Had David Drake said publicly if his Lt Leary series is a deliberate take off of either Hornblower or Jack Aubrey? It seems to have elements of both.
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Wikipedia flat-out says that Drake's referred to the series as a "scifi version of the Aubrey/Maturin series" but it doesn't actually cite that quote.– SpaceWolf1701Commented Dec 19, 2020 at 20:46
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I would have tagged this with 'David Drake', but there doesn't seem to be such a tag?– Vaughn OhlmanCommented Dec 21, 2020 at 2:20
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On his own website, Drake repeatedly cites the Aubrey/Maturin novels as the inspiration for his own RCN books.
The genesis of my RCN novels was Patrick O’Brian’s wonderful Aubrey/Maturin series, set during and after the Napoleonic Wars. It therefore won’t surprise many of you to find a number of plot points common to O’Brian’s last novels and When the Tide Rises.
He claims that he wasn't inspired by the Hornblower books, although they were present in his house when he was growing up, so it's very likely that he's at least read them.
Some reviews have referred to my Leary/Mundy series as an SF version of Hornblower. That’s not correct; I did an SF version of the Aubrey/Maturin series, Patrick O’Brian’s superb knockoff of Forester’s Hornblower. (If you want an SF version of Hornblower, Dave Weber and David Feintuch both do excellent but conceptually distinct takes on that paradigm.)
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1And if you base something on a knockoff, by default it's probably going to have elements associated with the original. Commented Dec 19, 2020 at 21:13
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There are definitely elements of Hornblower in some of them... but rather mild. The 'crazy captain', for example... which our hero manages to 'kill' is present in both of those series. Commented Dec 21, 2020 at 2:17