5. Reading Gene Wolfe is dangerous work. It’s a knife-throwing act, and like all good knife-throwing acts, you may lose fingers, toes, earlobes or eyes in the process. Gene doesn’t mind. Gene is throwing the knives.

6. Make yourself comfortable. Pour a pot of tea. Hang up a DO NOT DISTURB sign. Start at page 1.

7. There are two kinds of clever writer. The ones that point out how clever they are, and the ones who see no need to point out how clever they are. Gene Wolfe is of the second kind, and the intelligence is less important than the tale. He is not smart to make you feel stupid. He is smart to make you smart as well.

8. He was there. He saw it happen. He knows whose reflection they saw in the mirror that night.

9. Be willing to learn.

This was written for the program book of The World Horror Convention 2002, at which both Gene and I were guests of honor.

Remembering Douglas Adams

I met Douglas Adams toward the end of 1983. I had been asked to interview him for Penthouse. I was expecting someone sharp and smart and BBCish, someone who would sound like the voice of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I was met at the door to his Islington flat by a very tall man, with a big smile and a big, slightly crooked, nose, all gawky and coltish, as if, despite his size, he was still growing. He had just returned to the UK from a miserable time in Hollywood, and he was happy to be back. He was kind, he was funny, and he talked. He showed me his things: he was very keen on computers, which barely existed at that point, and on guitars, and on giant inflatable crayons, which he had discovered in America, had shipped to England at enormous expense, before learning that they were, quite cheaply, available in Islington. He was clumsy: he would back into things, or trip over them, or sit down on them very suddenly and break them.

I learned that Douglas had died the morning after it happened, in May 2001, from the Internet (which had not existed in 1983). I was being interviewed on the phone by a journalist (the journalist was in Hong Kong), and something about Douglas Adams’s dying went across the computer screen. I snorted, unimpressed by such nonsense (only a couple of days before, Lou Reed had gone onto Saturday Night Live to put to rest a round of Internet rumors about his death). Then I clicked on the link. I found myself staring at a BBC News screen, and saw that Douglas was, quite definitely, dead.

“Are you all right?” said the journalist in Hong Kong.

“Douglas Adams is dead,” I said, stunned.

“Oh yes,” he said. “It’s been on the news here all day. Did you know him?”

“Yes,” I said. We carried on with the interview, and I don’t know what else was said. The journalist got back in touch several weeks later to say that there wasn’t anything coherent or at least usable on the tape after I learned that Douglas died, and would I mind doing the interview again?