Archive for the ‘Obituary’ Category

Gene Wolfe, RIP

Tuesday, April 16th, 2019

Science fiction writer Gene Wolfe died on Sunday. If you know who Gene Wolfe was no explanation is necessary, and if you don’t no explanation is possible.

He was the best of us all: the cleverest, trickiest science fiction writer alive, capable of carrying off narrative gambits the rest of us could barely conceive of. And this was not just my opinion: it’s all but universally held in the field, from Neil Gaiman to Howard Waldrop.

In The Book of the Short Sun, protagonist Horn sets off to retrieve Patera Silk, the protagonist of The Book of the Long Sun. He comes back thinking he’s failed. The great tragedy of the work is that he hasn’t. In Return to the Whorl, there comes a line of just two words: “Silk nodded.”

And it’s absolutely heartbreaking.

Gene Wolfe was a Korean War veteran, a fact that greatly shaped The Book of the New Sun, whose last volume features protagonist Severian gradually being drawn into a distant war. He was also a working engineer, and helped develop the cooking portion of the machine that makes Pringles potato chips. He was also an editor on Plant Engineering magazine, where he handled (among other things) robotics and cartoons.

Gene was a friend, albeit one I saw only every half a decade or so. I interviewed him for Nova Express at the 1998 Worldcon, bringing a box of his books with me to sign. (Since then, of course, I’ve picked up many more.) We had lunch together at the 2012 Chicago Worldcon, by which time his beloved wife Rosemary was dying of Alzheimer’s.

Here’s a scanned picture of Gene and Rosemary on their wedding day from A Wolfe Family Album:

Wolfe Wedding

And here’s a picture of Gene and Rosemary (with Elizabeth Hand in-between) at the 2009 Readercon:

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And here are some pictures of Gene’s books from my library:

Wolfe Family Album

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He will be deeply missed.

Harlan Ellison, RIP

Thursday, June 28th, 2018

The man many thought was too stubborn and angry to die has passed away in his sleep: Harlan Ellison, dead at 84.

Ellison was a tremendously important science fiction writer in his heyday in the 1960s, the infant terrible of the American New Wave. His prose was both razor sharp and packed an emotional urgency pretty much unseen in the field heretofore, the SF counterpart to the “angry young man” briefly fashionable in the literary world. Among his prodigious short fiction output was “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” a story most would place among the genre’s very best, if not the best, and he won Hugos and Nebulas left and right back when they actually meant something.

He had a singular gift for memorable titles, superb taste in enemies, and a penchant for suing people at the drop of a hat (sometimes deserved, sometimes not). He wrote several memorable screenplays, including “Demon With a Glass Hand” for The Outer Limits and “City on the Edge of Forever” for Star Trek, as well as a large number of comic book issues. He was exceptionally smart, extremely charismatic, unusually hotheaded, irascible, opinionated and irreplaceable, and the source of hundreds of stories of his outrageous antics.

The field shall not see his like again.

Below: A few Ellison-related titles from my library. And I’ll actually be listing another recent purchase tomorrow…

Gardner Dozois, RIP

Sunday, May 27th, 2018

Michael Swanwick just announced the death of Gardner Dozois on Facebook:

It is my sad duty to note the passing of Gardner Dozois today, Sunday May 27, at 4:00 p.m. The cause was an overwhelming systemic infection. Gardner had been hospitalized for a minor illness and was expected to be released shortly. The decline was swift. He died surrounded by his family.

Gardner was a swell guy, one of the funniest people in the field, a fine writer and a great editor, and bought not only my first story, but more of my stories than anyone else over the years.

I’m about to rush off somewhere, but more extensive thoughts later.

Jigsaw, 2003—2018

Monday, March 12th, 2018

Friday, March 9, I had to have Jigsaw, my faithful canine companion of over 13 years, put to sleep.

I picked him up at Town Lake Animal Shelter through Gold Ribbon Rescue way back in December 2004, having finally bought my house earlier in the year and having already gone through GRR’s grueling vetting process.

Jigsaw started out as an unrestrained riot of affection. He wanted to chew through everything (including a nylon leash and a shoe, just his first night!) and jump excitedly on everyone who came through the door. Over the years he calmed down a bit, but he was well into his golden years before losing his puppish enthusiasm for jumping to greet people.

He loved swimming, chasing balls (though not so much dropping them), seeing people, and playing with other dogs; all the usual Golden Retriever joys. Going out to the regular GRR swim events, and having people come over to the house, were among his favorite things. (I’ll always remember that whenever we went to a GRR event, he loved swimming, but he always wanted to keep me in sight at all times, evidently scared I might leave him. He was always overjoyed to see me when I got back from trips to pick him up at my parents house.)

Age mellowed him into a dog all my friends loved.

I’ll always remember my father, in home hospice care for his own terminal cancer, scratching Jigsaw’s ears at his bedside.

Fourteen is a ripe old age for a Golden Retriever. I asked my vet how he was doing for his age. She said “I don’t know. They don’t usually live this long.”

I’d had false alarms with his health before. A couple of years ago he had increasing trouble getting up and down the stairs, and after long car trips he wouldn’t be able to stand for a while. Starting him on pain medication, and a round of antibiotics, seemed to fix that.

Then last year, when I adopted Avery, a black lab mix, to keep him company, she ran him ragged the first couple of days, to the point the same problems started to assert themselves. But slowly, with another upped medicine dosage, he got back to his old self, and was back to getting up and down the stairs without trouble.

I had suspected he had cancer for some time, but the first ultrasound last year was inconclusive, and I kept his pain under control with medication. But he started slowly but steadily losing weight the last few months. He’d still eat, but not as much, and stopped eating his dry food at all.

Finally, it got to the point he wasn’t pooping or peeing properly, probably due to (I found out a couple of weeks ago) inflamed lymph nodes near his spine. And when they finally got a good ultrasound of his bladder last week, the walls looked thickened, making cancer the likely culprit.

Finally, on Thursday night he had stopped eating entirely. And after two short walks that night, Friday morning his rear legs couldn’t support him at all. He walked about ten feet into the front yard and then feel down and lay in the grass.

It was time.

Here are some pictures of him over the years.

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Jigsaw Screen Cap Dup

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From his last day:

He was a good dog, and I’m going to miss him very, very much.

Bill Crider RIP

Tuesday, February 13th, 2018

Word has come down that writer Bill Crider died on February 12.

Bill was a prince among men and a welcome face at Armadillocon and elsewhere. He will be missed.

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Dolores O’Riordan, RIP

Monday, January 15th, 2018

Just heard the news that Dolores O’Riordan, the lead singer for The Cranberries, has just died at the untimely age of 46.

There were most famous for “Zombie” and a few other hits, but my favorite song of theirs has always been the melancholy “Daffodil Lament.” Here’s a live version.

(Hat tip: Derek Johnson.)

Jerry Pournelle, RIP

Friday, September 8th, 2017

I just got word that Jerry Pournelle died today.

Pournelle was most famous for his collaborations with Larry Niven, and justly so: Lucifer’s Hammer is a great novel, and Inferno and The Mote in God’s Eye are, at the least, very good. But he was a strong writer on his own as well.

Pournelle lied about his age to get into the army in the Korean War, where he served in the artillery, which gave him life-long tinnitus. He had a widely varied carrier before becoming a science fiction writer, working in the defense industry, then on the successful Los Angeles mayoral campaign of Sam Yorty. He was also a notable advocate of SDI and a prominent columnist for Byte magazine for many years.

He had a long and successful career as a science fiction writer, winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, but never really received his due, for a variety of reasons, some aesthetic (he did a lot of work in Military SF, a subgenre held in low critical esteem), some political (he was an unapologetic conservative and disciple of Russell Kirk), some personal (Jerry rubbed many people the wrong way, and reportedly had a drinking problem in the 1980s). He edited a number of anthologies over the years; when he finally received a Hugo nomination for that, Social Justice Warrior bloc voting made sure he finished below No Award.

He was 84.

Edited to Add: A personal remembrance by Borepatch.

Brian Aldiss, RIP

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2017

Science fiction writer Brian Aldiss has died just after turning 92.

Aldiss was an acquaintance rather than a friend. I got him to sign things at the two UK Worldcons I attended (2005 in Glasgow and 2014 in London), and we may have talked briefly at other Worldcons; I don’t actually remember.

He was an extremely important, but also extremely variable, writer. His good stuff was really good, but his bad stuff was really bad. When I brought him a copy of Cracken at Critical to sign, he said “Oh God, this piece of crap!” Highpoints include Nonstop and “The Saliva Tree.” He was much admired by a wide range of science fiction’s best talents, including Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock and Bruce Sterling (the latter of whom I bought an Aldiss chapbooks off of when he was culling his library).

Lacking much in the way of additional personal contact to pad out this obituary, here are some of the Brian Aldiss items in my own collection.

  • Aldiss, Brian. Brothers of the Head Pierrot Publishing Ltd., 1977. First edition hardback (simultaneous with the much more common trade paperback edition), oversized and illustrated, a Fine copy in a VG+ dust jacket with light wrinkling, wear to extremities, and some age toning to white flaps of the dust jacket. Signed by both Aldiss and illustrator Ian Pollock. The hardback edition was already uncommon, but became more so after an art house movie based on it came out a few years ago. Bought this from a dealer in France, of all places.

  • Aldiss, Brian. Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s. Avernus, 1990. First edition hardback, #104 of 250 signed, numbered copies, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket, with newspaper clipping (also signed by Aldiss) from the Times Literary Supplement of August 8, 1986 of a piece by Eric Korn that briefly quotes Aldiss on H. G. Wells laid into the pocket formed by the dust jacket protector at the back as an “Association Item,” as issued. And is listed as such on page 274-275. In The Science Fantasy Publishers, Jack Chalker labeled the “association items” as “an attempt to clean out Aldiss’ attic.” Chalker/Owings (1991), page 58.
  • Aldiss, Brian. The Creten Teat. House of Stratus, 2002. First hardback edition (according to Aldiss’ site, the trade paperback version preceded), a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. I have heard, second-hand, that House of Stratus went into receivership about the time this came out, and that very few hardback copies actually made it out into the world. Bought off Amazon for $9.94.
  • Aldiss, Brian. Cultural Breaks. Tachyon, 2005. Advanced reading copy, trade paperback format, with packet of review material.
  • Aldiss, Brain W. Excommunication. Post Card Partnership, 1975. First edition postcard, a Fine copy. Bought for £2.50 after discount.
  • Aldiss, Brian. Jocasta. The Rose Press, 2004. First edition hardback, #420 of 750 signed, numbered copies, a Fine copy, sans dust jacket, as issued.

    Jocasta

    As far as I can tell, The Rose Press did this and Avram Davidson’s The Scarlet Fig, and then fell off the map…

  • Aldiss, Brian. Moreau’s Other Island. Jonathan Cape, 1980. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket, signed by Aldiss on the front free endpaper.
  • Aldiss, Brian. Science Fiction Blues With Brian Aldiss. Avernus, 2000. First edition oversized chapbook original (A4 sized), a Fine- copy with a slight bit of bend on the left side. Program for some sort of Aldiss reading or performance, which also happens to contain three original Aldiss stories as well as other material. Odd little item. Bought for £3. Chalker/Owings (1991), page 58.

    Aldiss SF Blues

  • Aldiss, Brian. Sex and the Black Machine. Avernus, 1990. First edition chapbook, a Fine- copy with slight wrinkling and inevitable page darkening to newsprint pages and self-wrapper. Chalker/Owings (1991), page 59.

    Aldiss Sex Black Machine

  • Aldiss, Brian. This World and Nearer Ones. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. Signed by Aldiss. Bought for $8 from a notable SF book dealer. Non-fiction.
  • (Aldiss, Brian) Aldiss, Margaret. Item Eighty-Three: Brian W. Aldiss: A Bibliography: 1954—1972. SF Horizons, (1973). Chapbook, Fine. Non-fiction.
  • That’s not everything I own by Aldiss, but I’m far from having a complete Aldiss collection. The man was extremely prolific…

    Jerry Lewis, RIP

    Monday, August 21st, 2017

    Comedian, actor and director Jerry Lewis has died at age 91.

    It’s hard to evaluate the work of someone who absolutely dominated their field for an extended period of time and then almost immediately went out of fashion. Lewis was far and away the most successful comic actor of mid-century America, appearing in an extremely successful series of movies with Dean Martin, then having a successful solo career as both a actor and director.

    But after The Nutty Professor, it was a long, long slide. Between 1963 and 1980, you had Rowen & Martins Laugh-In, Lenny Bruce, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Richard Pryor, Saturday Night Live and Robin Williams, yet in Hardly Working (intended as a “comeback” film), Lewis was doing the same tried physical shtick. (Roger Ebert called it “one of the worst movies ever to achieve commercial release in this country.”) In between he directed the amazingly ill-conceived and incomplete The Day the Clown Cried, about a clown (Lewis) entertaining children on the way to the gas chamber in Auschwitz. Surviving footage suggests it is every bit as awful and cringe-worthy as you’d imagine.

    In the meantime, he taught an acclaimed directing class at USC attended by (among others) George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and was a familiar face for decades of television viewers for his Muscular Dystrophy Labor Day Telethon. And he turned in the occasional fine dramatic performance, such as in The King of Comedy.

    For someone who smoked as much as he did, had as many health issues, and battled prescription drug abuse, 91 is a very rip old age indeed.

    Here’s a very early footage of Lewis and Martin from what I think may be the very first MDA telethon:

    Here he is making his appearance as nutty professor alter ego Buddy Love:

    And here’s a long, interesting piece on Lewis I linked to once before.

    Hail the Departing Godzilla

    Monday, August 7th, 2017

    Haruo Nakajima, the original actor inside the Godzilla suit for the first twelve Toho films, has died at age 88.

    The suit was so hot and heavy that Nakajima evidently fainted several times during the making of the original Godzilla.

    Here are some video tributes: