really
have a moon? If that was actually a giant alien starship up there, stuck in orbit for millennia? Ooooooh, shiny!" And we all know where
that ended up.
In the case of "Sworsd Brother," there were certain things I wanted to get into Norfressa's DNA in case I ever got to write
Sword of the South, and this is the way I chose to do it. I used Marines because I know a lot of Marines, I like a lot of Marines, and who else are you gonna send on an expeditionary force? And for reasons which are internally important (to my thinking, at least, even if I never get around to explicitly explaining all of it in the books) it was important to me that the character from our universe who I introduced had to be a professional combat soldier [forgive me Marines! I mean it only in the
generic sense; I am not speaking of those souls how put USA after their names!]) who had some heavy karmic burdens of his own.
Actually, this isn't the first time I came up with a story idea that tracked really closely with another story/song. I wrote
Path of the Fury back in 1989 only to discover later that many of the same story elements were involved in a filk song (which I cannot now track down, though I think it was by Leslie Fish) which is also about the survivor of a planet raid who was left for dead and stole a ship to go after the pirates. Indeed, IIRC, at the end, the heroine of the song fully intends to carry through with a suicide run on the flagship of her enemies. There are a lot of
dissimilar elements in there, too, although I can't recall all the details of the song to mind right this minute. I do recall that I liked it --- a
lot --- when my sister-in-law sent me a copy of it a year or so after
Fury released. I don't have the copyright info on Leslie's song (hard to find it when I can't remember the durn thing's name!) and I don't know which came first. I know the book didn't release until late in '92, three years after I'd written it, but I'm hazy on the exact sequence. Even if I wrote the book first, though, I'm totally confident that she produced the song completely independently.
My point is that if you write enough stories, you're going to stumble across the same ideas from time to time. To me, the more interesting aspect of it is how the differing authors used the same ideas differently. For example, if I'm recalling correctly, the track commander from
Doomfarers returns to the alternate universe later, which Gunny Houghton wouldn't even have considered, and I don't recall any deities being involved.
This isn't even the best song on it.