So many weeks and months gone by, and still none of the right words about Aspects. John M. Ford sold his first story to one of the “big three” science fiction magazines before turning 20. Ford wrote a Star Trek novel from the point of view of the Klingons years before The Next Generation brought Lt. Worf to the bridge. He wrote another — How Much for Just the Planet? — that settled the main conflict with a song contest, in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. The powers that be never let him write a third. He won a World Fantasy Award for a poem — “Winter Solstice, Camelot Station” — that originally appeared in his Christmas card and only later saw print in an Arthurian anthology. He wrote a gaming supplement, The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues, so perfect in its zaniness that its fame has nearly eclipsed the game for which it was written. He wrote the extraordinary sonnet “Against Entropy” in less than eight hours in response to an idle blog comment. These are some of John M. Ford’s aspects.
He wrote Web of Angels, a cyberpunk novel, four years before Neuromancer. The Dragon Waiting is a fantasy novel set in an alternate Europe where Byzantium still rules while York and Lancaster contend for the English throne. There are no dragons, unless one counts Wales. It has depths that repay numerous re-readings, and is not immune to the occasional meta joke: the story features a captain, a doctor, an engineer and a scientist together in an undertaking they occasionally refer to as “the enterprise.” It won the World Fantasy Award in 1984. He never wrote a sequel or another major work set in the same, fascinating, detailed world. He said he had a horror of the obvious. These, too, are some of the aspects of John M. Ford.
He wrote The Last Hot Time a story of magic and elves in a Chicago that’s part 1930s, part 1990s, and part post-apocalypse. It’s short and irresistible. He wrote Growing Up Weightless, a book of life on a lunar colony. It’s in dialogue with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and is so much better than Heinlein’s book that it’s almost embarrassing. He wrote a Cold War thriller about a lost Marlow play. He wrote so many short items, pastiches, parodies and occasional poems at just one site that it took twelve blog posts to begin to catalog them. And then he died. Suddenly and completely one night in September 2006.