Into the Maelstrom - Drake & Lambshead

The eARC is out for my forthcoming novel with David Drake at Baen, for those who collect eARCs. The novel will be out in hardback in March.

There is a review out for the book in the January edition of Publishers Weekly. I have reprinted it below.

Into The Maelstrom is the second novel in The Citizen series.

The way we do these books, if anyone would like to know the mechanics of how two writers work on a novel, is that David writes a very comprehensive plot outline of 20,000 words which detail all the key characters and events which must go in and I then flesh it out and expand it. When I have a draft it goes back to Dave for checking, I rewrite any sections that need changing, and then on to the publisher.

Review.

Into the Maelstrom
David Drake and John Lambshead. Baen, $25
(448p) ISBN 978-1-4767-8028-3

Writing from an outline by Drake,
Lambshead neatly adapts real history to a
science fiction framework in the second
novel of the Citizen trilogy (after Into the
Hinterlands). Among the far-flung colonial
planets of the Cutter Stream, frustration
with home rule verges on revolution.
Allen Allenson takes on the role of captain-
general and leads a squabbling
group of disjointed militias to war. If this
sounds familiar, it is because Drake and
Lambshead are telling the story of George
Washington as a space opera. The
authors’ adept contrivance of the
Continuum, a troublesome energy field
that allows interstellar travel but only via
light vehicles, allows for ingenious renditions:
a battering trip along the
Continuum stands in for the crossing of
the Delaware, and problematic marsh
gases force the army to substitute catapults
and knives for pulse rifles during
the recreation of the siege of Boston.
Surprises are scant, but knowing that Allenson will triumph in Cambridge and
subsequently be defeated in Port Trent in
no way detracts from the enjoyment provided
by this ingeniously structured
retelling. (Mar.)