Dave Freer

Dave Freer is a South African-born science fiction and fantasy author who has lived in Australia, most recently on Flinders Island in Tasmania, for well over a decade. Before writing full-time he worked as a marine biologist, and that hands-on background shows up throughout his fiction in a taste for practical problem-solving heroes and settings grounded in real physical detail rather than pure abstraction. He's built much of his career on close collaboration with other Baen Books regulars, pairing his own dry, often comic sensibility with co-writers including Eric Flint, Mercedes Lackey, and others across a range of humorous fantasy and alternate-history projects; his solo and co-written work has continued to earn genre recognition into 2026, including a Prometheus Award for young-adult fiction.

In this catalogue, Freer is credited on all six novels of the Heirs of Alexandria series, the alternate-history fantasy he co-created with Mercedes Lackey and Eric Flint. He's the constant thread across the whole series -- present on every book including A Mankind Witch, a lower-stakes side volume he wrote entirely on his own between the series' first two entries, and All the Plagues of Hell, which he and Flint wrote together after Lackey stepped back. Readers who like his contribution to the main trilogy books should find A Mankind Witch a good showcase for his solo voice specifically.