Eating Authors: S. M. Stirling

Hello, and welcome to the first installment of EATING AUTHORS for 2013. Joining us for this year’s inaugural is S. M. Stirling, who’s written so many books he’s making the rest of us look bad. I refer of course to his alternate history Draka series (Marching Through Georgia, Under the Yoke, The Stone Dogs, and Drakon), as well as his two (seriously, two!) alternate history / time travel Nantucket series (Island in the Sea of Time, Against the Tide of Years, and On the Oceans of Eternity) and Emberverse series (Dies the Fire, The Protector’s War, A Meeting at Corvallis, The Sunrise Lands, The Scourge of God, The Sword of the Lady, The High King of Montival, The Tears of the Sun, and Lord of Mountains). And that’s not even counting the various series of books he’s done with other authors including David Drake, Jerry Pournelle, and the late, great James Doohan. But my favorite is his two book homage to the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Lords of Creation (The Sky People and In the Courts of the Crimson Kings). I keep hoping for a third book in that set, but clearly the man is a mite busy.

Just to be clear, that’s not all of his books (or even all of his series), but as we’re already a bit heavy on the links in the above paragraph let’s move on. We’ll balance it out with a short but stylish response to the classic question that defines this blog feature.

LMS: Welcome, Stephen. Would you kindly start our new year out right by sharing the tale of your most memorable meal?

SMS: Well, “most memorable”… meal I was having an ordinary upstate New York prime rib at a convention (dinner laid on for the pros) and then tasted the wine. It was remarkably good for that setting, so I checked the bottle.

Chateau Lafite Rothschild. Vintage of 1917.

It turned out a guy on the con-com had gotten a crate of it from his father and supplied a bottle to each of the pros… without telling us.

I nearly vapor-locked.