Farewell Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert died today, at the age of seventy, after living pretty much exactly the life he wanted since he became an adult and after getting several unexpected years in after beginning a fight with cancer a decade ago.

It's still sad, of course. We want to read what Ebert would have written next month, next year -- about the next Michael Bay movie, or the second Hobbit, or (god forbid!) The Human Centipede III. We won't get any of that.

But we do have what he did write, and much of that is wonderful, in the way of journalism that's meant to inform and entertain at a particular time for a particular purpose but rises above that. I just started his third book of nasty reviews, A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length, and reading that is how I want to remember him.

(When people have asked me about my role models, I've usually been stumped: I don't like people enough to want to be like any of them. But now I think I wanted to be Roger Ebert when I grew up -- to find a way to write about things, to champion the good and make fun of the bad, and to make no excuses for taste.)

Here's a piece of Ebert's review of the horrible 1994 movie North, just because:

I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.

Ebert was a hell of lot of fun writing about things he hated, and we'll miss that. But thanks, Roger, for the things you did see and hate and tell us about. (And the ones you loved as well.)

Ghouls of the Media

I said what I had to say about the Newtown massacre over the weekend (though the topic is certainly coming up over at Editorial Explanations, my other blog -- look for a bunch of cartoons with bizarre slants tomorrow).

But I do have to note one particularly slimy sidenote.

My last name is Wheeler; one of the kids murdered in Newtown had the same last name. And Newtown is less than a hundred miles away from me, which is practically next door, in US terms. There's no connection, as far as I know -- Wheeler is a common name.

But there was a call, from some random reporter from my local paper, on my answering machine yesterday. I have to assume they sat someone down with a phone book and a list of last names of the dead, to scare up potential relatives who might give a sad quote to their fish-wrap.

And at moments like that, I'm happy that the US newspaper industry is in such decline, if this is how they work a major story. It's disgusting, stupid, and a massive waste of time, all in the service of "human interest." And The Wife wonders why I'm such a misanthrope!

Diana Wynne Jones, 1934-2011

The great British fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones -- whose books were usually published aimed at an audience of young teenagers, and were as good as that genre, or any other, ever got -- died on Friday night, after fighting cancer for several years. It wasn't unexpected -- she was too ill to travel to see the 2004 premiere of Howl's Moving Castle, the Hayao Miyazaki film based loosely on her 1986 novel of the same name -- but her continuing productivity had made us think that, just this once, the iron laws of the universe would stand aside.

I didn't know Jones personally, just through her work. And I somehow managed to miss reading her when I was young -- the first Jones book I read was either her excellent adult novel Deep Secret (loosely based on an actual British SF convention) or her indispensable satiric reference book The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, both of which I came across before they were published in the US in the late '90s. So I can't say anything direct about her effect on young readers. But her books were always smart in the best ways, with that questioning intelligence that the best writers for young readers always have, that sense that the world might not, at the bottom, exactly make sense, and that every supposed certainty and bit of received wisdom needs to be carefully examined.

In other words, she was exactly the kind of writer that smart kids, or any kind of kids, really needed: both a guide to the ways that worlds could be and a voice to say that all of those conceptions of the world were worth thinking and talking and writing about. And she will be gravely missed -- luckily for us, she left us behind a long shelf of books to remember her by.

George Scithers, 1929-2010

I saw the story at Locus, which has the details: long-time editor George Scithers has died after a massive heart attack on the 17th. I didn't know him well, but he was a friendly face on the convention circuit, and always a gentleman with an easy smile and great insight. He'll be greatly missed.

Kage Baker, 1952-2010

It wasn't a surprise, but it was still a shock: SF and Fantasy writer Kage Baker died early this morning at home in the company of her sister Kathleen. SFWA has the news, and remembrances and obituaries have begun to appear on various sites.

I said what I wanted to say about Kage and her work last week; I only wish I had said it sooner.

No. I wish a hell of a lot of other things, primary among them that Kage was still healthy and with us. But we have her novels and stories, and that will have to be enough.

Farewell, Kage Baker. You did a hell of a good job while you were here.

Charles Brown, 1937-2009

Charles N. Brown, founder and long-time editor of Locus (and a fixture of the SFnal fan/pro scene even longer than that) died in his sleep on Sunday night, on the way home from Readercon.

On the one hand, I'm sure Charles would have appreciated dying on the way home from a con. But there are so many cons still to come that will now have to go on without him.

Charles Brown was one of the great Big Name Fans: smart and opinionated, talkative but good at listening, so familiar and dependable that he seemed like part of the furniture. But there's now a big hole in the room of SFF, and it will never quite be filled. Farewell, Charles.

His full obituary appears on Locus Online -- where else?

J.G. Ballard, 1930-2009

British novelist J.G. Ballard has died this Sunday morning, April 19th, at the age of 78, reports the BBC. Cause of death was not mentioned, but Ballard was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 2006, and that likely was the main cause.

Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930, the son of a British industrialist, and grew up in the International Settlement there. Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, and foreign nationals -- including the Ballards -- were moved to the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center in early 1943. Ballard turned his experiences as a teenager in the camp into fiction in his most famous novel, Empire of the Sun, and wrote of that time more directly in his last book, the autobiography Miracles of Life.

After the war, Ballard went to England, where he completed school and then went on to study medicine at King's College, Cambridge. He abandoned those studies for reading English literature at the University of London, with hopes of becoming a professional writer. It was only after joining the RAF in 1953 that -- when posted in a airbase in Moose Jaw, Canada -- he discovered American Science Fiction magazines and decided that the stories he wanted to write could fit into that genre.

After returning to the UK after his RAF stint ended, Ballard's writing career began in the British SF magazines, starting with "Prima Belladonna" in New Worlds for December 1956. He continued writing SF short stories, and began to publish novels in the early '60s, quitting his day-job as an editor of a scientific journal almost immediately. His early novels -- The Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World -- were SFnal novels, all stories of apocalypse that moved further and further from the traditional British "cozy catastrophe" as Ballard grew more and more confident with his own writing and voice.

Ballard's career turned to the avant-garde and political with the "condensed novels" collected in his collection The Atrocity Exhibition; many of them were published in SFnal outlets, but, in retrospect, this was the work that saw Ballard break with the SF field and continue his essential obsessions -- sex, death, the anomie of modern life, and a cool, detached viewpoint verging on nihilism -- into more direct and immediate channels based on contemporary life. The three following novels of the early '70s -- Crash, Concrete Island, and High Rise -- are the most uncompromising and fearless of his career, slicing with the detachment of the surgeon he nearly was at the psychological underpinnings of the world as he saw them.

Subsequent novels and works reiterated his central concerns and images, building up the quintessentially Ballardian landscape: drained swimming pools, carefully planned buildings fallen into physical or moral decay, aircraft in the air or crashed on the ground, the outer settings that mirrors the characters' inner worlds. His most successful novel of that period was Empire of the Sun, which explained the bases for so many of Ballard's key images while at the same time contextualizing them into a fine novel that was not simply a retelling of his own life.

Ballard's central concerns never varied, though the styles of his novels and stories did, veering from SF through the avant garde to more traditional literary novels and then into magic realism and the crime story an back out again. He was one of the great British writers of the 20th century, with a instantly recognizable style and matter and a endlessly fecund imagination watered ceaselessly by those same few wells.

He will be greatly missed, and he will now never be a SFWA Grand Master. But he'll still be read in a hundred years, when so many of his contemporaries and competitors are utterly forgotten.

For those who haven't read Ballard: SF readers should start with The Best Short Stories. Readers of mainstream fiction should try Empire of the Sun. And those who want to dive into the deep end should look at Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition.

Philip Jose Farmer, 1918-2009

Philip Jose Farmer's hometown paper, the Journal-Star, reports that he died this morning at the age of 91.

Like so much of SF, PJF was a curate's egg -- his best work (like "The Lovers" and To Your Scattered Bodies Go) was as good as anyone's, his worst (I'll refrain from naming any here) were similarly comparable to anyone's, and his oddities (all of those versions of Tarzan, for one thing) were much odder than anyone's. But that all matters much more in the hurly-burly of a career lived than it does after the fact; with a bit of luck, the best of PJF will be remembered for years to come, and the worst will be quietly forgotten.

I expect to see a lot of tributes over the next days and weeks; for now, here's his Wikipedia page, which has a solid overview of his career.

John Mortimer, 1923-2008

The BBC reports that novelist and screenwriter Sir John Mortimer has died at the age of eighty-five. His best-known work -- for both page and small screen -- were the stories about the disreputable barrister Rumpole, but he wrote many other fine novels (Paradise Postponed) and screenplays (the '80s miniseries of Brideshead Revisited). He was, like Rumpole, a barrister himself, and was additionally known as an advocate for free speech and other citizens' rights.

I read what I guess was his last novel, Rumpole Misbehaves, just less than a year ago. He was still doing fine work, and he will definitely be missed -- particularly as a voice of opposition as Britain slides ever closer to Panopticon status.

Donald Westlake, 1933-2008

This merits a full-fledged "oh, fuck." Donald E. Westlake, one of the great mystery writers of our time -- under his own name and as "Richard Stark," for about the last fifty years -- died of a heart attack while heading out to a New Year's Eve Party. He was seventy-five, but he'd been doing great work, and there were no signs that he'd be gone any time soon.

The Times has the obit.

If you've never read him, grab Drowned Hopes or Kahawa or Humans or Stark's The Hunter.

[via Sarah Weinman]

Bettie Page Is Dead

Reuters, among many other news outlets, reports that the real great sex symbol of the mid-20th century died yesterday of pneumonia at age 85.

Her life probably wasn't what she wanted or expected it to be, and it certainly wasn't what her many fans wanted or expected. (The latter may be a very good thing, actually.) But she always had that twinkle in her eye, and, towards the end of her life, she was able to benefit from the growing resurgence of her modeling work and the appreciation of her fans. And that's not so bad.

Farewell, Bettie. At least they're spelling your name correctly now.

William Gibson Dead at 94 (No, The Other One)

Reuters has the obituary.

I don't have any good excuse for posting this, except to possibly get out in front of the expected wave of misinformation, or because I myself used to wonder if the authors of The Miracle Worker and Count Zero were the same person.

As it turns out, they weren't, and now only the formerly SFnal William Gibson is still with us.

James Crumley, 1939-2008

James Crumley, one of the best writers of the American detective story and author of several books I expect will be read with pleasure and profit in a hundred years, died Wednesday of accumulating health problems and the simple weight of age. He was sixty-eight.

If you want the facts, go to the New York Times obit; it hits the high points and is both fair and honest.

But if you want to know why Crumley will be remembered, pick up The Last Good Kiss (or possibly Dancing Bear, or The Wrong Case), and read the man that took the Chandler hero and tarnished him out of all recognition, who sent that hero across a vaster and less forgiving landscape that Chandler ever expected, and who knew damn well what kind of world this was, and who peopled it.

His later novels are lesser, and I've never managed to find time for his early Vietnam novel, One to Count Cadence. But those three detective novels, from the '70s and early '80s, are as good as anyone's novels of America get. If you haven't read them, now is a good time.

And I'll hoist a glass in memory of him, the next time I'm drinking more than one.

Thomas M. Disch, 1940-2008

Locus Online reports that Tom Disch, noted critic and writer of SF as well as a highly respected poet, died by suicide on July 4th in New York City.

God damn that is horrible news. He just had a new book out, too. My thoughts are with all who knew and cared about him -- he'll be remembered, but that's no consolation right now.

Who Is The New Clarke?

And the man asking that question, in yesterday's New York Times, is...our own Dave Itzkoff!

(Did he think he could hide from us by appearing in a different section of the paper?)

Itzy phoned up a representative handful of current SF writers -- Charles Stross, Walter Jon Williams, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Ian McDonald -- and asked them about current scientific trends and SFnal prediction. All said reasonable things, although the backhanded compliment of Bacigaulpi's "In a lot of ways, Clarke was writing honest SF for his time" is awfully close to the perennial radical's lament of how everyone in this history of the universe was less intellectually advanced than the speaker is now. (I've liked several of Bacigalupi's stories a lot, but every time I read his comments about the field I get less and less interested in what seems to be more and more intense axe-grinding.)

The article's premise is on shaky grounds, though -- it's the old saw about SF, and in particular Clarke's work, being primarily about predicting the future. That never was true for any good SF past the very earliest Gernsback era, and it's less true of Clarke than most. Clarke never wrote a future history, and very few of his stories were particularly predictive.

Did Childhood's End "predict" that devil-shaped aliens would transform our children?

Did Rendezvous With Rama "predict" that giant enigmatic alien starships would use our solar system as an interstellar rest stop?

I suppose it's too early to say whether the "predictions" in Against the Fall of Night/The City and the Stars came true, so we can give him a pass there.

There's no space elevator yet, so I guess that makes The Fountains of Paradise "wrong."

Commentors are encouraged to post their own ideas of what particular Clarke works "predicted" and whether they came true or not.

Really, the predictiveness of a story has nothing to do with whether it's good SF, or good in any other way. It may be what non-SF readers cling onto as "what SF does," but that just proves that they don't know much about SF.

And that nicely returns to my first point -- let me repeat that the author of that article is one Dave Itzkoff.

Exactly.

Arthur C. Clarke, R.I.P.

The BBC reports that Arthur C. Clarke has died at the age of 90. It's a sad thing, but, given his health problems, it's amazing that he survived, and thrived, for so long. I guess Sri Lanka has a lot going for it.

Rest In Peace, Sir Arthur. You deserve it.

Burying Caesar, Not Praising Him

Let's say you're John Clute, writing an obituary of Robert Jordan for The Independent. You want to say nice things about the guy -- he's dead, and that's the gig -- but you also want to make your regular lofty critical position clear, and avoid saying anything overly positive that may be quoted against you later.

So your lede is:

The overwhelming presence of J.R.R. Tolkien blighted the careers of many writers who could not escape his shadow.

In context, "blighting" specifically does not mean "writing a long, somewhat Tolkien-derivative, exceptionally popular, fantasy series," since that's exactly what Jordan did, and you immediately go on to praise him for just that Tolkienian achievement.

So the study question is this: who, exactly, are these writers blighted by the presence of Tolkien? And what on earth do they have to do with anything?

More on Jordan

Robert Jordan/Jim Rigney has not been well-served by his New York Times or SFWA obituaries, but this write-up in the Los Angeles Times is a model of what a good obituary should do for a major figure.

Robert Jordan, 1948-2007

According to a post this evening on his blog, bestselling fantasy author Robert Jordan died this afternoon at his home in Charleston, South Carolina after a long battle with a form of cancer. He had been diagnosed with primary amyloidosis with cardiomyopathy in March of 2006 and had received several rounds of chemotherapy treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota for his condition.

Jordan was best known for the still-unfinished "Wheel of Time" series: eleven novels and a prequel had been published before his illness. The status of the projected final novel, A Memory of Light, is unknown at this time. Jordan had also written a number of well-received "Conan" novels and a number of historical novels under the name Reagan O'Neill.

"Robert Jordan" was a fairly open pseudonym for James Oliver Rigney, Jr., a Vietnam veteran, graduate of the Citadel, and nuclear engineer before he turned to writing in 1977. He is survived by his wife and editor, Harriet McDougal, and a legion of readers and enthusiasts.

Wikipedia article on Robert Jordan; Internet Speculative Fiction Database listing of his work.

Madeleine L'Engle 1918-2007

Madeleine L'Engle, author of the Newbery Award-winning novel for young readers A Wrinkle In Time, died yesterday of natural causes in Connecticut. She was 88 years old. The New York Times has a full obituary.

L'Engle wrote more than fifty books, including poetry, plays, autobiography, and devotionals, but was best known for her novels for teenagers. Most of those novels were intricately interconnected into a complex universe, crossing genres and styles and spanning decades as they told the stories of several families: the Austins, the Murrys, the O'Keefes.

I don't know if young readers still come to A Wrinkle in Time as they did when I was young; I suspect it was the first fantastic book of many readers of my generation. It's an odd, quirky book: beloved by millions, but able to intensely annoy both physicists and Christians with its sentimental science-tinged religion. (or should that be religion-tinged science?) L'Engle had an awareness of death and loss that isn't as common in the Young Adult field as it should be; she always managed the difficult balancing act of writing of a universe full of love in which bad things still happened.

L'Engle was never of the science fiction field, but she led many readers there; for that, and for all of the other gifts of her works, she will be greatly missed.