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And If Sometimes I Can't Seem To Talk
Feb. 21st, 2005 08:37 pmDown the rabbit-hole
Twilight at the Well of Souls
Last ferryboat ride
Apparently Jack L. Chalker is dead. I'd heard last month(through Neil Gaiman's blog, I'm sure)that he was ill, and apparently he died on the 11th. I'm faintly annoyed that I haven't heard anything about it until now.
I'm also more than faintly annoyed that the best obituary I can find for him(which doesn't reduce Midnight At The Well of Souls to "a book about a walking, talking plant with brains its feet"), written by the estimable John Clute, and which everyone is linking to, is only available as a per-pay option, now that it's, you know, a whole three days since it was printed. My advice: Google for "jack chalker obituary clute" and look at the cached version.
Though his books had declined in recent years, Chalker was among my favourite authors for many years. For a while, it was him and Piers Anthony, in fact. I first discovered him when my friend Jeremy was reading the Well World series; I read those(five of them, at the time)and the Four Lords of the Diamond, and then went on to his other multifarious series. His last decent series was "The Wonderland Gambit", and even the last two Well World books were pretty bad. I was not impressed with Melchior's Fire, the first of his most recent(and probably last)trilogy, and was probably about to stop buying his books anyway. But I remember many of his books fondly, and am now feeling the urge to reread a lot of them.
I just found out at The Infinite Matrix that F.M. Busby is dead, too. I'm not nearly as impressed with him, except for his novelette "First Person Plural", a stunning idea carried off beautifully about a man who wakes up one morning in the body of a woman who's just come out of a coma. But his novels that I've read, The Breeds of Man and Young Rissa, have been pretty crappy. That one story must have been a fluke.
Twilight at the Well of Souls
Last ferryboat ride
Apparently Jack L. Chalker is dead. I'd heard last month(through Neil Gaiman's blog, I'm sure)that he was ill, and apparently he died on the 11th. I'm faintly annoyed that I haven't heard anything about it until now.
I'm also more than faintly annoyed that the best obituary I can find for him(which doesn't reduce Midnight At The Well of Souls to "a book about a walking, talking plant with brains its feet"), written by the estimable John Clute, and which everyone is linking to, is only available as a per-pay option, now that it's, you know, a whole three days since it was printed. My advice: Google for "jack chalker obituary clute" and look at the cached version.
Though his books had declined in recent years, Chalker was among my favourite authors for many years. For a while, it was him and Piers Anthony, in fact. I first discovered him when my friend Jeremy was reading the Well World series; I read those(five of them, at the time)and the Four Lords of the Diamond, and then went on to his other multifarious series. His last decent series was "The Wonderland Gambit", and even the last two Well World books were pretty bad. I was not impressed with Melchior's Fire, the first of his most recent(and probably last)trilogy, and was probably about to stop buying his books anyway. But I remember many of his books fondly, and am now feeling the urge to reread a lot of them.
I just found out at The Infinite Matrix that F.M. Busby is dead, too. I'm not nearly as impressed with him, except for his novelette "First Person Plural", a stunning idea carried off beautifully about a man who wakes up one morning in the body of a woman who's just come out of a coma. But his novels that I've read, The Breeds of Man and Young Rissa, have been pretty crappy. That one story must have been a fluke.
