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jazzfishMore for my benefit than yours; I expect by now you're all sick of hearing me go on about him.
I first heard of John M. Ford in early 2000, when a news post on Steve Jackson's website mentioned that he was going in for a kidney transplant. A later post said he was doing fine afterwards. I thought "Huh. That's good, then," and thought no more about it.
I've been reading Making Light (and Electrolite before they incorporated) for about three years now. For a long time I knew that everyone there had a lot of respect for commenter "John M. Ford" but I didn't really understand why. Okay, he'd written a few books and some gaming modules. So what? A disproportionate number of ML's commenters are published authors.
When _Heat of Fusion_ came out in 2004, TNH and others were singing its praises pretty highly. I was working at Walden's at the time and mostly living off student loans. Hours were starting to pick back up at work; I had a little money to spare. I said "Okay, whatever, I've been looking for a good story collection, I'll try this one." I picked up a copy.
I can go (and have gone) on at length about how much his Hemingway pastiche ("The Hemstitch Notebooks") made me laugh. What I haven't mentioned as often is how good so much of the other stuff in the book is. The very first tale constructs a genuine-feeling slightly-technologically-advanced fantasy empire . . . as /background/. Even as uncritically as I was reading then, that blew me away.
I wouldn't call them all "accessible," though. I still don't really understand "Heat of Fusion" and I feel like I'm missing a couple of important bits of "Chromatic Aberration." Some of the longer poetry loses me. "Preflash" ends oddly and is very very dark. Perhaps that's why I said "Yeah, that was cool," and put the book on my shelf. It's challenging, and I was getting plenty of that with Wolfe's Solar cycle.
I went ahead and bought _The Last Hot Time_, though, and started keeping my eyes open for his stuff in used bookstores. Lucked into a copy of the alt-hist magnum opus _The Dragon Waiting_, and devoured it. (The fact that there are dogs barking at Richard Plantagenet when he first appears cracked me up even then.) And I began paying a bit more attention to his comments on ML. Especially the tossed-off bits of poetry.
Slowly I started to understand what the ML crowd saw in him. He had essentially no "off" comments. Everything was brilliant. /Everything/. Wry, witty, and full of references you'd never expect. Gorgeous off-the-cuff poetry and hilarious pastiche ("Harry of Five Points" being the first of those I recall specifically). Wow.
(I couldn't get into _How Much For Just the Planet?_. I dunno. Musical comedy's never really been my thing, and the book felt too over-the-top for me. It is the only book that I have ever described using the adjective "cracktastic." I can see why other people love it, though.)
In August I picked up _Heat of Fusion_ again. This time I was absolutely gobsmacked. I've heard it said that the first time you read something you don't really read it; you read your perception of it. You can't get a good view of the text until you've processed it once and gotten your preconceptions out of the way. That was certainly true here.
That, I think, was when I started waiting specifically for his comments, and generally laughing as they came up. I'd decided that he was Someone To Watch. In my head I figured I'd be reading his books slowly (there weren't many of them, so no sense rushing things) and enjoying seeing him on ML. Eventually I'd get to meet him at a convention and tell him how much I'd enjoyed reading what he'd written, and generally go all quietly fanboy like I did with Gene Wolfe.
(Coincidentally, that was also about the time I snagged a copy of _Growing Up Weightless_ from a used bookstore. I deliberately didn't start reading it: partly I wanted to drag out the anticipation, and partly I was afraid it wouldn't be as good as I wanted it to. It still sits unread between _The Dragon Waiting_ and _From the End of the Twentieth Century_. Mocking me.)
When the Amazon reviews thread came up on Thursday I was thrilled. I reloaded it once every couple of hours, hoping he'd have something witty and/or devastating to say about that horrid idea. I guess nothing struck him as worth the saying. I came in to class on Monday morning planning to check and see if he'd come up with anything over the weekend. I loaded up LJ first, like I always do.
The first words on my friendslist proclaimed "John M. Ford, 1957-2006".
I believe I actually said, out loud, "Oh, no." I know my first conscious thought was "That can't be . . . That /can't/ be him. Some other . . ." and then I noticed the link to ML.
I don't think I learned a thing in class that day. I kept refreshing the ML post about his death, which turned into what Terry Karney called a "virtual wake" rather quickly. I followed links to journals I'd never read before. I found out how much he'd meant to so very many people. I couldn't read all the way through Elise Matthesen's "Response to an unwritten poem of yours entitled 'Sorrow for Breathing'" (the crying would have distracted the rest of the class) but I took in most everything else I found.
The huge outpouring of grief and mutual support ("We could hit each other with our hats, but it wouldn't be the same." --Emma Bull) overwhelmed me pretty quickly. In all the wide web I think I found one person who didn't have positive things to say about him. She was an ex of his, and admitted that she had a less than objective view. Neil Gaiman, who makes a habit of mentioning the deaths of acquaintances in his blog exactly once, talked about him on at least four separate occasions. Everywhere I turned, people mourning, and remembering.
. . .
Which more or less brings me up to the present day. There was a memorial in Minneapolis the weekend after I was there. I've reread _Dragon_ and _Hot Time_ and acquired _20C_. "Against Entropy" and "Janus: Sonnet" now decorate my wall at work. I check in on Elise's journal every so often.
I wish I'd known him well enough to call him Mike. I wish I'd known him at all.
I still don't know why his death hit me so hard.
So we weep for a person who lived at great cost
But we barely knew his power 'til we sensed what we had lost
--Dar Williams, "Mark Rothko Song"
I first heard of John M. Ford in early 2000, when a news post on Steve Jackson's website mentioned that he was going in for a kidney transplant. A later post said he was doing fine afterwards. I thought "Huh. That's good, then," and thought no more about it.
I've been reading Making Light (and Electrolite before they incorporated) for about three years now. For a long time I knew that everyone there had a lot of respect for commenter "John M. Ford" but I didn't really understand why. Okay, he'd written a few books and some gaming modules. So what? A disproportionate number of ML's commenters are published authors.
When _Heat of Fusion_ came out in 2004, TNH and others were singing its praises pretty highly. I was working at Walden's at the time and mostly living off student loans. Hours were starting to pick back up at work; I had a little money to spare. I said "Okay, whatever, I've been looking for a good story collection, I'll try this one." I picked up a copy.
I can go (and have gone) on at length about how much his Hemingway pastiche ("The Hemstitch Notebooks") made me laugh. What I haven't mentioned as often is how good so much of the other stuff in the book is. The very first tale constructs a genuine-feeling slightly-technologically-advanced fantasy empire . . . as /background/. Even as uncritically as I was reading then, that blew me away.
I wouldn't call them all "accessible," though. I still don't really understand "Heat of Fusion" and I feel like I'm missing a couple of important bits of "Chromatic Aberration." Some of the longer poetry loses me. "Preflash" ends oddly and is very very dark. Perhaps that's why I said "Yeah, that was cool," and put the book on my shelf. It's challenging, and I was getting plenty of that with Wolfe's Solar cycle.
I went ahead and bought _The Last Hot Time_, though, and started keeping my eyes open for his stuff in used bookstores. Lucked into a copy of the alt-hist magnum opus _The Dragon Waiting_, and devoured it. (The fact that there are dogs barking at Richard Plantagenet when he first appears cracked me up even then.) And I began paying a bit more attention to his comments on ML. Especially the tossed-off bits of poetry.
Slowly I started to understand what the ML crowd saw in him. He had essentially no "off" comments. Everything was brilliant. /Everything/. Wry, witty, and full of references you'd never expect. Gorgeous off-the-cuff poetry and hilarious pastiche ("Harry of Five Points" being the first of those I recall specifically). Wow.
(I couldn't get into _How Much For Just the Planet?_. I dunno. Musical comedy's never really been my thing, and the book felt too over-the-top for me. It is the only book that I have ever described using the adjective "cracktastic." I can see why other people love it, though.)
In August I picked up _Heat of Fusion_ again. This time I was absolutely gobsmacked. I've heard it said that the first time you read something you don't really read it; you read your perception of it. You can't get a good view of the text until you've processed it once and gotten your preconceptions out of the way. That was certainly true here.
That, I think, was when I started waiting specifically for his comments, and generally laughing as they came up. I'd decided that he was Someone To Watch. In my head I figured I'd be reading his books slowly (there weren't many of them, so no sense rushing things) and enjoying seeing him on ML. Eventually I'd get to meet him at a convention and tell him how much I'd enjoyed reading what he'd written, and generally go all quietly fanboy like I did with Gene Wolfe.
(Coincidentally, that was also about the time I snagged a copy of _Growing Up Weightless_ from a used bookstore. I deliberately didn't start reading it: partly I wanted to drag out the anticipation, and partly I was afraid it wouldn't be as good as I wanted it to. It still sits unread between _The Dragon Waiting_ and _From the End of the Twentieth Century_. Mocking me.)
When the Amazon reviews thread came up on Thursday I was thrilled. I reloaded it once every couple of hours, hoping he'd have something witty and/or devastating to say about that horrid idea. I guess nothing struck him as worth the saying. I came in to class on Monday morning planning to check and see if he'd come up with anything over the weekend. I loaded up LJ first, like I always do.
The first words on my friendslist proclaimed "John M. Ford, 1957-2006".
I believe I actually said, out loud, "Oh, no." I know my first conscious thought was "That can't be . . . That /can't/ be him. Some other . . ." and then I noticed the link to ML.
I don't think I learned a thing in class that day. I kept refreshing the ML post about his death, which turned into what Terry Karney called a "virtual wake" rather quickly. I followed links to journals I'd never read before. I found out how much he'd meant to so very many people. I couldn't read all the way through Elise Matthesen's "Response to an unwritten poem of yours entitled 'Sorrow for Breathing'" (the crying would have distracted the rest of the class) but I took in most everything else I found.
The huge outpouring of grief and mutual support ("We could hit each other with our hats, but it wouldn't be the same." --Emma Bull) overwhelmed me pretty quickly. In all the wide web I think I found one person who didn't have positive things to say about him. She was an ex of his, and admitted that she had a less than objective view. Neil Gaiman, who makes a habit of mentioning the deaths of acquaintances in his blog exactly once, talked about him on at least four separate occasions. Everywhere I turned, people mourning, and remembering.
. . .
Which more or less brings me up to the present day. There was a memorial in Minneapolis the weekend after I was there. I've reread _Dragon_ and _Hot Time_ and acquired _20C_. "Against Entropy" and "Janus: Sonnet" now decorate my wall at work. I check in on Elise's journal every so often.
I wish I'd known him well enough to call him Mike. I wish I'd known him at all.
I still don't know why his death hit me so hard.
So we weep for a person who lived at great cost
But we barely knew his power 'til we sensed what we had lost
--Dar Williams, "Mark Rothko Song"
no subject
Date: 2006-11-08 09:37 pm (UTC)I loved the poem Troy: The Movie. 110 Stories broke my heart and makes me weepy every time I read it.
And yet I didn't quite realize that was the same M. Ford in the ML comments until after his death. I felt, and still feel, very small when I think of the man.
I've been playing around with the idea of calligraphing Against Entropy for myself. Do you have a version you wrote yourself, or bought it off the Cafepress site, or...?
no subject
Date: 2006-11-09 01:12 pm (UTC)"I want to be him when I grow up" is trite and not quite true but it's as close as I've been able to get. He was awe-inspiring.
As for _Against Entropy_, *sheepish* I dropped it into a Word document, set the font to twenty-point Book Antiqua (my favorite font, and as large as could fit one line on a page with one-inch margins), and hit Print. I've not got the patience or the fine motor skills to do calligraphy, or much of anything artsy/crafty really.