Future Making Light threads will revert to our famously warmer-and-fuzzier style of comment moderation. But this is the rule here.

Ebooks too, I hope?

Isaac Butler is a journalist and culture writer-around-town. He writes fairly frequently for Slate and his byline can be found in other places. He’s the co-author of a book about Angels in America.

Couldn't believe it when I read it, and then realized the truth would be, not "out there," but right here.

Honestly, I don't believe anyone has a full bibliography, let alone a complete collection, of everything Mike wrote in all his fantastically diverse interests.

http://www.sjgames.com/general/staff.html

I have...no idea where the rights would be for Mike's work on FASA's Star Trek RPG, but know people who might. Patrick, should they contact you, or Beth, or whom?

We're happy to consider stuff like the Car Wars stories for the new collection of short work, if we like it enough and the IP owners are amenable. So yeah, I'd like to see copies of that if anybody has them.

Some of what was originally printed here would also be nice to see included, as a bit of rounding-out of his character. But I can completely understand if you want to hold to fiction.

The end of "Against Entropy" makes me tear up every time.

So did the end of the Slate article - or, more precisely, so did that final quote from Elise.

Lots of love to Elise, too, btw.

REALLY looking forward to repairing this gap in my reading history.

Happy bounce! Happy bounce!

I am exultant that a new generation will get a chance to appreciate this wonderful writing. And I'm so looking forward to seeing copies of stuff I never knew about, or was never able to track down.

Is there anything that can be said about how much of ASPECTS there is?

The quote was from Heat of Fusion; something like "Of course we'll find a place to dance. This is New York City." But I don't have a copy of the book to check the wording, and memory is like a whatchacallit.

I wondered if a Tor editor had perhaps submitted the quote to LinkNYC for inclusion in their quote database, but perhaps it was a Slate journalist. Who can say?

=____________________________
1: For non-New Yorkers: LinkNYC are large monoliths that are all over the city (mainly in the more upscale parts, tbh) which don't really resemble something out of Arthur C. Clarke because they have grey sides rather than being dead black, have shapes that make them non-rectangular, & have two large colorful screens on their large sides that constantly change, showing advertisements, factoids about New York City, art by local artists (#ArtOnLink), weather conditions and forecasts, transit information, and so on and so forth. The display sequence also includes quotes about NYC by various authors. The kiosks also have a smaller display that can be used for useful things like browsing the web and making free phone calls, and so on. There's also open wifi hotspots to connect to, which I've always had problems getting to work.

website: link.nyc

Ironically, Mike was wrong. New York City is a terrible place for dancing, thanks to the cabaret law that from 1926 to 2017 prohibited public dancing except in venues holding an expensive and hard-to-get cabaret license. You will need to ready your shocked face before I tell you that enforcement of this law was often obviously and shamelessly racist. And although the law was repealed in 2017, the repeal has done little to improve matters, since there remains a zoning system, again enforced with vast arbitrariness, determining where and when establishments that provide live music may allow their patrons to dance to it.

Obviously in a civilized city there needs to be some system that prevents the opening of a loud live-music bar in the middle of a quiet residential street, but many American cities seem to manage this without making it mostly impossible for anyone but the rich and well-connected to dance to music in public.

My band, Whisperado, rarely plays in public any more because gentrification has vanished most of the pleasantly dive-y rock-and-roll bars which used to be our venues. But even back when we did, we never once had the chance to play for people who wanted to dance to music.

When I was young, I read a bunch of his stories in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
(aside: I don't feel I knew him well enough to say "Mike's stories"; but I know he didn't go by "John"; but saying "Ford's stories" seems weird somehow.)
I had trouble with them, and it took quite a while before I understood why. I was used to reading stories about solving problems...and these stories looked a lot like those. Except that they were really about living with insoluble situations and learning to cope. So they cut across my expectations, and I was too young to appreciate what they really were.

But a lot of people I really respected adored his work. So I picked up a copy of The Dragon Waiting, and prepared for it by reading four Shakespeare plays. And it clicked! I was blown away.

Since then I've managed to collect and read nearly all of his books.

A while ago, over on File 770, there was a fad for bracket competitions. The organizer left The Dragon Waiting out of the fantasy bracket, and I managed to encourage people to write it in. That succeeded, and it lasted several rounds. (Eventually getting knocked out by The Princess Bride.)

TL:DR: I am overjoyed by this news! Congratulations to all involved, especially Mr. Butler.

I should feel embarrassed at not recognizing a line from his most famous poem, but I've always found that one hard to read.

I remember feeling a bit bothered at the citation for the quote, because I knew that Heat of Fusion is an anthology, and the exact work in that collection wasn't specified.

The explanation of the cabaret law also looks (separately) familiar; like one of the many Facts About New York City that I've seen on the LinkNYC display (not at the same time as the Ford quote).

@ David Goldfarb: Thanks also for the reminder about the provenance of the quote.

Isaac Butler here. Just wanted to say thank you to the whole Making Light community. I spent a lot of time lurking on old posts and threads while researching the article and this wonderful site and its vibrant discussions were absolutely instrumental to the piece (as of course were Patrick and Teresa, who put up with an absurd number of questions over the last 18 months.)

Can you tell us anything yet about who will be finishing Aspects? I heard a name shortly after his death but also heard that the person was asked and declined.

I'm just sitting here thinking about the number of people I'll be sending the reprints to -- I don't have children, but there's at least one nephew who reads SF....

I've been thinking about how sometimes it takes an outsider to actually figure out how to cut through whatever is stopping a particular group. You might enjoy my experience around that which P&T published as Raiders of the Lost Basement a bunch of years ago.

Many cities have had nightlife-related moral panics of various kinds, absolutely. And they do seem to involve some very weird hoops in each case (New York's current "must be located in a Designated Boogie Zone" is especially picturesque). Patrick is quite right, however: New York City remains a distinctly bad place for dancing if you're not rich and connected. For instance, I can recall looking for a goth club, some years back. In spite of knowing several long-time residents from my clubs back home, it turned out... there wasn't one. Portland, Oregon, with a sixteenth of NYC's population, had more than one regular club night. Seattle, in spite of its own (more recent and more consistently enforced) moral-panic laws, had a full-time club and a couple regular nights at other venues. New York? Just didn't have anywhere you could go to dance to spooky music. And it certainly wasn't because there weren't any goths there, obviously.

(Parenthetically, Steve Jackson is sj@sjgames.com, and he might know about more Car Wars material than shows up in the indexes.)

Query: If someone wanted to get hold of translation rights, does/will Tor handle them? And if so, would that mean limited to the titles in print (or reasonably far through the pipeline) at a given moment?

Patrick @44: I'm an ex-NYer and of course you're totally right about the legal nonsense, but I always took that line in the poem to be more about people improvising under pressure - dancing somewhere they're not necessarily supposed to, because that did happen sometimes.

But I'll always remember going to a show at The Bottom Line in the mid-'90s where the band, unaware of the regulations, noticed that there was plenty of space between the tables there and started exhorting everyone to dance... and they were so sad to learn it wasn't possible that we in the audience forgot to feel sorry for ourselves and just felt sorry for the band instead. That band was Brave Combo, a great polka/salsa act from Texas that is one of the dancingest bands I've ever seen, and its frontman Carl Finch is one of the just plain happiest singers I've ever seen, so it was pretty memorable to see how bummed out he was. They carried on pretty well though.

Rock on!

You could just about fill a small-press volume with his Making Light occasionals and rejoinders.

It seemed sad at the time, and now it seems sadder because the light show gets to dance and people don't.

Patrick, please don't forget about the audio book versions, when you get that far. I'm very sure that Inge would love Mike Ford's books (The Dragon Waiting in particular), and she "reads" in audio form.

Will the books be getting any further editing? Would it be useful to have people scanning/OCRing the existing printed books? That's a task that could be crowdsourced and I'm sure you'd find volunteers.

I have a couple of printed books, reprints of prior publications, that were obviously scanned/OCRed and not competently proofread. The level of errors was appalling. Winterfair Gifts in the anthology volume Miles In Love is riddled with errors. The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, published by Tor... well, it's full of mistakes. The worst of them is that a couple of pages' worth of text were simply omitted from "Superiority", which in some sense is appropriate. It could have happened in a number of ways, but my suspicion is that a couple of pages were stuck together when an old book was scanned, and nobody noticed the omission at any point.

"When the war opened we had no doubts of our ultimate victory. The combined fleets of our allies greatly exceeded in number and armament those which the enemy could muster against us, and in almost all branches of military science we were their superiors. We were sure that we started to convert all homing torpedoes to carry the new weapon. For the time being all further offensives were suspended."

As someone helpfully noted on Twitter, Mike's other CAR WARS story "Alkahest" appeared in Autoduel Quarterly vol. 3 #3, which is also available in PDF at Warehouse 23.

I also noted on Twitter what I suspect is Mike's most obscure short story, except there are actually 2 of them--the introductory stories from the West End Games boardgame anthology Star Trek III, which also contains Mike's only solo board game design, "Free Enterpri$e", though I'd be surprised if he didn't write some paragraphs for "The Sherwood Syndrome" and he's got "contributing design" credit on the third game, "Kobayashi_Maru".

I will note that the BGG link is directly to the Files section of that game's entry, which has some interesting material.

Our trade paperback edition fixes the error. I'm unaware that anybody else's edition fixes the error.

(I have a copy of the Star Trek III game, purchased at a thrift shop. Mike was kind enough to send a photocopy of the missing rule book!)

http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.php?p=2295793&postcount=12

One of the authors for whom the Suck Fairy has not visited (for me), and I'm glad to see this good news.

This post reminded me to dig out the two Star Trek novels that I got at a used record store a while back for $2 each. I look forward to reading them over the holidays.

Dave Bell @ 62: a number of people commented at the time about the need for writers to have wills even if they had nothing tangible; I recall Gaiman being exceptional forceful (at least for Gaiman) in his blog. OTOH, I don't remember seeing details on how this could be done inexpensively; my partner and I recently made a couple of small changes and paid almost $300, which would not be trivial for most writers. I know SFWA has done great things for writers in some aspects but don't know whether they've gathered such info.

http://thegreenbelt.blogspot.com/2006/12/winter-solstice-camelot-station.html

Harriet, I am looking forward to reading that. I've not really been able to find a used copy, so I am thrilled for the reprints.