Zarf Updates

I wasn't blogging in 2006, but I was a regular commenter on the Nielsen Haydens' blog Making Light in the year and on the morning that I read "Mike Ford is gone."

I found the comment which I posted twenty years ago today:

I saw him just one or two times, at conventions. I never spoke with him. I admired him desperately and furiously.

I started with reading Just the Planet in a Crown Books, because I couldn’t justify spending my allowance on it. After a while, I started to worry they’d throw me out — not for finishing a book in the store; for laughing too loudly.

I finish, as a lot of us have, by waiting for Aspects.

-- me, that thread, Sept 25, 2006.

Aspects is available, such as it is. The Dragon Waiting and The Scholars of Night and Growing Up Weightless have been reprinted. Web of Angels has been reprinted, just a couple years ago -- ancient time; I forgot that edition was on my shelf. The Trek novels have remained in print, ironically, because they were work-for-hire and not subject to the long weird story of Ford's publication rights.

I also own The Last Hot Time and The Princes of the Air and The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues (a Paranoia module). I have the Tor Double that includes "Fugue State". I have the two short story collections and the Bordertown story collection. I hope those get reprinted. I have a tiny small-press collection of Ford's poetry. It includes "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station", which Ford legendarily wrote as a Christmas card and subsequently won a stack of awards.

(Camelot Station, under its Mittel-modern barrel-vaulted glass roof, comes 'round again as the Grand Terminus of Aspects.)

I need to reread the lesser-known stuff. I've been rereading Aspects recently, piecewise out of order, as I have now and then since 2021. "Comfort reading," my spouse diagnosed correctly. I can't spend all my time in the comfort zone, though.

A few years ago I wrote an essay about language in Aspects. I thought about writing another essay, as a twenty-years' memorial, but I don't have enough pieces. Or too many, incomplete. What did happen to the Moon? How does the book's Book (its Tarot deck) echo the plot? The rules of Battleboard? Goddess, her aspects and consorts? The way Silvern and Edaire's telepathic conversations are always perfectly transparent to the reader? The omnipresent and unspoken theme of "Every story can be told two ways"?

All of that is in there, but none of it is finished and I don't see how it works. Teresa Nielsen Hayden (the book's editor) described it as having "(was going to have) (damn it) a fiendishly complicated plot." I don't even know what the plot was! I don't know if she does!

I have figured out a few things about Aspects, and since I'm not writing an essay, I'll just list them.

• Varic is certainly the one who doesn't care about the circumstances of his death. He disclaims caring whether he lives.
• Gaily, the cook at Strange House, is described as "frighteningly animated"; she "seem[s] to be floating" or "dancing" whenever she moves. Now go read the description of Gelly, the Klingon gladiator introduced in Chapter One of The Final Reflection.
• Winterhill the ex-street-kid orders a whole bowl of bacon for breakfast because he can.
• Lescoray suffered a Great Famine once. In legend, it also suffered a volcano when sorcerers (or gods) did... something... to the Moon. The same event? A volcanic winter?
• "The Coron of the Grange" can be sung to "Oh Susannah," seamlessly. ("It rained all night the day he left / the weather it was dry / the sun so hot he froze to death / oh Coron, don't you cry.")

Beyond that, I've been humming the chorus of "Summer's Gone to Cavalry" since last week. I have a shadowy notion how the rest of it goes. I'll keep listening.