Any fiction that portrays war in SF, since the 1960s, has generally been eliminated from the leading ranks unless it is entirely dedicated to the proposition that war is, in Isaac Asimov's phrase, the last refuge of the incompetent. All military SF became suspect in the 1970s, and most of it was rejected by major portions of the serious readers of literate SF, as advocating war. This was evident at Robert

A. Heinlein's famous guest of honor speech at MidAmericon in Kansas City in 1976,at which he was publicly booed for stating that war was a constant in world history, and that there was every indication that there would continue to be war in the future. At least since that time, much of the literary SF community has unfortunately failed to distinguish portrayal of war from advocacy of war, or to be interested in examining military SF. The literary community even tends to avoid the authors at convention parties. The only leading writer to overcome this has been Joe Haldeman, author of The Forever War, and a majority of his fiction since has not been military SF. And so those authors hang out with their own crew, usually the Baen crew, mostly at conventions in the midwestern and southeastern US, where they are not so easily marginalized.

David Drake was a well-known young horror writer and fan, who published both fantasy and SF in the magazines in the mid-1970s. I knew David fairly well then. He was a young attorney who had served in Vietnam. He was most prominent in horror circles. He was on the editorial board of Stuart David Schiff's distinguished small press horror magazine, Whispers, and co-proprietor, with Karl Edward Wagner and Jim Groce, of Carcosa, a leading small press founded to publish the works of Manly Wade Wellman, who was a mentor to both Wagner and Drake. He was on the first Young Writers panel at the first World Fantasy Convention in 1975. He got a great literary agent, Kirby McCauley, who gathered all the best in the horror field in the 1970s under his aegis. And he soon had a contract to write his first novel, The Dragon Lord, a gritty, realistic Arthurian fantasy.