He left Britannica in 1973 to write full time, moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

In 1968 The Broken Lands began a trilogy of fantasy novels finished in 1973 and gathered as The Empire of the East. Science fiction writers will argue interminably about the definition of their genre in his position with Britannica, Saberhagen wound up writing the encyclopaedia's definition of it. At that point, Saberhagen took a job with the Encyclopaedia Britannica, writing and editing entries on science and technology. His first novel, The Golden People, was published in 1964, and the first Berserker book, a collection of stories, in 1967. He was 30 before he sold his first story, Volume Paa-Pyx, which appeared in Galaxy magazine in 1961.

After serving in the US air force, he worked as a civilian technician for it. 'It was just eight weeks of well-paid fun,' he said, 'but nothing to do with my own books.' Saberhagen would later team Dracula with historical figures such as Napoleon, and fictional ones such as Sherlock Holmes, but his biggest success came with the novelisation of Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 movie, Dracula. The first in the series, The Dracula Tape (1975), predated Anne Rice's Interview With a Vampire by a year. Saberhagen wondered what the vampire himself would be thinking about the whole business. His inspiration came while re-reading Bram Stoker's original and realising Dracula's presence was largely offstage. Although never a celebrity figure within the world of science fiction, Saberhagen was often ahead of trends that others made bigger, particularly with his 10-novel Dracula series, in which the vampire count was the hero.

The Dracula Tape by Fred Saberhagen