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I'm packing for London, Edinburgh, and York, so I almost missed blogging today. Luckily, what I have to blog is short and sweet. It's a memory of the astonishingly and effortlessly witty John M. Ford, known to all his friends as Mike. Years ago, I ran across him at a science fiction event, where they'd given us those little stick-on name tags beginning:
HELLO. MY NAME IS . . .
and under it, he'd written:
INIGO MONTOYEZ
YOU KILLED MY FATHER
PREPARE TO DIE
Which was just so damned typical of him. I really miss the guy.
And if you're going to be in London a week from Wednesday. . .
I'll be appearing at the British Science Fiction Association meeting in the Antelope Tavern in Belgravia. Meeting notice here. Why not drop by and say hi? I'm not like most of the people you meet.
*
2 comments:
I never knew Mike Ford in even the most ephemeral internet way, but I was extremely familiar with his mind from his posts on Making Light, where he seemed to be able to whip up gems like this at a moments notice:
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/005235.html
(Henry V recast as Damon Runyon, and it works as drama as well as comedy)
He wrote some brilliant novels (The Last Hot Time shares with your two Iron Dragon novels the distinction one of the incredibly few "faerie and the modern world" books that I can read with admiration rather than nausea) and short stories (what was the title? - the one about a performance of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' in a recently decomissioned concentration camp...) but his real strength was in the unimaginably profuse and witty stream of comments he left on the web.
I don't think being the world's greatest salon wit is a viable career path, more's the pity.
Mike and I frequented the Pyramid newsgroups once upon a time. What I remember best of him is his sigs; little bits of witty text, featuring the name of some fictional enterprise or group doing something odd and wondrous for humanity. Provided informative and entertaining posts he did.
Alan
Member of Time Traveling Cluebats; traveling the seconds' swift way to smack some smarts in long dead philosophers.
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