Sometimes People Leave You Halfway Through the Wood (Patreon)

Some of you, especially if you're a member of our Discord server, may be aware that one of our own passed away a few weeks ago. John Peacock, who I've known for over a decade, who until recently, single-handedly moderated that server, alongside the hundreds of other things he did for so many people throughout his life. I will not say he's no longer with us, because he, and the ripple-effects of his kindness, will always be.

The image on this post is the dedication page of Space Oddity.

Because John also did some math for me so that I could build that famous duct-tape rocketship for Bastian. Back then, in my darkest place, he quietly taught me how to make something beautiful.

As far as I know, we haven't lost anyone from this little bubble of a world we've created here, through Patreon and Discord and books and connection. It will, thanks to the nature of linear time and the mortal coil (messy bitches that they are), not be the last.

I've never known what we, in this digital universe we all inhabit, that some of us helped build, some of us were born into, some of us pushed into when we'd rather've not, some of us love, some of us hate, ever meant to do about that.

Not about death itself. Death is in the Terms of Service. We all signed it by being born, which is quite a lot of chicanery when you think about it, but there's no backing out now.

What we mean to do about losing people we may never have met in person to begin with. How is a life lived online archived, how is it preserved, how can there be a memorial place to go and remember someone who only shared space with you psychically. What will be our last posts, our last words, who will caretake the legacy of all these billions of words spilt that comprise a record of our time here?We all live a life at least partly online now. It is as valid as the other places in which we move and function and breathe and sweat and complain and giggle and fall in love. Just because that place doesn't exist physically and those people don't always enter our actual tangible sweat-and-complaining sphere doesn't make them any less the voices and presences with which we share our lives.

Because my heart hurts, for a man I never met in person. And it won't be the last time. Indeed, I only ever met Chris Priest , Space Oddity's other dedicatee, once in real life. But our attachment was never any less for that.

In making this space, indeed, in writing books that are ,and have always been, and always the fuck will be, fundamentally about explicitly, implicitly, all the plicitlies, about creating connections where none are supposed to exist, about fighting for those connections, those delicate jeweled webs of love and meaning people spin between this human I love and that human I love and this book that saw me and that human who this book also saw, and therefore we can see each other, I feel quite a lot of responsibility toward all of you, and I suppose I tacitly accepted the pain of loss within that web as the other side of the joy of finding it.

But I haven't known what to say, exactly. The problem with death is everyone has to deal with it, pretty much all their lives. Only your intellectual capacity to grasp it evolves, not the Big Dark Thing itself. And because everyone has spent all of human history facing death and learning to accept it, almost anything you could ever say feels just so unforgivably cliched. You say I'm sorry to the bereaved so sincerely and it is authentically what you feel, yet even that, the most basic sentence of bargain-basement compassion, just feel dumb and inadequate and airless. You can get fancy with it, words written in cursive on cardstock, but words can't really fill the holes Our People leave when they go. They're too big, too wide, too deep.

And all I got is words.

It's ours to figure out, as well. Because this whole post-internet-singularity way of being is so new, so strange, so raucous and weird. We're the ones feeling our way through it, setting up rules and watching them get knocked down, then building others, and watching them get knocked down, too.

The level of contact and access--both ways--that I have with you and you have with me, that all of us have with other creators and artists of all sorts, is actually totally unprecedented. There was really never any way to talk to, oh, I don't know, let's say Gore Vidal, without becoming a writer yourself, then being in his direct social orbit, or both. You could go to a signing, sure. For SFF writers you could go to a convention. Many writers had a huge number of pen pals. We've always been trying to do this. But it's a HIGH level spell to make friends with a writer in their own autograph line, letters are slow, each convention is only once a year, and only really exist for speculative fiction writers--it was always difficult, let alone having the kind of regular contact with actors and musicians that social media has allowed and encouraged, for better or worse.

But for me, oh goodness, it has always been for better. I have met people who are intimate parts of my life through this weird, messy internet life and Part of what Patreon and the like has given the world of art and artists is the ability to create these little secret gardens of human connection, where quite unique relationships can form around story, image, song, object.

But those bonds mean, inevitably, very real grief. Them's the breaks, really. Attachment being the beginning of suffering and all. We are so attached