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Humphrey Lyttleton, musician, raconteur, all-round virtuoso, has died.

He was a man of immense talent, not to mention his equally immense comic timing. He was one of two people who inspired me to pick up a trumpet (the other was Louis Armstrong). More importantly, he showed me the value of deadpan delivery, of straightfacedness in the face of the undeniably silly and, most importantly, of the ability to laugh and to have fun, whatever life throws at you.

He once said:

"As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from dessication."

And now he's gone. Like I said on Twitter: the world's going to be a lot less funny from here-on in.

From BBC News:

British science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90...

Sir Arthur's vivid - and detailed - descriptions of space shuttles, super-computers and rapid communications systems were enjoyed by millions of readers around the world.

He was the author of more than 100 fiction and non-fiction books, and his writings are credited by many observers with giving science fiction - a genre often accused of veering towards the fantastical - a human and practical face.

I think there are few writers that I could name who have been more influential on my own worldview than Arthur C. Clarke. Although his writing has never really influenced mine - I tend to write in a different strand of his genre if at all - it did instil into me some basic rigours of the rule of writing: Be truthful, within your own universe; once you've set the rules for yourself, don't break them and, most importantly of all, Science Fiction is about the people, not the science. The science is incidental.

I remember a line from his book of essays, Greetings, Carbon-based Bipeds!, specifically from his epitaph to Isaac Asimov. It went something like this:

I once introduced Isaac to a dinner by saying "Ladies and gentlemen, there is only one Isaac Asimov." Well now there is no Isaac Asimov and the world is a poorer place for it.

I think that you could pretty much use his own words to describe how a lot of science fiction readers and writers feel right now.

And so one of the greats of our age passes into history. But, as always, his legacy remains.

Dead man wakes under autopsy knife (Reuters , via BoingBoing):

"I woke up because the pain was unbearable," [he] said, according to a report on Friday in leading local newspaper El Universal.

Pretty high on the oops list, that one. 

It seems to have been a weekend for people to die. Which is odd, because it was an otherwise unremarkable weekend in this part of the world, and as such I had a fairly pleasant time of it. Now, of course, in true human fashion, I'm feeling rather guilty about that.

I heard - entirely the wrong verb; I read - this morning that Jim Rigney, known to the most of us as Robert Jordan, died yesterday afternoon. Not a surprise, exactly, since he had a pretty well-publicised terminal condition, but still something of an "oh, fuck," moment.

I first came across Rigney/Jordan's work in 1997, in my first year as an A-Level student at Blackburn College. I was introduced to the Wheel of Time by Dan Critchley, the same guy who turned me on to Ultima Online (about which there's a post to be written if I ever find the time). I remember picking up a hardback copy of The Eye of the World in the also now sadly gone Wardleworths in Accrington and being reassured by its very heft. This was a book that, I felt, could have stopped just about any offensive weapon at any range. I took it home, devoured it, and returned a couple of weeks later (it took me rather longer to read it than I thought it would) to buy the next book in the cycle.

And so it went for a couple of months; the series capturing me in a fashion that only Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons had hitherto managed. I bought some books, borrowed others from the library, borrowed yet others from Dan himself, pretty much by annoying him until he lent me them as I recall, until I was as up-to-date on the cycle as I could be (without having referred to the interwebs, of course; I was unaware in those days just how much material there was to be found out there. Oh innocence, why have you deserted me so?).

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I fell out of love with WoT, mostly due to what I saw as overlong, over-intricate plot lines that left me cold and more than a little confused, and I stick by that opinion, not least because an author's death doesn't serve to change what they've written in any way. But longer-time readers, and long-time friends, especially those from University, upon whom I tried to foist my copy of Eye at just about any opportunity (the other option was to offer them Lord of the Rings, but a lot of them seemed to balk at that), will know that Robert Jordan and the Wheel of Time left an indelible mark on me.

Naturally, looking back at the stuff I wrote back then (not much because I didn't have proper writer pants in those days and most of my "I'm a writer" moments were confined to statements made whilst inebriated), I tried to ape his style and failed miserably. This is what usually happens when I fall in love with an author's work, before I realise that there's already someone in the world doing the job of being that author and realise that I'll do a better job (hopefully) of being myself.

Well today there's no-one doing the job of being James Oliver Rigney Jr., and the world is worse off for it.