Memorial Day
This post is a long one, simply because Neil knows a lot of people. The curse of knowing a lot of people is that eventually, you lose some of those people. I'm sure he's lost more than he's mentioned on his blog, but he takes the time to remember quite a few of them there, and it always causes me to take pause. Take a few moments a learn a little more about some of these folks, the marks they made, the lives they led.
Remember those who have passed on before us.
“Too many deaths. Too many people I know. Too many names that come with memories.Locus :George Alec Effinger is dead -- He wrote a wonderful story for the Sandman Book of Dreams, a Little Nemo in Slumberland pastiche. We had several meals in good restaurants, always discovered and recommended by him, and would discuss rewriting famous books from the points of view of more interesting characters than the ones who told them originally. I didn't know him well, but I knew him as the partner of a friend, and we'd make a point of getting together, eating and chatting, at conventions. No more.
And two entries down, on the same page, I learn that Joan Harrison, author Harry Harrison's wife, has died. I've not seen Joan or Harry for over a decade, but I first interviewed Harry for Knave in about 1984, in London's Natural History Museum for reasons that escape me now, and Harry wrote the introduction to Ghastly Beyond Belief, and I knew them both socially, and liked them both very much, when I lived south of London and they lived mostly in Ireland. Joan was the kind of person who made you feel, instantly, like family, if she liked you, and she liked me. When they'd talk about the famous SF people of the 40s, 50s and 60s, she was the one who'd say things like, "Well, of course his wife left him, and I couldn't blame her, it was just after that party, the one where he hit Bob Sheckley with a glass ashtray, you remember, Harry?" giving me a much more interesting and personal version of the history of the Science Fiction field than I might otherwise have had.
I remember when reading the Year's End Obituaries, in the Year's Best Fantasy or SF collections, I'd be looking at a list of names, which often meant something in terms of the work but nothing as people. These days they're all too often people I know.”
-- Neil Gaiman 04/30/02
“I was going to write a quick late at night journal entry, about a long day at the World Fantasy Con (3 panels -- Punch and Judy (fun), Role Models in Children's Fiction (interesting) and Gods and Monsters (weird but interesting) and lots of food and friends) but then I got in and turned on the computer and learned that Charles Sheffield's died. We met 18 months ago at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the arts and liked each other much and talked poetry and english history and literature together and haven't seen each other since, and now we won't.”
-- Neil Gaiman 11/03/02
“Bill Liebowitz owned and founded Golden Apple on Melrose, a comics-and-entertainment store. I've known Bill and his wife Sharon since I did my first signing in one of their stores in 1989. He was a good man, he really enjoyed what he did and loved the medium of comics as much as he loved yo-yos. (He gave my son his first yo-yo.) He did good things for the CBLDF, and long after I'd pretty much stopped doing signings in Comic Shops I kept on doing signings and events for Bill, because he was unique and so was Golden Apple.
He died yesterday, and is already much-missed, not least by me.
Mark Evanier has an appreciation of Bill, and a photo. http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2004_10_27.html#009147 (In the photo, Bill is the one who isn't blonde.)”
-- Neil Gaiman 10/28/04
“When I was fifteen going on sixteen, John Peel actually played punk bands on the radio, back when it didn't seem like anyone else did. That was when I'd start listening, and apart from discovering bands like the Undertones, I'd also hear things like "Sir Henry and Rawlinson's End" and songs by Tom Lehrer or John Cooper Clarke reading "Beasley Street". Definitely broadened my horizons. But mostly I'm sad because he was the kind of broadcaster who treated the listener as a friend, so you felt that you knew him.
”Note to not-English people: you can read about John Peel's death at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/news/altnews/041026_john_peel.shtml?rhppromo
And I'm pretty sure that Radio 1 and Radio 4 will both be doing the sort of tributes to him that will give you a good idea why he was that loved. (Although you needed him to be part of your life for most of it to really get it.)”
-- Neil Gaiman 10/26/04
“And, according to Locus, Damon Knight is dead. I only met him once, with Kate Wilhelm in New Orleans, but we were on GEnie together, and as I was growing up I read what Damon wrote, edited and criticised. On GEnie, I was always conscious that this was Damon Knight, and if he was crusty and persinickety, then he'd earned the right to be crusty and persnickety, and he was astonishingly perceptive as well. He sent me a copy of his novel, Humpty Dumpty, in ms. form, to offer any input, and I never sent back any input because I couldn't think of anything to say.”
-- Neil Gaiman 04/16/02
“I can go and look at an entry like this one -- http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2002/04/you-know-if-i-wasnt-completely-tired.asp -- and remind myself how incredibly fortunate I sometimes am. That was the night I got to eat ice-cream with Jerry Juhl, and talk Muppet history and everything. He was an incredibly nice, funny, wise man, and we corresponded by email afterwards, a little, and I sent him books.
Mark Evanier's journal at http://www.newsfromme.com/ is one of the best blogs on the web, an ongoing and informative commentary on comics and showbiz and Vegas and some politics, not to mention Mark's occasional tribulations with places that should be selling him things to eat or use but don't. He also keeps up entries on those who died recently, with personal n otes and memories. I think this is the first time I've gone there and learned that someone I knew had died: http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2005_09_28.html#010384”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/25/05
“I interviewed my friend Will Eisner a few year ago, at the Chicago Humanities Festival. At one point I asked him why he kept going, why he kept making comics when his contemporaries (and his contemporaries were people like Bob Kane -- before he did Batman -- remember) had long ago retired and stopped making art and telling stories, and are gone.
He told me about a film he had seen once, in which a jazz musician kept playing because he was still in search of The Note. That it was out there somewhere, and he kept going to reach it. And that was why Will kept going: in the hopes that he'd one day do something that satisfied him. He was still looking for The Note...
Will Eisner was better than any of us, and he kept working in the hope that one day he'd get it right.
I was woken up this morning, with the news that Will had died last night, aged 87, and I've let a few friends know, and already had to speak to one journalist about who Will was and what he did ("It's as if Orson Welles had made Citizen Kane and redefined what you could do in film, and then carried on making movies until now," I said, wishing I could come up with a better analogy, and knowing that that didn't explain it. And I didn't mention how proud he was of any of us who did good comics -- how much he cared about the medium -- or how glad I am that I got to tell him that I wouldn't have written comics if it wasn't for him. There's a reason that the Oscars of comics are the Eisner Awards.)
I'm suddenly very grateful for the time I've had with Will over the years, in England and Germany and Spain and the US, for the times that I went over to see him and Ann when I was in the Fort Lauderdale area. I'm glad I was there in Erlangen, when they gave Will an award and the place erupted into a standing ovation that went on and on until I thought that the walls would collapse and the Millenium come and we'd still be in that theatre cheering and clapping, with Will looking modestly satisfied and Ann Eisner beside him beaming down at us from the stage.
I'm going to miss him enormously, more than I can say. I made a speech last year, where I said how strange it was to discover that the gods of comics, the people who made the medium, were, when I met them, cranky old Jews. Will Eisner wasn't cranky, and he was never old. He was, in all ways, a mensch.
And I keep weighing it in my head, the sorrow at losing Will with the knowledge of how fortunate I was to have known him ("you're always sorry, you're always grateful," as Sondheim said about something quite different).
I'm more grateful than sorry.”
-- Neil Gaiman 01/04/05
“I didn't know Octavia Butler well -- we met at the Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Florida and we ate together and talked, and she was incredibly tall and wise and imposing. We shared an agent, Merrilee Heifetz, but I loved her books and somehow thought of her as a permanent presence, although nobody ever is...
http://darkush.blogspot.com/2006/02/octavia-butler-died-saturday.html “
-- Neil Gaiman 02/26/06
“Josh Kirby has died.
It's been almost twenty years, I think, since I last saw Josh: a beaky, blinking, owl-faced artist, who lived in a crumbling East Anglian rectory. A dreadfully nice man. These days he's famous for the UK covers of Terry Pratchett books - covers he painted in a busy, colourful, explosive bigfoot style. For a few years in the mid 80s, every funny fantasy novel (and many that only aspired to be funny) published in the UK had a Josh Kirby cover. Terry Pratchett got the really good ones. The lesser lights of comic fantasy got paintings that looked like they were knocked out in an afternoon, or several afternoons (if memory serves he only painted by natural light, in the one room of the rectory where the sunlight was at its best).
At the time I met him, before this, he was still an SF cover artist, doing the covers for Bob Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle series -- huge, intricate paintings which, he grumbled, the publishers ran in a ribbon-high strip around the cover.
I remember being astonished to discover how many styles he had and how many covers of books that I'd read as kid he had painted. He did the Pan Book of Horror Stories covers, for example, before they went over to photos of eyeballs in buckets, and most of the Alfred Hitchcock presents short story collections -- wonderful paintings in which he'd create Hitchcock's face out of vultures and beasts, or instruments of murder...
The only cover I ever had by Josh was the German version of Good Omens. (It's not one of his great covers, alas, but I'm very happy that it exists.)
People stick in your memory as you last saw them. He was 72 when he died. In my head he's still in his early 50s, and will be forever.”
-- Neil Gaiman 10/30/01
“Just learned that Peter Tinniswood died last week. Tinniswood is someone who tends to be forgotten when people talk about great fantasy writers, but he wrote The Stirk of Stirk, a strange, wonderful, historical fantasy (about the noble Stirk of Stirk, his evil enemy, and an ancient, gay, Robin Hood). And the strange darkly wonderfulness of A Touch of Daniel. All of his books were funny, although often the humour hovered out past black, somewhere in the ultraviolet.
I interviewed him, as a young man, for Knave, and he was kind and intelligent and reserved, and very relieved when he realised I'd actually read his books. We talked about the opening lines of his first novel, A Touch of Daniel:
When Auntie Edna fell off the bus, she landed on her pate and remained unconscious for sixty-three days. At the end of this period she died, and they had a funeral.
At the party Uncle Mort, husband of the deceased, said:
"What I can't fathom out is why conductor didn't tell her they was only stopped at a zebra crossing."
and how he wrote them and had no idea who these people were, so kept writing to find out. (And to make sure that I'd get that quote right I went down to the library in the basement, and found that most of my Tinniswood paperbacks were signed by him, to me, "Thanks for being a super interviewer" he wrote in one, which means, looking back on it, probably that he was dreading the whole experience, and found it less horrid than he had feared.)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/ram/tinniswood.ram is the Real Audio feed of a tribute programme to Tinniswood.”
-- Neil Gaiman 01/17/03
“I was about to post this and go to bed, when the email went Ding and I got an email from my friend Alisa Kwitney telling me that her father, Robert Sheckley, had died. It wasn't unexpected, and mostly I'm glad I heard from Alisa rather than reading it at Locus Online. Here's the SFWA obituary.
If you want to know why this matters, why Bob Sheckley mattered, not just as someone I knew and liked and will miss, or as my friend's dad, go and read his best SF novels, collected as Dimensions of Sheckley -- http://www.nesfa.org/press/Books/Sheckley-1.html or better still, a selection of the short stories, collected as The Masque of Ma�ana, http://www.nesfa.org/press/Books/Sheckley-2.html Go on. One day you'll thank me.”
-- Neil Gaiman 12/09/05
“About fifteen years ago I was the chairman of the Society of Strip Illustration, which was, for a while, the nearest thing that comics in the UK had to a professional organisation. I had to write a monthly "Talk From a Chair" for the SSI newsletter, and in February 1988 I wrote a paragraph regretting the passing of artist Don Lawrence.
Several days later I got a phone call from the late Don Lawrence, pointing out that he strongly suspected that I'd meant the late artist Ron Embleton, who had just passed away. They were friends, and had similar styles, and I'd meant to type one of them, and had written the other one instead. He was very nice about it. So I wrote an apology for killing Don off early, and it gave us something to talk about when we finally met, somewhere in Europe, a decade later. He was funny, gracious, filled with anecdotes...
When I was a boy, Don painted a comic I loved. It was called The Trigan Empire -- two comics pages a week, in the otherwise comicsless and dryasdust children's magazine "Look And Learn", which even schools who banned comics allowed. It was the story of something a lot like an SF Roman Empire on a distant planet, and was gorgeous. (And has, I've just discovered, its own web page at Trigan.com.) The Trigan Empire was the most popular thing in Look and Learn, and when, after a decade, Don asked if he could have a royalty, he was simply sacked by IPC. So he went on to do "Storm", his own comic.
He died on December 29th. You can see a photograph and a webpage here. http://www.donlawrence.nl/eng/dynamic/4_1.htm. And here's a page about Ron Embleton http://www.lambiek.net/embleton_ron.htm-- which I should warn you contains a smidge of nudity, of the Oh Wicked Wanda persuasion.”
-- Neil Gaiman 12/31/03
“Julie Schwartz is dead.
Harlan Ellison is writing Julie's obituary for the New York Times. "Hardest thing I've ever written," said Harlan, when he told me this morning.
Julie was a fan, and agent, an editor. By the time I met him, about seventeen years ago, he'd just retired, age 72, as an active editor, and DC Comics had appointed him their "goodwill ambassador". I liked him, and he liked me, even though I was by no stretch of the imagination a gorgeous young woman, and we'd make time to find each other and talk, at conventions. Julie was all about stories, and he had known everyone. (He once came to a convention with photographs of Eric Frank Russell, solely in order to find me and say "You know who this is?", so I could say "No," and he could tell me Eric Frank Russell stories.)
His passing really is the end of an era.
Go read what Mark Evanier has to say, for he says it all much better than I could: http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2004_02_08.html#003668”
-- Neil Gaiman 02/08/04
“I was doing a telephone interview about American Gods when I saw it on the screen. The interviewer was in Tokyo where it was gone 1:30 am.
For a weird moment I thought it was a joke, then I realised it wasn't.
"Douglas Adams is dead," I said.
"Yes," said the interviewer. "I know. Did you ever meet him?"
I said yes. And I was obviously shaken enough that the interviewer offered to stop for half an hour, and I said no, it was fine, we should carry on.
After that the interview was pretty much a bust. Or at least, I don't remember anything else that was said. (Sorry, Justin.)
I'd known Douglas fairly well in the 80s -- interviewed him originally for Penthouse then used the leftover material in a dozen other magazines, then in 1987 I wrote "Don't Panic -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion" for Titan Books, which involved lots more interviews with Douglas and his friends and colleagues, and lots more spending time in his flat going through his files and archives looking for cool stuff.
Saw him at David Gilmour's 50th birthday party, in 1996, and I told him how the Neverwhere TV series was going, and he said at least it wouldn't be the same experience he'd had with the Hitchhiker TV series, but it was.
Saw him in Minneapolis a couple of years ago for a signing for the Starship Titanic game. (Only a dozen people came to the signing. He started out by demonstrating the game, but it kept crashing and he couldn't get out of one of the opening sequences. It was kind of sad.) He'd previously asked me to work on a radio adaptation of the later Hitchhiker's Books, and I'd said no as I didn't have the time.
We'd e-mail from time to time.
He was a very brilliant man. (Not said lightly. I think he really was one of those astonishingly rare people who saw things differently and more clearly and from a different angle.) I don't think he liked the process of writing very much to begin with, and I think he liked it less and less as time went on. Probably, he wasn't meant to be a writer. I'm not sure that he ever figured out what it was that he did want to do; I suspect it's something they don't have a concept for yet, let alone a name -- and if he'd been around when this thing was around (World Designer? Explainer?) he would have done it brilliantly.
(I hope that his death isn't followed by the publishing of all the stuff he hadn't wanted to see print.)
He was immensely kind and generous, with his time and his material, to a young journalist, over 15 years ago; and watching how he, and how Alan Moore (who I met around the same time), treated their fans and other people – graciously, kindly and generously – taught that young journalist an awful lot about how famous authors ought to behave. And how most of them don’t.
& I'll miss him.”
-- Neil Gaiman 05/12/01
“I pulled out my copy of Don't Panic (the original Titan edition of 1987, not the reissue that Dave Dickson wrote extra chapters for at the end, nor the US Pocket Books edition where page 42 – which we’d left intentionally blank because the first time I’d printed out the book page 42 was [not on purpose, just a glitch from whatever computer program I was using to word process in those dim dark days] a blank piece of paper with “page 42” on it, and that seemed improbable enough to be some kind of a sign – on the US Pocket Books edition Page 42 was just part of the book... ) and I read the book I'd written fourteen years ago, and heard Douglas’s voice all the way through it, affable, baffled, warm and dry.
There are worse ways to say goodbye. And it may have been a strange one, but it worked, and we take our goodbyes where we can.”
-- Neil Gaiman
05/13/01
Remember those who have passed on before us.
“Too many deaths. Too many people I know. Too many names that come with memories.Locus :George Alec Effinger is dead -- He wrote a wonderful story for the Sandman Book of Dreams, a Little Nemo in Slumberland pastiche. We had several meals in good restaurants, always discovered and recommended by him, and would discuss rewriting famous books from the points of view of more interesting characters than the ones who told them originally. I didn't know him well, but I knew him as the partner of a friend, and we'd make a point of getting together, eating and chatting, at conventions. No more.
And two entries down, on the same page, I learn that Joan Harrison, author Harry Harrison's wife, has died. I've not seen Joan or Harry for over a decade, but I first interviewed Harry for Knave in about 1984, in London's Natural History Museum for reasons that escape me now, and Harry wrote the introduction to Ghastly Beyond Belief, and I knew them both socially, and liked them both very much, when I lived south of London and they lived mostly in Ireland. Joan was the kind of person who made you feel, instantly, like family, if she liked you, and she liked me. When they'd talk about the famous SF people of the 40s, 50s and 60s, she was the one who'd say things like, "Well, of course his wife left him, and I couldn't blame her, it was just after that party, the one where he hit Bob Sheckley with a glass ashtray, you remember, Harry?" giving me a much more interesting and personal version of the history of the Science Fiction field than I might otherwise have had.
I remember when reading the Year's End Obituaries, in the Year's Best Fantasy or SF collections, I'd be looking at a list of names, which often meant something in terms of the work but nothing as people. These days they're all too often people I know.”
-- Neil Gaiman 04/30/02
“I was going to write a quick late at night journal entry, about a long day at the World Fantasy Con (3 panels -- Punch and Judy (fun), Role Models in Children's Fiction (interesting) and Gods and Monsters (weird but interesting) and lots of food and friends) but then I got in and turned on the computer and learned that Charles Sheffield's died. We met 18 months ago at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the arts and liked each other much and talked poetry and english history and literature together and haven't seen each other since, and now we won't.”
-- Neil Gaiman 11/03/02
“Bill Liebowitz owned and founded Golden Apple on Melrose, a comics-and-entertainment store. I've known Bill and his wife Sharon since I did my first signing in one of their stores in 1989. He was a good man, he really enjoyed what he did and loved the medium of comics as much as he loved yo-yos. (He gave my son his first yo-yo.) He did good things for the CBLDF, and long after I'd pretty much stopped doing signings in Comic Shops I kept on doing signings and events for Bill, because he was unique and so was Golden Apple.
He died yesterday, and is already much-missed, not least by me.
Mark Evanier has an appreciation of Bill, and a photo. http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2004_10_27.html#009147 (In the photo, Bill is the one who isn't blonde.)”
-- Neil Gaiman 10/28/04
“When I was fifteen going on sixteen, John Peel actually played punk bands on the radio, back when it didn't seem like anyone else did. That was when I'd start listening, and apart from discovering bands like the Undertones, I'd also hear things like "Sir Henry and Rawlinson's End" and songs by Tom Lehrer or John Cooper Clarke reading "Beasley Street". Definitely broadened my horizons. But mostly I'm sad because he was the kind of broadcaster who treated the listener as a friend, so you felt that you knew him.
”Note to not-English people: you can read about John Peel's death at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/news/altnews/041026_john_peel.shtml?rhppromo
And I'm pretty sure that Radio 1 and Radio 4 will both be doing the sort of tributes to him that will give you a good idea why he was that loved. (Although you needed him to be part of your life for most of it to really get it.)”
-- Neil Gaiman 10/26/04
“And, according to Locus, Damon Knight is dead. I only met him once, with Kate Wilhelm in New Orleans, but we were on GEnie together, and as I was growing up I read what Damon wrote, edited and criticised. On GEnie, I was always conscious that this was Damon Knight, and if he was crusty and persinickety, then he'd earned the right to be crusty and persnickety, and he was astonishingly perceptive as well. He sent me a copy of his novel, Humpty Dumpty, in ms. form, to offer any input, and I never sent back any input because I couldn't think of anything to say.”
-- Neil Gaiman 04/16/02
“I can go and look at an entry like this one -- http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2002/04/you-know-if-i-wasnt-completely-tired.asp -- and remind myself how incredibly fortunate I sometimes am. That was the night I got to eat ice-cream with Jerry Juhl, and talk Muppet history and everything. He was an incredibly nice, funny, wise man, and we corresponded by email afterwards, a little, and I sent him books.
Mark Evanier's journal at http://www.newsfromme.com/ is one of the best blogs on the web, an ongoing and informative commentary on comics and showbiz and Vegas and some politics, not to mention Mark's occasional tribulations with places that should be selling him things to eat or use but don't. He also keeps up entries on those who died recently, with personal n otes and memories. I think this is the first time I've gone there and learned that someone I knew had died: http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2005_09_28.html#010384”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/25/05
“I interviewed my friend Will Eisner a few year ago, at the Chicago Humanities Festival. At one point I asked him why he kept going, why he kept making comics when his contemporaries (and his contemporaries were people like Bob Kane -- before he did Batman -- remember) had long ago retired and stopped making art and telling stories, and are gone.
He told me about a film he had seen once, in which a jazz musician kept playing because he was still in search of The Note. That it was out there somewhere, and he kept going to reach it. And that was why Will kept going: in the hopes that he'd one day do something that satisfied him. He was still looking for The Note...
Will Eisner was better than any of us, and he kept working in the hope that one day he'd get it right.
I was woken up this morning, with the news that Will had died last night, aged 87, and I've let a few friends know, and already had to speak to one journalist about who Will was and what he did ("It's as if Orson Welles had made Citizen Kane and redefined what you could do in film, and then carried on making movies until now," I said, wishing I could come up with a better analogy, and knowing that that didn't explain it. And I didn't mention how proud he was of any of us who did good comics -- how much he cared about the medium -- or how glad I am that I got to tell him that I wouldn't have written comics if it wasn't for him. There's a reason that the Oscars of comics are the Eisner Awards.)
I'm suddenly very grateful for the time I've had with Will over the years, in England and Germany and Spain and the US, for the times that I went over to see him and Ann when I was in the Fort Lauderdale area. I'm glad I was there in Erlangen, when they gave Will an award and the place erupted into a standing ovation that went on and on until I thought that the walls would collapse and the Millenium come and we'd still be in that theatre cheering and clapping, with Will looking modestly satisfied and Ann Eisner beside him beaming down at us from the stage.
I'm going to miss him enormously, more than I can say. I made a speech last year, where I said how strange it was to discover that the gods of comics, the people who made the medium, were, when I met them, cranky old Jews. Will Eisner wasn't cranky, and he was never old. He was, in all ways, a mensch.
And I keep weighing it in my head, the sorrow at losing Will with the knowledge of how fortunate I was to have known him ("you're always sorry, you're always grateful," as Sondheim said about something quite different).
I'm more grateful than sorry.”
-- Neil Gaiman 01/04/05
“I didn't know Octavia Butler well -- we met at the Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Florida and we ate together and talked, and she was incredibly tall and wise and imposing. We shared an agent, Merrilee Heifetz, but I loved her books and somehow thought of her as a permanent presence, although nobody ever is...
http://darkush.blogspot.com/2006/02/octavia-butler-died-saturday.html “
-- Neil Gaiman 02/26/06
“Josh Kirby has died.
It's been almost twenty years, I think, since I last saw Josh: a beaky, blinking, owl-faced artist, who lived in a crumbling East Anglian rectory. A dreadfully nice man. These days he's famous for the UK covers of Terry Pratchett books - covers he painted in a busy, colourful, explosive bigfoot style. For a few years in the mid 80s, every funny fantasy novel (and many that only aspired to be funny) published in the UK had a Josh Kirby cover. Terry Pratchett got the really good ones. The lesser lights of comic fantasy got paintings that looked like they were knocked out in an afternoon, or several afternoons (if memory serves he only painted by natural light, in the one room of the rectory where the sunlight was at its best).
At the time I met him, before this, he was still an SF cover artist, doing the covers for Bob Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle series -- huge, intricate paintings which, he grumbled, the publishers ran in a ribbon-high strip around the cover.
I remember being astonished to discover how many styles he had and how many covers of books that I'd read as kid he had painted. He did the Pan Book of Horror Stories covers, for example, before they went over to photos of eyeballs in buckets, and most of the Alfred Hitchcock presents short story collections -- wonderful paintings in which he'd create Hitchcock's face out of vultures and beasts, or instruments of murder...
The only cover I ever had by Josh was the German version of Good Omens. (It's not one of his great covers, alas, but I'm very happy that it exists.)
People stick in your memory as you last saw them. He was 72 when he died. In my head he's still in his early 50s, and will be forever.”
-- Neil Gaiman 10/30/01
“Just learned that Peter Tinniswood died last week. Tinniswood is someone who tends to be forgotten when people talk about great fantasy writers, but he wrote The Stirk of Stirk, a strange, wonderful, historical fantasy (about the noble Stirk of Stirk, his evil enemy, and an ancient, gay, Robin Hood). And the strange darkly wonderfulness of A Touch of Daniel. All of his books were funny, although often the humour hovered out past black, somewhere in the ultraviolet.
I interviewed him, as a young man, for Knave, and he was kind and intelligent and reserved, and very relieved when he realised I'd actually read his books. We talked about the opening lines of his first novel, A Touch of Daniel:
When Auntie Edna fell off the bus, she landed on her pate and remained unconscious for sixty-three days. At the end of this period she died, and they had a funeral.
At the party Uncle Mort, husband of the deceased, said:
"What I can't fathom out is why conductor didn't tell her they was only stopped at a zebra crossing."
and how he wrote them and had no idea who these people were, so kept writing to find out. (And to make sure that I'd get that quote right I went down to the library in the basement, and found that most of my Tinniswood paperbacks were signed by him, to me, "Thanks for being a super interviewer" he wrote in one, which means, looking back on it, probably that he was dreading the whole experience, and found it less horrid than he had feared.)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/ram/tinniswood.ram is the Real Audio feed of a tribute programme to Tinniswood.”
-- Neil Gaiman 01/17/03
“I was about to post this and go to bed, when the email went Ding and I got an email from my friend Alisa Kwitney telling me that her father, Robert Sheckley, had died. It wasn't unexpected, and mostly I'm glad I heard from Alisa rather than reading it at Locus Online. Here's the SFWA obituary.
If you want to know why this matters, why Bob Sheckley mattered, not just as someone I knew and liked and will miss, or as my friend's dad, go and read his best SF novels, collected as Dimensions of Sheckley -- http://www.nesfa.org/press/Books/Sheckley-1.html or better still, a selection of the short stories, collected as The Masque of Ma�ana, http://www.nesfa.org/press/Books/Sheckley-2.html Go on. One day you'll thank me.”
-- Neil Gaiman 12/09/05
“About fifteen years ago I was the chairman of the Society of Strip Illustration, which was, for a while, the nearest thing that comics in the UK had to a professional organisation. I had to write a monthly "Talk From a Chair" for the SSI newsletter, and in February 1988 I wrote a paragraph regretting the passing of artist Don Lawrence.
Several days later I got a phone call from the late Don Lawrence, pointing out that he strongly suspected that I'd meant the late artist Ron Embleton, who had just passed away. They were friends, and had similar styles, and I'd meant to type one of them, and had written the other one instead. He was very nice about it. So I wrote an apology for killing Don off early, and it gave us something to talk about when we finally met, somewhere in Europe, a decade later. He was funny, gracious, filled with anecdotes...
When I was a boy, Don painted a comic I loved. It was called The Trigan Empire -- two comics pages a week, in the otherwise comicsless and dryasdust children's magazine "Look And Learn", which even schools who banned comics allowed. It was the story of something a lot like an SF Roman Empire on a distant planet, and was gorgeous. (And has, I've just discovered, its own web page at Trigan.com.) The Trigan Empire was the most popular thing in Look and Learn, and when, after a decade, Don asked if he could have a royalty, he was simply sacked by IPC. So he went on to do "Storm", his own comic.
He died on December 29th. You can see a photograph and a webpage here. http://www.donlawrence.nl/eng/dynamic/4_1.htm. And here's a page about Ron Embleton http://www.lambiek.net/embleton_ron.htm-- which I should warn you contains a smidge of nudity, of the Oh Wicked Wanda persuasion.”
-- Neil Gaiman 12/31/03
“Julie Schwartz is dead.
Harlan Ellison is writing Julie's obituary for the New York Times. "Hardest thing I've ever written," said Harlan, when he told me this morning.
Julie was a fan, and agent, an editor. By the time I met him, about seventeen years ago, he'd just retired, age 72, as an active editor, and DC Comics had appointed him their "goodwill ambassador". I liked him, and he liked me, even though I was by no stretch of the imagination a gorgeous young woman, and we'd make time to find each other and talk, at conventions. Julie was all about stories, and he had known everyone. (He once came to a convention with photographs of Eric Frank Russell, solely in order to find me and say "You know who this is?", so I could say "No," and he could tell me Eric Frank Russell stories.)
His passing really is the end of an era.
Go read what Mark Evanier has to say, for he says it all much better than I could: http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2004_02_08.html#003668”
-- Neil Gaiman 02/08/04
“I was doing a telephone interview about American Gods when I saw it on the screen. The interviewer was in Tokyo where it was gone 1:30 am.
For a weird moment I thought it was a joke, then I realised it wasn't.
"Douglas Adams is dead," I said.
"Yes," said the interviewer. "I know. Did you ever meet him?"
I said yes. And I was obviously shaken enough that the interviewer offered to stop for half an hour, and I said no, it was fine, we should carry on.
After that the interview was pretty much a bust. Or at least, I don't remember anything else that was said. (Sorry, Justin.)
I'd known Douglas fairly well in the 80s -- interviewed him originally for Penthouse then used the leftover material in a dozen other magazines, then in 1987 I wrote "Don't Panic -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion" for Titan Books, which involved lots more interviews with Douglas and his friends and colleagues, and lots more spending time in his flat going through his files and archives looking for cool stuff.
Saw him at David Gilmour's 50th birthday party, in 1996, and I told him how the Neverwhere TV series was going, and he said at least it wouldn't be the same experience he'd had with the Hitchhiker TV series, but it was.
Saw him in Minneapolis a couple of years ago for a signing for the Starship Titanic game. (Only a dozen people came to the signing. He started out by demonstrating the game, but it kept crashing and he couldn't get out of one of the opening sequences. It was kind of sad.) He'd previously asked me to work on a radio adaptation of the later Hitchhiker's Books, and I'd said no as I didn't have the time.
We'd e-mail from time to time.
He was a very brilliant man. (Not said lightly. I think he really was one of those astonishingly rare people who saw things differently and more clearly and from a different angle.) I don't think he liked the process of writing very much to begin with, and I think he liked it less and less as time went on. Probably, he wasn't meant to be a writer. I'm not sure that he ever figured out what it was that he did want to do; I suspect it's something they don't have a concept for yet, let alone a name -- and if he'd been around when this thing was around (World Designer? Explainer?) he would have done it brilliantly.
(I hope that his death isn't followed by the publishing of all the stuff he hadn't wanted to see print.)
He was immensely kind and generous, with his time and his material, to a young journalist, over 15 years ago; and watching how he, and how Alan Moore (who I met around the same time), treated their fans and other people – graciously, kindly and generously – taught that young journalist an awful lot about how famous authors ought to behave. And how most of them don’t.
& I'll miss him.”
-- Neil Gaiman 05/12/01
“I pulled out my copy of Don't Panic (the original Titan edition of 1987, not the reissue that Dave Dickson wrote extra chapters for at the end, nor the US Pocket Books edition where page 42 – which we’d left intentionally blank because the first time I’d printed out the book page 42 was [not on purpose, just a glitch from whatever computer program I was using to word process in those dim dark days] a blank piece of paper with “page 42” on it, and that seemed improbable enough to be some kind of a sign – on the US Pocket Books edition Page 42 was just part of the book... ) and I read the book I'd written fourteen years ago, and heard Douglas’s voice all the way through it, affable, baffled, warm and dry.
There are worse ways to say goodbye. And it may have been a strange one, but it worked, and we take our goodbyes where we can.”
-- Neil Gaiman
05/13/01
posted by Really_Rather_Not_Nice at 3:08 PM
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