| rdfs:comment | - John Milo "Mike" Ford was a writer and game designer, notable as a Star Trek author for the klingonaase theme of two Pocket Books Star Trek novels that was also included in his contributions to game design for FASA's Star Trek: The Role Playing Game.
* John M. Ford died in the night between September 24th/25th 2006 at the age of 49.
* A 23rd century J.M. Ford will write the best-selling novel The Final Reflection.
- Ford was born and raised in Indiana. As well as writing science fiction, he was a keen poet. He was the author of On Writing Science Fiction (The Editors Strike Back!), which gives advice to would be writers in the genre. He suffered from kidney problems and diabetes most of his life, and died of this illness in Minneapolis. His partner in later life was the writer Elise Matthesen.
- John M. Ford (1957 - 2006) was an SF writer, game designer, and poet, noted for his intelligence, wit, and originality. This last was in a sense also his greatest weakness, since a writer who never repeats himself can be very hard to market effectively, and he never achieved the fame many feel he deserved. Ford's other work in the realm of RPG design includes several sourcebooks for GURPS, and the classic Paranoia supplement, The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues.
|
| abstract | - John M. Ford (1957 - 2006) was an SF writer, game designer, and poet, noted for his intelligence, wit, and originality. This last was in a sense also his greatest weakness, since a writer who never repeats himself can be very hard to market effectively, and he never achieved the fame many feel he deserved. Probably his widely-known work is in a sense his least original -- two novels in the Star Trek Expanded Universe, but even here he broke new ground: The Final Reflection is a historical novel of the early years of Federation-Klingon interaction, with a Klingon as its hero, and How Much For Just The Planet? is a musical comedy. He also co-wrote the Klingons sourcebook for FASA's Star Trek Table Top Role Playing Game, which was for a time the most complete and in-depth source on Klingon language and culture available. Much of it has been Jossed since the screen canon got serious about exploring Klingon culture, but there are still fans who think Ford's version was better, and not just in the sense that there will always be fans who think the old version was better. Even so, many feel that Ford's explorations directly influenced the evolution of the canon Klingons into their modern, honor-driven pseudo-Samurai form. Ford's other work in the realm of RPG design includes several sourcebooks for GURPS, and the classic Paranoia supplement, The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues. Notable poems include the sonnet "Against Entropy" ("Regret, by definition, comes too late; / Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate."), the multi-award-winning narrative poem "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station", and the September 11 tribute "110 Stories". And we haven't even scratched the surface of his original novels, which include Web of Angels, which did Cyberpunk before cyberpunk was cool; The Princes of the Air, a Space Opera featuring a trio of con men; The Dragon Waiting, an Alternate History political thriller that won a World Fantasy award; The Scholars of Night, a Cold War thriller; Growing Up Weightless, a Philip K. Dick Award winner that's been described as one of the best Heinlein juveniles Robert Heinlein never wrote; and The Last Hot Time, a Chicago gangster story set Twenty Minutes Into the Future in which half the characters are elves.
- John Milo "Mike" Ford was a writer and game designer, notable as a Star Trek author for the klingonaase theme of two Pocket Books Star Trek novels that was also included in his contributions to game design for FASA's Star Trek: The Role Playing Game.
* John M. Ford died in the night between September 24th/25th 2006 at the age of 49.
* A 23rd century J.M. Ford will write the best-selling novel The Final Reflection.
- Ford was born and raised in Indiana. As well as writing science fiction, he was a keen poet. He was the author of On Writing Science Fiction (The Editors Strike Back!), which gives advice to would be writers in the genre. He suffered from kidney problems and diabetes most of his life, and died of this illness in Minneapolis. His partner in later life was the writer Elise Matthesen.
|
