Wednesday, February 10, 2010

A perfect storm

Gaiman working on an episode of Doctor Who, sez the Guardian, which reminds us:

Gaiman, whose latest novel The Graveyard Book won many awards last year, including best novel at the Hugos, the Newbery medal and the UK's Booktrust teenage prize, is not the first fantasy author to have been tapped by the Doctor Who machine. Last year, Michael Moorcock revealed he had been approached to write a new Doctor Who novel for publication next Christmas.

Nothing about Alan Moore yet, but I'm sure he's next....

4 comments:

David Chute said...

Moorcock, maybe.

Gaiman has also struck me as an arrogant snob who thinks he was put of earth to "redeem" various kinds of genre stories by imposing his personality on them.

Tulkinghorn said...

This resentment thing is getting to be chronic.... What follows is part of a biographic sketch in Wikipedia. Doesn't strike me as the career path of a snob:

As a child and a teenager, Gaiman read the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, James Branch Cabell, Edgar Allan Poe, Michael Moorcock, Ursula K. Le Guin, Lord Dunsany and G. K. Chesterton. He later became a fan of science fiction, reading the works of authors as diverse as Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, Robert A. Heinlein, Harlan Ellison, H. P. Lovecraft, Thorne Smith, and Gene Wolfe.

In the early 1980s, Gaiman pursued journalism, conducting interviews and writing book reviews, as a means to learn about the world and to make connections that he hoped would later assist him in getting published. He wrote and reviewed extensively for the British Fantasy Society. [13] His first professional short story publication was "Featherquest", a fantasy story, in Imagine Magazine in May 1984, when he was 23.[14]

In 1984, he wrote his first book, a biography of the band Duran Duran, as well as Ghastly Beyond Belief, a book of quotations, with Kim Newman. He also wrote interviews and articles for many British magazines, including Knave. As he was writing for different magazines, some of them competing, and "wrote too many articles", he sometimes went by a number of pseudonyms: Gerry Musgrave, Richard Grey, "along with a couple of house names".[15] Gaiman ended his journalism career in 1987 because British newspapers can "make up anything they want and publish it as fact." [16][17]

In the late 1980s, he wrote Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion in what he calls a "classic English humour" style. Following on from that he wrote the opening of what would become his collaboration with Terry Pratchett on the comic novel Good Omens, about the impending apocalypse.[18]
[edit] Comics and graphic novels

After forming a friendship with graphic novel writer Alan Moore, Gaiman started writing graphic novels, picking up Marvelman after Moore finished his run on the series. Gaiman and artist Mark Buckingham collaborated on several issues of the series before its publisher, Eclipse Comics, collapsed, leaving the series unfinished.

Tulkinghorn said...

There's a profile of Gaiman in a recent New Yorker article, and he seems remarkably attitude-free.

It is interesting that his parents were major Scientologists and his sister is still active.

About all that I know could be said against him is that he's an ambitious person who wears black and just got married to a young woman who is what passes these days for a punk rock star. But... he's friends and collaborators with Alan Moore and Terry Pratchett, who probably don't suffer phonies easily.

David Chute said...

I met him once at a Golden Apple event. Maybe it was the accent.