Contents of LACEY AND HIS FRIENDS

I've had a lot of good book covers. I've never had a cover better than Steve Hickman's for this volume.

The three Lacey stories are harsher than anything else I've written. It's probably not a coincidence that I wrote them in the later '70s when I was starting to raise my head up a little. For the first five years or more after I got back to the World I was afraid to do that.

By contrast, Travellers is a gentle, upbeat time travel story, and Time Safari a novella about hunting dinosaurs. Neither one has any heavy emotional baggage for me.

The Lacey stories were successful in a commercial as well as (I believe) a literary sense. I've been asked to do more of them; and have refused, because that's not a place I want my head to go back to.

The thing is, if I hadn't written the stories maybe my head would still be back there.

--Dave Drake