Happy (belated by an hour and a half) Mike's birthday

[elisem]

Yesterday, April 10, 2022, would have been Mike's 65th birthday.

He was such a Mike. I miss him a lot. Like Neil says, we were very lucky to have him.

Got any Mike stories or appreciations of his work?

Comments

[longstrider]

I bought Aspects on Friday.

One of the things that makes me saddest about SJ Games' shutdown of their old BBS was the loss of all of his sig file bits. I loved reading those even on posts where I cared nothing about the content.

[mrissa]

I remember figuring out part of what he was doing with Ask Dr. Mike, which I do on a much smaller scale, which was: take note of who falls out of their seat laughing at the really obscure part of the joke, find that person later and talk happily to them about obscure topic. I thought that's what I was seeing, and then the conversation later that very same Minicon slid oh so gracefully into how it was that I had experience of thus-and-so, and: yeah. So many people at his memorial said "Mike was the only one I could talk to about [interest]!" and meanwhile I watched him making the mental notes that led to that: oh good, I can talk to X about y interest, that'll be nice.

Example: one of the looks he gave me in particular there was a Susan Calvin/TULIP joke, and I made a noise like I'd been shot before I started laughing, and there was that sharp-eyed Mike look of: ah. That one hit home, did it? Hello, member of that club, hi. And sure enough there was a Total Depravity joke later in private conversation. Yep, hello, I can match you with Limited Atonement. Here we are then. Well.

...nice might not be the right word exactly, in that particular case.

[azurelunatic]

It was not my first cosplay; that was Amelia Bedelia.

But one fine sunny morning in the fall of 1994 or so, there I was sitting outside wearing my command-gold sweater, with a glass of blue "orange juice" (lemonade) and a piece of cinnamon toast with green sugar, as though my breakfast had been scrambled by a very peculiar AI that had gotten into my starship.

[kellan_the_tabby]

*absolute, entire delight*

[azurelunatic]

My nerd camp friend Rebecca shoved a couple books in my hands, saying I needed to read them immediately. That was one of them.

[kellan_the_tabby]

THAT'S a good friend.

[naomikritzer]

One of my favorite memories of Mike is sort of a sideways memory of Mike: I have this vivid memory of Octavia Butler, Minicon GoH, at Ask Doctor Mike, laughing so hard she was almost falling out of her chair.

[davidgoldfarb]

I was nine years old when Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine started up. And I bought every issue and read everything in it. And in that first decade that included a number of Mike's stories.

(It feels a little weird to call him "Mike" when I never really knew him, but it also would feel a little weird not to.)

And I had a lot of trouble appreciating them. I'd read a lot of Golden Age SF, problem stories. And Mike's stories were shaped like them in a lot of ways...but in the Golden Age stories the problems got solved while in Mike's they were chronic conditions that just had to be adjusted to. (I'm thinking for example of "Alternities".) And I was too young to understand what he was doing with the form. To me it just felt like these stories didn't have proper endings.

Fast forward to around the turn of the millennium. A number of people on Usenet whose taste I highly respect adore his work. So I try The Dragon Waiting — I prepare for it first by reading Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy and Richard III, which was worthwhile in itself and also a good idea. And The Dragon Waiting absolutely blows me away. The characters, the setting, the way he uses things from Shakespeare and keeps them completely the same on the surface but makes them mean something different. Wow.

So I want to share this newfound appreciation with my folks on Usenet. I am so enthused that I title my post "John M. Ford" without a second thought. It took three direct followups all saying "Don't DO that!" before I realized just what exactly I'd done. Ai-yi-yi.

(In case it's not clear to anyone: there was somewhat of a pattern of titling death notices with just the person's name....and Mike of course had been chronically in ill health.)

[ckd]

I think my first exposure to his work was one of his stories for the Car Wars magazine Autoduel Quarterly, "Alkahest: The Deathtoll Solution".

It was a game-world story that wasn't the kind where you can hear the dice rolling with each paragraph, had some wonderfully fun twists and witty lines (of course), and managed to get a great "found family" vibe into just a few pages--all while building a great gaming hook for, as his gaming notes put it, "episodic adventures with continuing elements. And isn't that the way most of us, with jobs and non-gaming social lives and so forth, actually wind up playing?"

Freshman year (1986-87) one of my friends in the dorm invited me to a convention; it was local and "you'll probably enjoy it". (Turned out to be the Boskone From Hell, no lie, but I enjoyed it anyway.)

Friday night at the Meet the Pros party I saw a familiar name on a badge, and got the chance to tell him how much I'd liked the story.

(And if that sounds interesting enough to anyone to spend $3 on the PDF: it's available.)

[sine_nomine]

I have asked a DW friend for permission to share with you something they shared a bit ago... stay tuned!

ETA: My friend said sure, and that's really sweet!

About Aspects, they posted, "I might have gotten the hardcover, the Kindle version, and the audiobook, all at once as a late 20th anniversary sobriety present to myself. Just maybe."

[redrose]

I read 110 Stories every September 11, and cry.

Several of his other poems are in my commonplace book.

I only ever knew him in Making Light, and in the hole he left.

May we all be so loved and remembered.

[carbonel]

Many years ago, we were in a play-reading group together. (Mostly Shakespeare, and he always did a great job with whatever part he took.) I had a car, and he didn't drive. He usually got there by himself, but I was the one who often gave him a ride home. I always treasured the conversations we had during that time. I felt as if I had to be my best self to keep up with him. It was a challenge, but a worthwhile one.