I have been thinking today of an essay Neil Gaiman wrote almost thirty years ago, for an edition of Fritz Leiber’s The Swords of Lankhmar<\/i>. It begins:<\/p>\n
“It is too often a sad and unwise thing to go back and read a favourite book. Favourite books are the treasure-chests of memory; just thinking of the book evoles the place you read it, the circumstances under which it was read, the person you were, when you read the book first. Some of these books should not be revisited. It is not wise.”<\/p>\n
I have been thinking of this phrase in particular: “the person you were.” And when I read Gaiman’s work, up until I guess COVID lockdown and his strange flight from New Zealand to Scotland, when it looked like he was abandoning his wife and son in a strange country, I thought of Gaiman one way. I know the feelings “The Problem of Susan” or “One Life, Furnished with Early Moorcock” or “Murder Mysteries” evoked in me, and in reading them I had ideas about Gaiman and the kind of man I thought he was.<\/p>\n
Neil Gaiman is not that man<\/a>.<\/p>\n I’ve been around the comic book industry and sci-fi fandom for a long time. I would never say I was part of “the Cult of Neil.” I haven’t really taken to his novels (except Good Omens<\/i>), his post-Sandman<\/i> comics work has been okay if not great—1602<\/i>, I’m looking at you—and I thought Doctor Who<\/i> fandom was far too kind to “The Doctor’s Wife”<\/a> and far too harsh to “Nightmare in Silver.”<\/p>\n That Gaiman is a shitbag and a rapist sucks<\/i>, but I’m not going to burn his books or drop his stuff at the Little Free Library down the hill. Maybe I’ll cull a few titles, but no wholesale library cleanse. Hell, I still have my Harry Potter library, and J.K. Rowling is a well-known transphobic shitbag<\/a>. Writers have been deeply problematic shitbags for as long as human beings have been telling stories to one another.<\/p>\n Will I buy another Gaiman work, if<\/i> there are more Gaiman works? Orson Scott Card, another problematic writer, still publishes after all. And to that, all I can say is, I don’t know. Miracleman: The Dark Ages<\/i>, if Marvel ever publishes it? Yeah, probably. Novelizations of his Doctor Who<\/i> stories? Well, duh. The Seven Sisters<\/i>, the long-in-gestation sequel to Neverwhere<\/i>? Maybe, I don’t know.<\/p>\n But I know people who loved Gaiman’s work far more than I ever<\/i> did, who met or knew Gaiman and were charmed by him, who could call Gaiman an acquaintance and even a friend, who counted Gaiman’s work among their “favourite books.” For these people, many of them friends<\/i>, today is a painful day. They may never be able to revisit these stories, opening the “treasure-chest of memory” risks utterly ruining what is stored inside with the knowledge of what Gaiman did.<\/p>\n My heart goes out to them. And to Gaiman’s victims.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have been thinking today of an essay Neil Gaiman wrote almost thirty years ago, for an edition of Fritz Leiber’s The Swords of Lankhmar. It begins: “It is too often a sad and unwise thing to go back and read a favourite book. Favourite books are the treasure-chests of memory; just thinking of theContinue reading “The Neil Gaiman Thing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[5183,665,4082,5184,447,481,4322],"class_list":["post-34303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comic-books","tag-amanda-palmer","tag-dc-comics","tag-doctor-who","tag-good-omens","tag-lankhmar","tag-neil-gaiman","tag-the-sandman","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}