David Carrico Books in Order

If you want Ring of Fire through music and culture: The Muse of Music → 1636: The Devil's Opera
If you want Carrico’s darker Magdeburg stories: Letters From Gronow → Magdeburg Noir
If you want big-ship military science fiction: The Span of Empire
If you want classic dragon adventure: The Dragon's Boy → The Dragon’s Apprentice
If you want darker fantasy outside his shared universes: A Song of Passing → Blood’s Call → The Blood Is the Life

David Carrico grew up in a military family, so moving from place to place was normal from the start. He spent the biggest stretch of his childhood just south of Fairbanks, Alaska, and later graduated from high school in Miami, Florida. Science fiction and fantasy got hold of him early, especially after he discovered Andre Norton in sixth grade.

Writing came early, but publication took time. Carrico studied Music Theory and Composition at Oklahoma Baptist University, then earned his living for years in land and legal work for energy companies instead of in the arts. That mix, serious music on one side, practical day-job experience on the other, helps explain why his fiction often feels both imaginative and grounded.

His first professional sale arrived in 2004, when The Grantville Gazette bought one of his stories set in Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire universe. That sale turned into a long-running creative home. He kept returning to the setting in stories, anthologies, and later books, building a corner of the series where music, crime, politics, and everyday work all matter.

Music matters in Carrico’s fiction.

You can see that in 1635: Music and Murder, a collection that explores what happens when seventeenth-century Europe collides with new instruments, new sounds, and new ways of listening. He kept widening that thread in The Muse of Music, 1636: Flight of the Nightingale, and 1636: The Devil's Opera, where performers, composers, and political pressure all share the stage.

Carrico also has a strong feel for investigation and city life. Magdeburg Noir and Letters From Gronow show that side well, one through crime and social disorder in a fast-changing city, the other through a young aspiring writer chasing publication in a world suddenly open to strange new kinds of fiction.

He does not stay in one lane for long.

With Eric Flint, he also moved into space opera in The Span of Empire, an entry in the Jao Empire series about humans and aliens searching the galaxy for allies against the genocidal Ekhat. The book was nominated for the 2017 Dragon Award for Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy novel, a clear sign that his work had reached well beyond short fiction and shared-world stories.

In fantasy, books like The Dragon's Boy and The Dragon’s Apprentice lean into dragons, apprenticeship, and the kind of adventure story that starts with curiosity and widens into real danger. More recently, The Blood Is the Life takes a very different path, following an observant Orthodox Jewish young man who is turned into a vampire and has to make sense of faith, identity, and survival all at once.

Across all of this, Carrico seems drawn to people learning how to live through upheaval. Musicians, detectives, apprentices, editors, soldiers, and ordinary citizens show up again and again. Even when the stakes are huge, civil unrest, war, supernatural danger, or threats on a galactic scale, he keeps one foot in the human side of the story. He has also published work in Jim Baen’s Universe, and his author biography says he lives in Oklahoma, near his three grown children.