Am I just hoping.

[NotKosh]

Last week was Nirvana. The discovery of an unknown (to me) SF author. It manifested itself in the rapture of a well written book, The Seeker, by Jack McDevitt. Great pace, concept, depth, backstory/detail and enough hard/pseudo-hard SF. Anyways, I quickly hit the used bookstores and picked up some more of the author's work.

Reading "A Talent For War" going through the pages, and just happened to run into (pg 76)
Occasionaly, he speaks of the ships: of the Straczynski and the Morimar..."

And again, page 77
Killed during the action off Randin'hal, while serving on board the Confederate Frigate Straczynski

Anyways, It seemed to be Nirvana. Nothing elevates the heart like a favorite/respected SF author being mentioned by another. First time for me was Niven mentioning a ship named "Heinlein" in World of Ptavvs. JMS used Asimov and others (and I don't think he mentioned Heinlein, the bastard)...

But, I may be wrong. Date of Book is copyright 1989...

Arghhhh.

PS My apologies if this came up before, but a search on "McDevitt" had no hits...

[Shabaz]

A quick search on the front page of this website turned up these two messages:

Actually, it was caused by a charity SFWA auction; I bought the
rights to have a ship named after me in Tom's new book (at that time).
Ed Bryant was the auctioneer, who snared me into a bidding war with a
woman with an even longer name than mine, finally provoking me with, "If
you were a REAL man you'd jump another hundred dollars and shut her down."

I'm such a stooge....

jms

From here. And the other from here:

Yeah, the Starship Straczynski is in Jack's novel as a result of a charity
auction. I could never do it in my own work, but the idea of a starship
with that name was very funny to me, and I held my own in the auction
(this was a long time ago) against a woman with an even longer and more
convoluted name than my own to get that one.


jms

So it does refer to the same Straczynski you were thinking of, although it didn't come about in quite the way you may have been expecting. Still a fun enough story though.

Hope that helps.

[Dr Maturin]

Coming up with ship names is one of the most fun aspects of writing.

[Mike Detlefsen]

I've been a fan of McDevitt's writing since I discovered him back in 1995 or so. I will buy the hardcovers of his stuff when it first hits the shelves. There's a very short list of authors I will do that for.