Frequently Asked Questions

I do more collaborations than some writers, less than others.

          As a general rule, I won't do a collaboration just to increase "product," nor will I do one that I'm not going to be fully involved with. If my name is going on the cover of a book, then I'm going to be directly involved in producing what goes between the covers.

          Just about every collaboration I've done has been done because I believed that the final product would be stronger in some ways than either of us would have produced on his or her own. The fact that the final book will be stronger in some ways doesn't necessarily mean that I expect it to be stronger in all ways, but it does mean that my collaborator and I are each going to be bringing different strengths to the table with us.

          I'll do collaborations whenever I think it's going to be a case of combining strengths, rather than reinforcing weaknesses. And I'll do them when I think I can learn something or perhaps teach something along the way. Actually, I'm constantly learning something new even when I do solo novels; when I get a chance to work "inside someone else's head," as it were, the opportunities to learn and improve my craft as a writer are much greater.

          I have to admit that another factor in my deciding to do collaborations is sometimes to tell stories I wouldn't have time to tell entirely on my own. In that sense, I suppose, you could say that I was collaborating with someone else to "increase product," but there's a difference between simply trying to get word count out (and separate your readers from their hard-earned money) and working with someone else to tell a story that you really, really want to tell it simply don't have enough time to tell entirely on your own.

          The Hell's Gate novels are a case in point, and, to be honest, I was unfair to Linda Evans when I started the project. I thought I was going to have a lot more time to devote to it than I turned out having, and I pulled her with me into a series that I simply haven't been able to get back to. Linda brought exactly what I wanted her to bring to the project, but the story is important enough to me that I really need to be hands-on with it at all stages, and I simply don't have the time to do that right now. I should have realized that I wouldn't, and I should have refrained from launching yet another series.

          At the same time, this is definitely a series I intend to get back to as soon as humanly possible. I love the storyline, Linda and I have put a lot of thought into where the series needs to go, I like working with her, and this is a story I've wanted to tell for the next best thing to 20 years. The problem, of course, is when "as soon as humanly possible" is going to come, and all I can say in this case is that I hope it's sooner, rather than later.

UPDATE, 4/2013: Unfortunately, David and his co-author, Linda Evans, have yet to have the chance to begin the third Hell's Gate novel. David appreciates the number of devoted fans who are still interested in the series, and plans to schedule time to work on it later this year.

I really can't answer this one. There are entirely too many writers whose work I currently enjoy or whose work I have enjoyed enormously in the past. I can tell you that writers who clearly had a formative impact on me included Robert Heinlein, H. Beam Piper, "Doc Ed" Smith, Isaac Asimov, Andre Norton, Keith Laumer, and Anne McCaffrey. I learned different things from each of them, of course, and I think that the influence of some of them is probably more readily apparent to a reader than the influence of others. Other people I read and greatly admired in my "formative years" included Theodore Sturgeon, Roger Zelazney, Poul Anderson, Mack Reynolds, James White, John Campbell, Jack Williamson, and quite a few others.

          It's harder to pick favorite authors out of the folks who are writing now, and I am ashamed to say that part of that is because I have so much less time to read than I used to have. Back in the "good old days" (as it were) I tended to polish off at least one novel a day. These days, I'm using up all that "literary energy" writing instead of reading, which is probably my greatest regret as a negative consequence of the success of my own books. I tend to grab books here and there, devour them, then fade back into writing mode, and that leaves me with a sort of . . . out of focus sense of what I've read. There are people who I enormously enjoy reading -- Walter Jon Williams, Steve Stirling, Jon Ringo (when I'm in the mood for a lot of bloodshed), Greg Benford, Patricia McKillip (I think she's one of the finest stylists writing today), Jim Butcher, Katherine Kurtz, Emma Bull, and the list goes on and on. All of them are damned good, and rather than picking an absolute favorite, I tend to just be glad there are so many of them!

          Having said all of the above, I have to admit that I think probably the writer who had the greatest single influence on me in a great many ways (although it took me a while to realize this) was Anne McCaffrey. I'm not trying to downplay the effect that E. E. Smith had on me when it came to giving me a taste for space opera, but it was Anne who truly made me appreciate what goes into successful "world building." I was (I know Anne will forgive me for admitting this) in high school when I read Dragonflight in its original serialized version, and I was deeply impressed by the sense of realness she had managed to give Pern. It was the first time that I'd really sensed the texture of a literary universe, become aware of all the little things that had to fit into place, how a writer had to be careful about making sure that the cultural references of her literary creation remained internally consistent and coherent without slipping into the cultural references of her readers' "real world" experience. There was a real, live planet, with its own indigenous societies and political institutions and histories and art, and when I began to write myself, I realized that all those little bits and pieces had to be fitted together properly. So, in a very real sense, Anne is the literary grandmother of the Honorverse, because she's the one who gave me my own taste for world building in the first place.

          I'm glad that I finally figured that out, and that I had the chance to tell her that. And if anyone out there hasn't read her Pern novels, rectify that fault immediately!

Well, it's been about 15 years, you understand, so some of the details have gotten blurred, I'm sure. Basically, though, what happened was that Jim Baen called me up and pointed out to me that, as he put it, my books were "spawning" again. The problem was that when I did what was supposed to be a stand-alone book, I kept thinking about other things that could be played with, or other points that I thought needed more attention, and so I kept on writing sequels. As Jim pointed out, this meant that any fact I was producing a whole bunch of small series, and he suggested that if I was going to do that anyway, I should probably come up with an idea for a series that was designed from the get-go as such. I think what he was thinking about was that if I did that, I would start putting all of the building blocks in place in an orderly fashion from the outset rather than having to go back and think about back story I hadn't considered with the first novel of an unintentional series. And, I think, there was the notion that if readers knew from the outset that it was going to be an ongoing series, they would be more willing to make the emotional commitment in the protagonist and in the series generally. Not to mention (we are talking about Jim Baen here, after all, bless him) the fact that he felt there would be all sorts of marketing potentials.

          So I sat down and thought up 10 potential series concepts and sent all of them to him. One of them became Honor Harrington; one of them became the Safehold series I'm currently doing with Tor Books; and one of them became the multiverse or Hell's Gate series.

          What I didn't know when I pitched the ideas to Jim was that he had been looking for someone to write an interstellar Horatio Hornblower series for the better part of 20 years. As soon as he read the first sentence of the proposal -- "Honor Harrington is a 6'2" female, Eurasian starship captain in the service of the Star Kingdom of Manticore" -- he basically told Toni Weisskopff "Write him a contract. No, make it two contracts! No! Make it four contracts!" I don't know for certain that he ever read all of the other proposals at all . . . and given the Honorverse's success, I'm not going to complain if he didn't!

          As for the reasoning process that led me to create this particular literary universe, I knew that I wanted to do a military novel, that I wanted it to be about a very long running war, that I wanted to have "good guys" on both sides, and that I wanted it to be of a naval character. I actually started out looking at the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, but I decided that the naval aspects of those wars were too limited. Seapower in those wars was really primarily logistical -- transporting armies and keeping them supplied -- rather than the sort of "command of the sea" warfare in the tradition of Alfred Thayer Mahan that I really wanted to write about. Which, of course, caused me to turn to the wars that Mahan had actually analyzed -- the Napoleonic Wars between the British Empire and Revolutionary and later Imperial France.

          Once I'd chosen my historical template, I sat down and constructed the basic universe: political units, available technologies, naval strategic and tactical doctrines, historical evolution, etc... And, I will confess, I deliberately constructed my navel technological toolbox in a way which would create something with clear parallels between three-dimensional space-going warfare and the two-dimensional broadside warfare of the eighteenth century.

          At any rate, that's how I came up with the idea.

          It would, however, be a mistake to read too much parallelism into the "Honorverse." There are obvious resonances, but although there are some distinct similarities between the People's Republic of Haven and Revolutionary France (and especially between the Jacobins and the Havenite Committee of Public Safety under one Rob S. Pierre), France was never the actual template upon which the People's Republic had been imposed. Mind you, I did my very best to fling out as many red herrings as possible to convince readers that it was, because I didn't want them to see where I really meant to go with the political developments in the series. By making Haven look like Revolutionary France (hence the French names, calling the capital "Nouveau Paris," and a few other minor things of that nature), I conditioned readers who'd picked up on it and who knew their history to expect me to eventually produce the Havenite equivalent of Emperor Napoleon, when in fact I had absolutely no intention of doing anything of the sort.

          In fact, one of the underlying "themes" of the novel is that the Bad Guys™ at the outset of the series never set out to become the Omnivoracity of Evil and never actually thought of themselves that way, either. Besides, I knew they weren't going to be the Bad Guys™ for the entire series, so I was going to have to "redeem" them in the readers' eyes eventually.

          It would also be a mistake to regard the Star Kingdom of Manticore as simply the Kingdom of Great Britain transported into the far reaches of space. Again, there are obvious and clear resonances -- partly as a result of the template I'd used, partly as another example of my intention to focus the readers' attention on one anticipated direction while I actually went in another, and partly because I was interested in playing against the tendency to view republics as the good guys and empires or kingdoms as the bad guys. But there are actually rather more differences between the actual Kingdom of Great Britain and the Star Kingdom of Manticore than there are similarities. Elizabeth III, for example, has far more actual power than any British king since George III (at the very best), if not William and Mary. Or, for that matter, probably since Charles I. In addition, the Star Kingdom was a well-developed constitutional monarchy -- although with significant differences from its British model -- from the moment it came into existence. As a result, most of the political conflict between the various branches and organs of government has taken place in a nonmilitary, purely political arena. In other words, there's never been a Manticoran Civil War to establish where authority truly lies. Moreover, you'd have to go back to a time well before the British Reform Act of 1832 to find a British House of Lords with the sort of power that was deliberately reserved to the Manticoran House of Lords when the Star Kingdom's Constitution was written. For example, the provision that the Prime Minister must come from the House of Lords, rather than the House of Commons, and that the House of Lords is the branch of Parliament which actually holds the power of the purse, is quite different from the model which evolved in Britain following the English Civil War. So, in a functional sense, the Star Kingdom is distinctly different from Great Britain, even if a sort of vague concept of Great Britain which existed only in the minds of the Star Kingdom's Constitution writers did play a significant part in their final product.

I’ve addressed this in part in my previous answers, but let me see if I can give a more complete breakdown here.

The affairs of both houses are affected by the activities of the other in many ways; this is part of the notion of balance of power.

The House of Lords' power is based primarily on the fact that the Prime Minister must be a member of that House and the control of the initiation of finance bills. The House of Commons' power lies in the fact that approval of both houses is required for an act to become law as well as the Commons' ability to amend finance bills before approving them. More to the point for the purposes of this little drama, the House of Commons votes to confirm patents of nobility; no one may become a peer of the SK (and thus a member of the House of Lords) without the approval of the Commons. The ability of the Crown and the Commons to "pack” the Lords by creating new peers favorable to the Crown/Commons side of a dispute with the Lords is limited by two factors:

1. the total membership of the Lords may be increased by a maximum of 10% between general elections
2. the peers may vote to exclude any peer for any reason in its sole discretion, which means that the Lords could simply refuse to seat the peers appointed to "pack" its membership.

NOTE: There are Manticoran peerages which do not grant their holder a seat in the House of Lords. Most of these are "life peerages" granted as a sort of public atta-boy! (or atta-girl!), but some are hereditary. After so long as a monarchy, the Star Kingdom has acquired its own share of idiosyncrasies.

Ultimately, the powers of the Lords trump the power of the Commons, which was precisely how the Founders (who were all about to become nobles under the new Constitution) wanted things set up. What Elizabeth wants to do is to split one of the Lords' twin-barreled "whammy" powers -- the power of the purse -- away from the Lords and hand it to the Commons, thereby promoting a more equal balance of power between the two Houses.

Pavel, the political figure, had no choice. Had he not accepted, he would no longer have been a political figure... period. So, yes, he could have refused, but only at the price of giving up everything he felt he had left in life. If you'll notice, he didn't exactly cover himself in steely-nerved glory when the moment came, and that was largely because his political ambition (i.e., hunger for power) had gotten him into a situation he lacked the intestinal fortitude to face up to. And remember also that he had agreed to a protocol in which he only had to face a single shot from Honor. Yes, as the moment loomed large before him he became more and more aware of his own mortality; at the moment he actually accepted her challenge, the instinctive need to preserve his position of power (and to avoid a situation in which no one in "society" would ever so much as acknowledge his existence once again) overpowered his fear that she would be able to kill him with that one shot. In the event, his nerve snapped, leading to his ignominious demise.

As for why none of Paul's family members or HH's friends challenged Denver, there were two reasons. (1) No one knew where to find him until Georgia slipped the word to Ramirez and McKeon through an intermediary, so no one could challenge him, and (2) Would you really want to be the person who challenged and killed him instead of leaving him for Honor to deal with?