AN INTRODUCTION
I
With the close of day there comes an end to screaming
And a calmness in the dying of the fire.
Holding tight to breath has worn your fingers ragged
And the earth comes up to meet you in a kiss.
You will waken on another day of never;
There is nothing that can hear you, in the dark.
John M. Ford wrote that. It’s the last stanza of a sestina, a form of poem in which the words that end the six lines repeat through each of six verses. He wrote the entire thing, inspired by something I had once put into Sandman, a tossed-off jewel in an email about something else entirely.
II
John M. Ford was Mike to his friends, and I was fortunate enough to be able to count myself as one of his friends.
Mike Ford looked gentle and amused. As the years went by his eyebrows grew out, like insectile antennae, putting him in touch with the infinite. He was mild-mannered, a description that normally is only applied to reporters who are secretly Superman, which seems appropriate, as all of Mike’s friends suspected him of secretly being, well, if not a Superman, then a different kind of human, one vastly smarter and wiser than the normal manner of person.
Mike died alone, taken by a sudden heart attack, in 2006, and it was devastating. He was forty-nine when he died, and it felt like he was only getting started.
He had been giving me Aspects, a few chapters at a time, for years: whenever we saw each other he would have another section printed out, or he would apologise for his slowness (his excuses were valid: he had, for example, had a kidney transplant) and he would promise one next time.
Mike has been dead fourteen years, as I write this, and I would do anything to put off writing this introduction, because writing it means that I have to acknowledge two things that, on a very fundamental level, I do not wish to believe:
They are, that Mike is actually, really, irrevocably dead; and that Aspects, his final novel, will never quite be finished.
It’s magical thinking, I know, but it’s still real: the belief, amounting to a certainty, that as long as I don’t finish this introduction, as long as Aspects in this form is not published, it could all be a mistake.
I know, deep in my soul, with the same conviction with which I know that the sun will rise tomorrow, that pretty soon I’ll do a signing at DreamHaven Books in Dinkytown in Minneapolis, and Mike will casually turn up about half an hour before the end, browse the shelves, talk to people, and then, when it’s all done, I’ll drive us both somewhere for some food, probably sushi, and we will talk, and Mike will do most of the talking (for which I will be grateful) and at the end of the meal Mike will produce the final chapters of Aspects from deep inside a coat pocket and I will take them gratefully, and then I will drive him back to his place, an office that was a living space that was his life, with the model train set that runs all around the room.
During the meal I will learn things. I have learned always to ask questions, because when I do, Mike will explain something to me that I did not know. Mike’s conversation is always erudite, and travels smoothly from high culture to low. He can modulate from movie and TV trivia to Marlowe and Shakespeare with a side trip into quantum physics or obscure economics in the same thought. Perhaps during the meal Mike will let slip some unlikely jewel of personal history, and I will learn more about the intelligence communities’ attempts to recruit him as a boy genius.…
He talks only about the parts of his life he felt comfortable letting you know about. Other bits are shadowed and brushed away.
But DreamHaven Books has moved away from Dinkytown, and I don’t really do those signings anymore, and as I type this COVID has closed the world down—which means I worry, irrationally, about Mike Ford, whose health was always precarious and would need to isolate (He’s dead, I remind myself, he doesn’t need to isolate himself, he won’t be catching anything from anyone.… And still I persist in worrying.)
I’m honestly not that irrational about any of my other friends who have died. I’m sad, or resigned, or just used to it. I’m frustrated I can’t talk to them any longer, but they don’t feel so there. Mike feels like he stepped out of the room mid-sentence, and I will never stop expecting him to come back.
Physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli relates that Einstein wrote to the wife of a colleague who had recently died to reassure her that her husband had not ceased to be—her husband was still present and working, but in the past, a place she could not go. (The past is truly a foreign country, as L. P. Hartley told us. Just one to which we can no longer travel. The inhabitants aren’t dead—they are there, in their country, and they cannot leave and join us. The borders are closed.)
Sometimes I go back and read Mike’s emails to me. I don’t do that with anyone else. Then again, nobody else I knew was likely to take a typo in an invitation I’d written to come to a bonfire party and turn it into a small play in verse, and then, as an afterthought, round up a small bunch of talented people actually to perform it. Mike did.
There. I stopped writing this introduction to reread all the surviving emails from Mike, which sent me off on a small YouTube trip to watch the final two minutes of The Prisoner TV series, inspired by Mike’s commentary on it. He said something I wanted to reply to, and I needed to check my own memory.…
And then I remembered, once again, as I always remember, that I couldn’t ever reply to him. I found a sestina, though, that he sent me, inspired by something I had once written in Sandman, and the final stanza felt like it fitted the beginning of this introduction. So there’s that.
III
When I was a teenager, I dreamed of being a Young Novelist. The kind who would write the first of a lifetime’s worth of great novels as they enter their twenties. I wasn’t one, which is, in retrospect, a good thing: I wouldn’t have had anything to say.
Mike was, and he did. He broke into print, with short stories and poems, when he was seventeen. His first novel was published when he was twenty-two. It’s called Web of Angels, and it’s a proto-cyberpunk novel, with an honest-to-goodness cyberspace Web in it, and it came out in 1980, four years before William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
I met Mike Ford—the M was for Milo, not Michael—in Birmingham in 1984, at a convention. He was funny in the way writers usually aren’t funny, in that he would come up with the perfect riposte, line, or comment at the perfect moment for it, and not (as is the case with me) two weeks later, but he would say it quietly, as an aside, never to put people down or to dominate the conversation, although his comedic delivery was world class. We became friends. He was just about to win the 1984 World Fantasy Award for his alternate history novel The Dragon Waiting. (It contains no dragons, or rather, the dragon of the title is Wales.)
Whenever he would come to the UK—he would come in August, sometimes, for the Fairport’s Cropredy Convention—we would get together and eat, and talk, and I would learn.
We became correspondents, too, back in those days when that involved typewriters and postage and airmail. Somewhere I have a letter from Mike written to teach me how to write a sestina. It was in the form of a sestina.
He wrote brilliantly for people who were, he assumed, as brilliant as he was.
Mike followed The Dragon Waiting with two Star Trek novels—one a First Contact novel about the Klingons, The Final Reflection, and the other, How Much for Just the Planet?, a slapstick musical comedy in science fictional form. I am there, under an anagrammatic pseudonym, and my character sings, I fancy, the finest of all of the songs in the book.
When I moved to the U.S., Mike’s being in Minneapolis was one of the deciding factors of where I went.
He was my best reader. Every writer has one, or hopes they will find one. The person you know will read your story and understand it for what it was, see what you were trying for, identify the places you fell short, and tell you, succinctly and correctly, how to remedy them.
IV
I first read Aspects, as I have mentioned, as Mike was writing it, in chunks. They were always handed over in person, in passing, with a comment from Mike about my not ever actually having to read it, and another comment about something obscurely wrong in the text that Mike hoped I wouldn’t find too alarming. I never noticed the wrong things, if they were indeed there.
I loved the book, though.
It began with a duel, and I thought myself, as I read the first chapter 150 years ago in Europe, in the kind of imaginary place and time that Avram Davidson had once written about, and then I realised, as I read, that it was something else entirely, not that at all.
It felt like he was building something quite new in Fantasy, a place where nothing is ever new: it was what A Game of Thrones might have been, if the author had been fascinated by trains, and set in a place that wasn’t nineteenth-century Europe, just as Westeros isn’t fifteenth-century Britain, and it was about—I thought—communication and politics, magic, redemption, and the forms that love can take. It was shaped only like itself, as Mark Antony said of the crocodile, and the tears of it were wet.
The world of Aspects feels like that of a classic movie—in black and white perhaps, shot by Howard Hawks or John Ford (Mike loved to begin his books with quotes from John Ford movies).
I had so many questions for him about what I was reading—about the characters, about the setting, about the way the people were and were not us. There is science fiction hidden here, alternate world-building aplenty, in this story about love and life, trains, government, and death.
I thought, back then, I’ll put off the questions until he gives me the final chapter, and I’ve read the whole thing.
I should have learned, I realised, when the final chapter never came, to have simply asked the questions when they occurred to me. He always took so much pleasure in answering them.
V
Mike died fourteen years ago. I originally agreed to write this introduction eleven years ago, and I should have given it to its editor a year ago.
I begin to write it, but then shy, like a skittish pony, and I back away, do something else. Often the something else I do has to do with Aspects—I reread old emails from Mike Ford, or I reread the book. We have almost all of it, after all. Endings, and the books that would have followed, can be imagined.…
Perhaps what delays me is the conviction that if I can only write this introduction well enough, it won’t be needed. We’ll jump the rails, find ourselves clattering along on another track, one in which Mike finished this book and wrote the other Aspects books he planned.
But no. I write it as best I can, and Mike stays dead, and remains in his own country, which is the past, and this book is what he left us.
Neil Gaiman
April 2021
Copyright © 2022 by The Estate of John M. Ford
