The work most closely associated with David John Lake in the catalogues of Australian science fiction is his output as a genre writer — fiction composed in English by a man who was simultaneously a scholar of that same language.

Lake was born on 26 March 1929 in Bengaluru, and the broad shape of his life moved from the Indian subcontinent to the southern hemisphere. He was educated at Trinity College, a formation that prepared him for two parallel careers: one as a scholar of English, the other as a writer of science fiction. He became a citizen of Australia, and it was in Brisbane that he spent his later years.

Those two vocations — scholarship and fiction — ran alongside each other throughout his working life. He used English as his medium in both, and his occupation as a scholar of the language sat beside his occupation as a science fiction writer without apparent contradiction. The combination was not unusual among genre writers of his generation, though the specific conjunction of literary scholarship and speculative fiction gave his career a particular character.

Lake died in Brisbane on 31 January 2016, in the city where he had made his life as an Australian citizen. He had been born eighty-six years earlier in Bengaluru, educated at Trinity College, and had carried those origins into a career that encompassed both academic and creative work. That he pursued both the study of English and the writing of science fiction across the span of his adult life, and that he did so as an Australian citizen working in Brisbane, are the coordinates by which his career can be most precisely located.