I woke up this morning to some very confused reporting about David Hartwell. Apparently he’d had a fall and hit his head, and been taken into hospital. Some reports said that life support had been turned off, but Locus is currently just saying that he suffered, “a massive brain bleed and is not expected to recover”. The source for that is his wife, Kathryn Cramer.
My very best wishes to Kathryn and the family. This sort of uncertainty must be horrible.
Long term, of course, it doesn’t sound at all good. On the assumption that David is now a guest of Ereshkigal in the Underworld, a couple of things occur to me.
Firstly, that dismal place will be considerably brightened thanks to the arrival of the most eye-popping collection of ties ever known to man. Don’t let them dim you, David.
And secondly, if you ever want to know what an editor can do for a writer, just look around the blogs and social media of the science fiction community right now and see how many brilliant writers are talking about how much they owe to David.
Even as much of a comparative outsider as I am, that man made an impression. I’m so glad I got to see some of that tie collection at WorldCon (though I can’t remember now whether it was Montreal or Reno that had the retrospective).
Montreal. As it happens, I posted on my FB feed a short YouTube clip from that Worldcon where Neil Gaiman and I joked about that particular exhibit being downstairs, so I’m sure of it.
Well said. And not just the writers. David Hartwell was a constant and inspiring presence at ICFA. He was incredibly kind and supportive to young academics. He would listen, make suggestions, encourage us to believe that what we said and wrote mattered to industry professionals: in that he was one of the people who helped create the matrix of sf fans/pros/academics that make the genre the thing it is. My feed is full of young (and now not so young) scholars mourning.
Gone, far too soon.