I've just learned that Thomas M. Disch, author, teacher, editor, and poet, has passed away. He is the second instructor I had at the Clarion Science-Fiction Writing Workshop to have died in the past few weeks, having been preceded by Algis Budrys. In addition to having both been teachers of mine, Tom and Ajay were bound together in another, far more intense way, as can be seen by the recent posting in which Tom wrote of Ajay, "I was certain I would beat him to the exit, but no I get to dance on his grave," an eerie sentiment to reread in light of this new context.

I can no longer remember when I read my first Disch, but I can very much remember when I read my favorite Disch. It was in the pages of Terry Carr's 1967 Ace Books anthology New Worlds of Fantasy, which reprinted "The Squirrel Cage." The story begins:

The terrifying thing—if that's what I mean—I'm not sure that "terrifying" is the right word—is that I'm free to write down anything I like but that no matter what I do write down it will make no difference—to me, to you, to whomever differences are made. But then what is meant by "a difference?" Is there ever really such a thing as change?

We learn that our narrator is locked in a small, windowless room. He has no memory of how he got there or why he is there. Perhaps he volunteered for an experiment. Perhaps he's the sole survivor of the human race, Perhaps he's being studied by aliens. All he knows is that time is passing while the only things he has with which to entertain himself are the copies of the New York Times which keep showing up in the room.

And a typewriter, with no platen. He cannot see the results of his typing, and so he imagines that his words appear outside his room, perhaps like a news ticker in lights scrolling across the side of a building as crowds watch. We experience his despair as one day blends into another, and he struggles to stay sane and survive. The story ends with:

"Terrifying?"

It's not terrifying. How can it be? It's only a story, after all. Maybe you don't think it's a story, because you're out there reading it on the billboard, but I know it's a story because I have to sit here on this stool making it up. Oh it might have been terrifying once upon a time, when I first got the idea, but I've been here now for years. Years. The story has gone on far too long. Nothing can be terrifying for years on end. I only say it's terrifying because, you know, I have to say something. Something or other. The only thing that could terrify me now is if someone were to come in. If they came in and said, "All right, Disch, you can go now." That, truly, would be terrifying.

I was only 12 when I read this story, and it made an immediate existential impact on me. It apparently had the same affect on many others. When I went to Clarion in 1979, primarily because I wanted to be taught by Tom, I started to tell him how much a certain story had moved me. He instantly knew which story I'd meant. People were always coming up to him to tell him how much that particular story had changed their lives, including one woman who had memorized the entire tale. I never went quite that far, but Tom did change my life.

While at Clarion, he told me things which had they been said by anyone else, I might not have heard. But getting critiqued by Tom was like getting hit by a 2"-by-4". He got my full attention. I left my one-on-one with Tom stunned, but as soon that critical concussion wore off, I put what he taught me into practice.

I loved his short stories such as "Descending" and "The Roaches, and his novels such as Camp Concentration and On Wings of Song, and ... well ... I wouldn't be who I am today without both them and him.

When I first read though The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, one of the entries I immediately paged to was Tom's. There I came across the following words written by John Clute:

Because of his intellectual audacity, the chillingly distant mannerism of his narrative art, the austerity of the pleasures he affords, and the fine cruelty of his wit, Thomas M. Disch has been perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied and least read of all modern first-rank SF writers.

And though that sort of description might put off those of you who dream of bestsellerdom, when I read those words, I immediately thought, if anyone could ever honestly describe my work in that way, I would be happy. It would be enough. I have no idea what Tom thought of that write-up, but I hope that he, too, was pleased.

And now he's suddenly gone, with a new novel just out, and having blogged as tomsdisch just a few days ago. I'm stunned, and saddened, and not sure what else to say, other than to repeat these words from "The Squirrel Cage":

"All right, Disch, you can go now."

I've always loved George Carlin, starting before he was considered a satirist, back when he was just a comedian who did characters like the hippy-dippy weatherman, who'd make predictions on the Merv Griffin Show along the lines of "Tonight's forecast—dark, continued mostly dark tonight turning to widely scattered light in the morning." His material and his delivery always cracked me up.

But with his routine "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," Carlin transformed himself into a modern-day Lenny Bruce (Bruce was then one of my gods), and that love became adoration.

So back in the early '70s, when I heard that he would be doing a show at Brooklyn College, I went with a friend, and we roared with laughter the entire time. When Carlin mentioned from the stage that he'd be appearing a few days later at the Bitter End in the Village, we decided right then that we had to be there.

We'd pretty much made fools of ourselves at that second show. Carlin had recently begun doing a bit in which he enthusiastically sang the theme from the Raisin Bran commercial (I can't really explain why that was funny; you'd have to see it), and so when we went to the Bitter End, we gift-wrapped half-a-dozen boxes of Raisin Bran, and brought it to the show along with a card we'd made in the shape of a giant raisin inside of which we'd written dozens of very bad punning raisin jokes. After that show, Carlin allowed us back stage to so we could give him this very weird gift (hey, we were teenagers!), and then talked with us in his dressing room for what seemed like at least an hour.

I wish I could remember the details of the encounter, but memory fails me. I know we discussed his change from the shaved and suited comedian to the bearded and pony-tailed satirist, and what part drugs may have played in the transformation, but anything more than that is lost. I can only remember being awestruck, and feeling extremely lucky.

I asked Carlin if I could interview him. He said that he'd be appearing on the Johnny Carson Show a few days later, and though he couldn't get us tickets, if we wanted to meet him in the lobby after the taping, he'd let me ask him some questions. For some reason, my friend couldn't make it, and so this picture was taken in that lobby by my father, who came along. (Click on the image once, then again, to see a larger version.) And as for that lobby—how's this for coincidence? It was the lobby to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the same building in which my current employer, the SCI FI Channel, is housed. So the more things change ...

That's a tape recorder in my hand not making the peace sign. I asked Carlin questions both there and as we walked through the streets of Manhattan until he finally had to call it a night. I'll always remember Carlin's kindness to what had to have been an annoying teenager.

I'm not exactly sure when all of this occurred. Based on my hair, and that denim jacket which had a studded peace symbol on the back and a "War is Not Healthy For Children and Other Living Things" patch on one shoulder, I think this happened in 1972, but for all I know it could have been a year earlier or a year later. I think I was either 16 or 17. I imagine that I could pinpoint the exact date with enough research by figuring out when the Brooklyn College-Bitter End-Johnny Carson trifecta occurred in such close proximity, but I'm not even sure such information still exists.

And if you're wondering about the deterioration at the top and bottom of the photo, that's because I'd misplaced the roll of film I'd used that day—for years! Every once in a while, I'd wonder what happened to the pictures I'd taken that night, but I never could find them. About a decade later, during a move, I finally discovered the roll. When I had it developed, only two images remained, this one, and a picture I'd taken of a friend's parakeet. So I'm grateful that this image exists at all. (Now if only I could find the reel-to-reel tape of that interview.)

In any case, farewell, class clown!

Algis Budrys, or Ajay as he was known to his friends, passed away earlier today. His father was the head of the Lithuanian government in exile, so when Ajay came with him to the U.S. in 1936 at the age of five, he received an early education in seeing the world with outsider eyes. That sense of the alien helped him well in his future writing career. Ajay went on to write many classic novels, notably Who?, Rogue Moon, and Michaelmas.

But he was also a teacher, and that was his role when I first met him in the flesh, as opposed to on the page. It was 1979, and I was a student attending the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Workshop. (My other teachers were Robin Scott Wilson, Carol Emshwiller, Thomas Disch, Damon Knight, and Kate Wilhelm.) Before Ajay decided that Writers of the Future was the preferred path, he had been a strong proponent of the Clarion workshopping method, and he was a wonderful teacher.

But aside from having an excellent understanding of how to build a story, he also helped provide one of the more memorable incidents of my six weeks in East Lansing. Ajay's week was early on in the term, and so he surprised us by returning for the final week of Clarion, at which time Damon and Kate were the scheduled teachers. During workshopping one morning, after all of the students had taken their turns commenting on the story at hand, when it was Ajay's turn to critique the manuscript, he spent what seemed like half an hour (though I know it could never have been that long) explaining in great detail why the story under discussion could never be sold in its current state, why it wasn't working, and how it could be turned inside out and fixed.

He then handed the story on to the next critiquer, who happened to be Damon Knight. Damon looked at Ajay, looked at the manuscript, grinned with great amusement (any of you who ever had the good fortune to meet Damon know exactly the look I mean), and then told us that he completely disagreed with Ajay. He was buying the story for the final volume of his Orbit anthology.

I was flabbergasted at the time. We all were. How could this be? Whom were we to believe? Was Ajay right, in which case Damon had bought a story that was not up to snuff and could have been made better? Or was Damon right, which meant that Ajay was off-base about both the story's quality and its chances in the marketplace? We students were baffled, and talked about this for the rest of the day, and late into the night.

It wasn't until years later that I realized it was a set-up. Had to have been. I'm convinced of that now. Damon and Ajay didn't want us making them into gods. They wanted us to learn to think for ourselves, to make our own choices instead of blindly following them, and so decided to play with our heads a bit and create a contradictory bit of theater, orchestrating the order of their critiques for maximum effect.

I wish Ajay could be with us to play with our heads still. And though he can no longer do so in the flesh, he will forever be able to do so on the page. So please pick up one of his classic works over the next few days and help him live forever. I know that I'll be doing so.

Will Elder, one of the founding artists of MAD magazine, passed away this morning. Though I attended the 1972 EC Comics Convention, as far as I recall, Elder did not, and so I never met the man and have no personal anecdotes to share. (I did, however, meet much of the rest of the EC crew, managed to get Bill Gaines, Joe Orlando, George Evans, Al Williamson, and Wally Wood to sign my program book, and even got sketches from the last three of those names, plus a caricature of me by Jack Davis that you see as the icon at left.)

But I've long admired his artwork, not just in those early issues of MAD, but also in the pages of Trump, Humbug, and Playboy. That last publication was where, with Harvey Kurtzman, Elder co-created the strip Little Annie Fanny at Hugh Hefner's request.

I would have liked to have met him, because he was reported to be a wild and crazy guy, legendary in his zaniness. The caricature above right, taken from that con's program book, and drawn by Marie Severin back when she and Elder worked together at EC in the '50s, gives a clue as to how he was seen by his coworkers.

Here's the official press release from DC Comics, currently the publishers of MAD:

William "Willie" Elder, the successful cartoonist and commercial illustrator whose work helped launch MAD Magazine, died Thursday morning, May 15th, 2008. He was 86.

Born Wolf William Eisenberg in the Bronx, New York, Elder changed his name after returning in World War II. During his time of service, Elder was part of the map-making team that was instrumental in the invasion of Normandy.

When Harvey Kurtzman launched MAD Magazine in 1952, he hired Elder along with Wally Wood, Jim Severin, and Jack Davis to produce content for the first issues.

"Willie Elder was one of the funniest artists to ever work for MAD. He created visual feasts with dozens of background gags layered into every MAD story he illustrated," says John Ficarra, Editor of MAD Magazine, "He called these gags 'chicken fat.' Willie's 'anything goes' art style set the tone for the entire magazine and created a look that endures to this day."

"Willie's passing saddens all of us here at MAD," says Sam Viviano, MAD Magazine Art Director, "Everyone who has attempted to draw a funny picture over the course of the last fifty or sixty years owes an enormous debt to Willie, who taught us all how to do it—and no one has ever done it better than he did."

If you want to learn more about the madcap Will Elder, click here to see a larger version of the image above, and then click "next picture" to read a two-page feature from the program book in which Gaines, Al Feldstein, Marie Severin, Davis, Wood, Kurtzman, and Evans praised their friend in 1972.

The latest issue of the weekly Variety brings belated news of the death of Werner Groebli, who died back on April 14 at age 92. That name is probably unfamiliar to you, as it was to me. But you might recognize, as I did, the identity he took on in the '30s, when he entered show business and needed to spare his family the embarrassment of his taking part in such poorly regarded profession.

Groebli, an ice-skating wizard, dubbed himself Frick, while Hansruedi Mausch, his partner, named himself Frack, and as the team of Frick and Frack they became world famous, both as superstars of the Ice Follies and in films such as Let's Dance and Silver Skates. Groebli performed more than 12,000 times (both with and without his partner) from 1939 through 1981.

But there's more to the story than that, as some of you may have already realized, just from hearing those assumed names. For not only did the team turn into skating legends, but their names entered our language, becoming synonymous with any two people so alike as to be indistinguishable, a phrase I still hear in use today, though likely by people who have no idea of its origins, and also usually in a disparaging manner. (The phrase almost missed its chance to enter the lexicon, however, as Groebli and Mausch first thought of calling themselves Zig and Zag.)

So even though Werner Groebli is dead, Frick lives on as one half of a figure of speech!

John Berkey, one of our greatest science-fiction and fantasy artists, passed away Tuesday. He was a frequent contributor to both Science Fiction Age and Realms of Fantasy. (Click on the cover at right to begin viewing a gallery of nine Science Fiction Age covers I've uploaded to honor his memory. Each cover can be clicked on yet again to be seen full size.)

His impressionistic paintings had a dreamlike quality which made them a welcome change from the photo-realistic images that many other artists seemed to be aiming for then. But John embodied more than just talent. He was a consummate professional who made all of his deadlines without complaint, whatever his circumstances. And those circumstances were often dire.

Back when I worked at Sovereign Media, I always looked forward to my conversations with John, and almost thought of them as perks. We never met face-to-face, but he was always warm to me over the phone, and we had many long talks, not only about art, but also about the differing challenges life had handed each of us.

During one of those talks, John once segued with a phrase I'd never before heard used in a conversation and am unlikely to ever hear again—"When I first came out of my coma, I ... "—which certainly perked up my attention for what he was to say next. John had been dealt some fairly tough hands in his personal life, but he always faced them with dignity and grace.

Considering his many health problems over the years, his passing was no surprise. But that doesn't make him any less missed.

Prolific comic-book artist Jim Mooney, who as far as I and many other people are concerned was the greatest Supergirl artist who ever lived, passed away on Sunday.

He and I only worked together once, in 1976. We only met face to face once, in 2006. And strangely, without realizing he had passed, I was talking about him on the day of his death.

The panel at right, from the March 1977 of Omega the Unknown, in which the character Gramps grieves for Mamie while Omega watches, captures a little bit of my mood today.

When the Dreaded Deadline Doom meant that fill-in issues were required on Omega, then editor-in-chief Jim Shooter took me and Roger Stern out to a restaurant at which he told us that we were to plot issues of the magazine overnight. Whether or not we should have messed with the grand plan begun by creators Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes isn't something either of us really thought about. When you're 21, and want to write comics, those thoughts just don't pop into your head.

We were each assigned an artist. My story was to be drawn by Jim Mooney, who was the regular artist for the series, while Sterno got Lee Elias, who by doing a fill-in issue would help get the book a couple of months ahead.

I had loved Mooney's artwork since I was a kid, first from the adventures of Supergirl, which he had drawn in Action Comics, and later in Dial H for Hero. Since Jim lived in Florida then, we had no interaction other than through my written plot. The story appeared early the next year in issue #7. It wasn't until three decades later at the 2006 San Diego ComicCon International, where he sat behind a table in Artists' Alley, that I was able to chat with him and tell him how much it had meant to me at the time to see him bring my story alive.

But as I mentioned above, that's not the end of this. Because two days ago, I was talking about that issue the same day Jim Mooney died, completely unaware of his passing. On Sunday morning at the World Horror Convention, I was on a panel about censorship along with Rocky Wood and Michael Shea. Even though I'd had no plans to mention it, since the focus was meant to be more contemporary, near the end of the panel I suddenly remembered the only two moment of censorship with which I'd ever been involved. One of them took place in that issue of Omega the Unknown, and it had to do with Jim Mooney's artwork.

The panel at left isn't as Jim had originally drawn it. It had to be altered in order to pass muster with the Comics Code Authority. (Click on either of these two panels to see them larger.) In the third panel from the end of the issue, the villain of the story escapes from Omega, punching a policeman as he runs off. Since one of the rules of the Code was that no villainy was allowed to go unpunished—with, I seem to recall, a specific taboo against getting away with abusing authority figures in that way—we had to remove the policeman from the image. As you can see, it looks weird, as the villain is now swinging at empty air.

It didn't matter that punishment would come in a future issue—Blockbuster couldn't be seen as escaping unpunished even for an instant. And so Wite-Out was applied, and the morals of America's children were once again safe.

Monday afternoon, leaving Salt Lake City, I surfed the Web on my BlackBerry while sitting on the tarmac waiting for the plane to push back from the gate. I was over at my Friends page, and in that moment, as far as I was concerned, Jim Mooney was alive. But then I refreshed the page, and I discovered the sad news through a posting of Jim's death in an entry over at kradical's blog. It was eerie to find out about it in that way, and even spookier that I had been speaking of Jim just 24 hours or so earlier, not knowing that, depending on the time, he was either dying or had already died that day.

I wish I could have known him better, but my path took me away from comics. If you want to find out more details about Jim's life and work, check out Mark Evanier's blog.

When I first started reading science fiction, my gods were three:

Isaac Asimov.

Robert Heinlein.

And Arthur C. Clarke.

Those were the writers I read and reread. Those were also the writers whom, when I first thought I might become a writer, I wanted to be. As far as I was concerned, they were science fiction.

In my late teens, when I began to rebel, I found a new set of gods. Once more, there were three of them:

Roger Zelazny.

Samuel R. Delany.

And Harlan Ellison.

Now that the last of my first set of gods has departed for a new odyssey, and I pause to mourn as many of us are doing today, I also find myself thinking that those entering science fiction today must have their own set of living gods, for the ones I began with must surely seem as ancient as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells did to me by the time I got around to reading them.

I won't even begin to attempt to fill in those new names today, just say that even as I mourn the passing of Arthur C. Clarke, I also celebrate that continuum of which we all are a part.

We can only see so far today because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Clarke was definitely one of them. We are all indebted to him, and were extremely lucky to have had him with us for so long.

Avant-garde author and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, perhaps known best for his Academy Award-nominated screenplay for the 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad, died Monday. He was part of a group that came to be known as the New Novelists, which, as yesterday's New York Times obituary pointed out, eschewed "literary conventions like plot and character development, narrative and chronology, chapters and punctuation." While that may be true, I've still managed to find wisdom in his essays contained in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, which offer good advice far more clear-headed and down to Earth than that previous description would indicate.



In the 1957 essay titled "On Several Obsolete Notions," he had this to say about the novel:

It is not enough that it be entertaining, or extraordinary, or enthralling; to have its measure of human truth, it must also succeed in convincing the reader that the adventures he is hearing about have really happened to real characters, and that the novelist is confining himself to reporting, to transmitting events of which he has been the witness. A tacit conversation is established between the reader and author: the latter will pretend to believe in what he is telling, the former will forget that everything is invented and will pretend to be dealing with a document, a biography, a real-life story. To tell a story well is therefore to make what one writes resemble the unprefabricated schemas people are used to, in other words, their ready-made idea of reality.

Thus, whatever the unexpected nature of the situations, the accidents, the fortuitous reactions, the narrative must flow without jolts, as though of its own accord, with the irrepressible élan which immediately wins our adherence. The least hesitation, the slightest oddity (two contradictory elements, for example, or two that do not exactly match), and unexpectedly the current of the novel ceases to sustain the reader, who suddenly wonders if he is not being "told a story" and who threatens to return to authentic testimonies, about which at least he will not have to ask himself questions as to verisimilitude of things. Even more than to divert, the issue here is to reassure him.

I think this aim is the same whether a story is set in the here and now, or on the other side of the galaxy. The quest for that perfect truth remains.

I just learned that Steve Gerber passed away yesterday while waiting in the hospital for a lung transplant. I'm still sort of stunned right now, since he'd posted on his blog as recently as last Monday about his progress on a Dr. Fate project. He seemed hopeful, and so I was trying to remain optimistic.

I won't attempt to go on at length here to explain to you who he was and why he mattered. You probably already know him from his work on Man-Thing, Omega the Unknown, and Howard the Duck, and I'll leave it to others who can better keep their wits about them to recount the details of his life. You can also get more information and read remembrances from those who loved him here.

But I'd just like to quickly say that I remember him as much for what I knew of him off the page as for what the rest of the world knew of him from what was on the page. Around the Bullpen, he was always a funny guy, part Mort Sahl, part Lewis Black.

And he had no sense of shame when it came to making you laugh. Here he is, posing for a photo that appeared in the October 1975 issue of Crazy magazine, which he edited for Marvel back when I was on staff there. He used his sense of the absurd to make Crazy into more than just another clone of MAD. I'd like to remember him that way, smiling, happy, and in your face.

He followed a rough road in comics, because he pushed the envelope—both artistically and in fighting for creator rights—at a time when most didn't bother. We need more like him.

We need him.