Dave Freer

Dave Freer is a South African–born, Australian-based, award-winning science fiction author writing mostly humorous or alternate history novels.

Biography Freer was born and educated in South Africa, where he grew up on the outskirts of a city next to a 500-acre nature preserve of coastal bush. His father worked as a member on a commercial fishing boat on weekends. After a stint in boarding school, where he learned "smoking, strong drink and pursuit of wild women", he was conscripted at the age of 17 into the South African Defence Force and deployed to the Angolan border as a medic (his last choice). Recalling the experience, he noted, "My choices were five years in jail, leave the country, or go in for a year. I'm a strong swimmer, but the Atlantic seemed too large...."

Dave has his own forum at Baen's Bar, a website, His literary agent in the United States is the OnyxHawk agency.

Awards His 2008 Novel, Slow Train to Arcturus, won the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novel in the Preditors & Editors Readers Poll 2008.

In 2022 he published Cloud-Castles, which won a Prometheus Award. 0-671-57831-6 Crawlspace, military/social satire, with Eric Flint in JBU1.6 and in Best of JBU 2007 Slow Train to Arcturus, with Eric Flint (Baen 2008) 978-1-4165-5585-8, winner of the Preditors & Editors Readers Poll 2008 for SF/F novel Stardogs (Magic Isle Press 2014) 978-0992549008 Joy Cometh With The Mourning (Magic Isle Press 2014) 978-0992549022, a non-science fiction mystery. Changeling's Island (Baen 2016) 978-1476781204 Tom (Magic Isle Press 2016) 978-0992549039 Cloud-Castles (Magic Isle Press 2022) 978-0992549053, Prometheus Award winner

Short stories "Genie out of the Vat", military SF, in Adventures in Far Futures (Baen 2005), edited by T. Weisskoph 978-0743498876 "The Red Fiddler", with Eric Flint, in Bedlam's Edge Techno for Baen, 2005), edited by Rosemary Edghill and Mercedes Lackey. "Candyblossom" in Probe (SASF magazine) (2006), in JBU Volume 1.1, and in The Best of JBU 2006 "The Tinta Falls Catfish" (Fish II), with Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis, in JBU Volume 1.2 (2006) "Flashing the Loch Ness Monster" (Fish III), with Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis, in JBU Volume 1.3 (2006) "Thin Ice" in JBU Volume 2.1 (2007) "The Yellow Submarine" (Fish VIII), with Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis, in JBU Volume 2.2 (2007) "Love at First Bite" (Fish XI), with Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis, in JBU Volume 2.3 (2007) "Jack October" in Fates Fantastic Anthology (Techno 2007), edited by Dan Hoyt "The End of Mankind" (Fish XIII), with Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis, in JBU Volume 2.5 (2008) Regency Fay in Something Magic This Way Comes (DAW 2008), edited by Sarah Hoyt "Boys" in The Future We Never Had (DAW 2008), edited by Rebecca Lickiss "Wetware 2.0" in Transhuman (Baen 2008), and in Approaching the Singularity Anthology (Baen), edited by Mark L. Van Name and Toni Weisskoph "The Witch's Murder", with Eric Flint, in The Dragon Done It (Baen 2008), edited by Mike Resnick and Eric Flint "The War, Me, Seventeen Million Dollars, and a Stripper", in Front Lines (Techno 2008), edited by Denise Little "The Poet Gnawreate and the Taxman" in Better Off Undead (Techno 2008), edited by Daniel M. Hoyt "Pirates of the Suara Sea", with Eric Flint, in Black Sails, Fast Ships (Nightshade 2008), edited by Jeff Vander Meer "Soot" in Witch Way to the Mall (Techno for Baen 2009), edited by Esther Friesner "Wolfy Ladies" in Strip Mauled (Baen 2009), edited by Esther Friesner "If Music be the Food of Love" in Fangs for the Mammaries (Baen 2010), edited by Esther Friesner "Pinked Djinn" in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine 42 (2010), edited by Edwina Harvey "Neither Sleet, Nor Snow, Nor Alien Monsters" in Citizens (Baen 2010), edited by John Ringo and Brian M. Thompson "Like Ghost Cat and a Dragon's Dog" in Free Short Stories 2012 (Baen 2012).