Our friend Charles N. Brown, editor and publisher of
Locus, has died at age 72,
Locus Online reports.
Looking through my digital photos of the past few years, I could turn up only this photo of Charles, snapped as he was threatening to bash me with his walking stick if I didn't put the camera down. I guess that's one reason I don't have more photos of him.
When Sydney was attending a conference at Stanford a few years ago, and I was tagging along, Charles kindly invited us to dinner at his house, a.k.a. the
Locus office, and we had a most enjoyable time with Charles, the
Locus staff and the other guests. Charles loved entertaining and
was entertaining, and he made sure all his guests were entertained, or else!
A mutual friend who knew Charles much better than I did, and for a lot longer, told me once that he always believed Charles had constructed a life in emulation of Jubal Harshaw in Robert A. Heinlein's novel
Stranger in a Strange Land, and nothing I saw at Charles' house that night contradicted that impression.
One of my favorite memories of Charles is from that evening, as he roared in laughter when his extraordinary collection of autographed first-edition books eventually reduced me to a sputtered stream of obscenities, just as he had intended.
I also remember my
Locus interview. I followed Charles to his hotel room -- where proofs of the next issue were strewn about every flat surface -- and watched him switch on a hand-held recorder.
"Now what?" I asked.
"Now you talk," he said. So I talked, while he leaned back in his chair, fingers intertwined across his belly, and watched me -- at least, I
assume he was watching me; with Charles' cocked eyes, it was hard to tell, sometimes. Two or three times during the hour, he interjected an observation, such as: "So you don't believe in the Singularity, then." He took no notes. Eventually he nodded his head and turned off the recorder.
"That's it?" I asked.
"That's it," he replied.
"Well," I said, "good luck getting a coherent article out of that."
"Oh, you're easy," Charles said, "like Bruce Sterling. Talkers are easy. Let's go downstairs and get a drink."
Charles accurately thought Sydney was gorgeous, and instead of "Hello, Andy," his standard greeting was usually "Is Sydney here?" If my answer was, "No," he'd make a dismissive sound with his mouth and turn his back on me. So instead of saying, "Hello, Charles," I took to greeting him with, "She's upstairs!" or "She's in the dealer's room!" Whereupon he'd smile broadly and be very friendly indeed.
When he
did talk to me, he usually needled me about not writing more. When he found out I had started a blog, he cried out in dismay. "That's not writing!" he said. "Now you'll get even
less accomplished."
I saw my first copies of
Locus in the dormitory living room at Clarion West in 1994, and once I got home to Raleigh, N.C., I bought the subscription that I've kept up ever since. When the first issue arrived -- its cover story, I think, an obit of Robert Bloch -- I thought, "OK! I'm a member of this community now!" That's still what I think, every month when
Locus arrives. I hope it keeps arriving for many years to come. Soon the cover story, I suppose, will be an obit of Charles N. Brown himself. I'll miss him.
Below: Oh, it's a family of sandhill cranes.
Below: Karen Vess and Ellen Klages on the boardwalk.
Below: Two views from the boardwalk.
Below: Ellen Klages meets a turtle.
Below: The turtle demands a close-up. Moments later, it got tired of us and crawled off the road and safely back into the brush.
I wish I had taken some photos of East Lake Fish Camp, a bit of Old Florida where we relaxed and ate exactly the lunch we wanted (catfish and beer, in my case). I did, however, take a photo to prove exactly why straying off the "main roads" in the Orlando area can be so bewildering, at the intersection of Boggy Creek Road and Boggy Creek Road:
(Yes, we all immediate thought of the 1972 drive-in classic The Legend of Boggy Creek -- it was that sort of crowd -- but I believe that was set in Arkansas, not Florida.)
