She’s lovely. In the Good Old Days she and her husband Peter Morwood and Terry Pratchett and I would eat together whenever we found ourselves in the same place, or try and sit together if it was one of those long tables you wind up at when a dozen or more people at a convention head out into the night to find somewhere to dine. I have fond memories of those conversations to this day.
The heights of authorial scholarship to which these conversations soared can be demonstrated by one reported in “Ansible”, Dave Langford’s multi-Hugo-award-winning fan magazine.
I reformatted this image for ease of reading - the original is here.
Dave enlarged on his brief note a bit later in an overview of the Uncle books on website Infinity Plus; again, the link is to the full article.
Here’s how it begins:
I can’t actually recall this incident, but given the amount of spillage at the average convention meal, I’m sure that table-cloth was both flavoursome and nutritious.
*****
Once upon a time I even had a complete set of “Uncle” in first edition hardbacks, but those went the way of “I own them, they don’t own me” when money was tight. Appropriately enough for stories of a millionaire elephant, they had increased so much in value between buying and selling that they loosened the tightness considerably. :->
Neil (along with Marcus Gipps and a really successful Kickstarter campaign) was later instrumental in getting all the Uncle books back into print as a fine (and suitably elephantine) limited-edition hardback entitled “The Complete Uncle”.
However, as seems the way with Uncle, this is now also out of print and will doubtless become as rare, sought-after and expensive as its predecessors.
No matter; I’ve got mine, and this time I’m keeping it.
