File 770
George Alec Effinger passed away April 27, 2002. He was 55 years old and had lived much of his life in the French Quarter of New Orleans, an experience that enlivened his finest writing. Effinger attended Clarion in 1970 and his stories began appearing in print the following year, among them the satirical "All The Last Wars At Once." His first novel, What Entropy Means To Me (1972), became a Nebula Award nominee.
George's humor and accessibility at conventions made him a fan favorite, and in the dawning days of the Internet he was omnipresent on the GEnie Roundtables and Compuserve forums. He occasionally wrote for File 770 and other fanzines.
His science fiction masterpieces were the Marid Audran novels set in a 21st century Middle East. When Gravity Fails (1987) was followed by A Fire in the Sun (1989) and The Exile Kiss (1991). The 1988 Hugo nomination of When Gravity Fails inspired the dream of George receiving the rocket at NolaCon II in his hometown but it was not meant to be. Ironically, the next year (1989) his novelette "Schrödinger's Kitten" swept both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. George's other accolades included a GoH-ship at the 1995 Dragon*Con/NASFiC in Atlanta.
George was frequently beset by severe health problems. The hospitalizations left burdensome medical bills. In fact, his plight was one reason the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Emergency Medical Fund was started, aided by a $2,000 contribution from L.A.con II.
About the last time I saw George was at Loscon 2000 on Sunday afternoon. He and Barbara Hambly had missed on Loscon in favor of a Beatles convention elsewhere in town, then visited the Loscon green room on the way home to tell friends that they had married. Barbara was in what I'd call a "sock hop" outfit. George was in a white jacket with padded shoulders doing his best to look like Elvis Presley. It was a glorious moment: I wish it would have lasted a long, long time.
I'd heard about George's death -- an obit in the New York Times. He was one of the pros who I felt was a contemporary. Not actually: five years is a big separation when you're not out of school and just barely out of your teens, but I felt that way. I first met him [in 1970] at a series of Locus collations at Charlie Brown's house. Collations were, for me, an invigorating though sometimes intimidating experience and when Piglet [George's nickname] showed up, starting to write and looking for connections (both personal and professional) in New York, I found him very easy to talk to. We spent many a Sunday afternoon passing mimeographed pages to each other, swigging Coke, and talking.
When Lou Stathis and I decided to take our mutual love of science fiction and start Xrymph magazine (under the nominal sponsorship of the nearly catatonic Stony Brook Science Fiction Forum -- they had a library but not much else, and no one there [save Jim Frenkel] seemed to have much of a taste in music) we began to look for people who we thought could write and ask them to create fiction for the magazine. Though I could never convince Piglet to write something for us he was extremely encouraging, generous of his editorial time, and a big booster. One of my sadnesses now, is that of the six people who I remember from that period as being supportive of this passionate but low-rent mimeographed fan fiction magazine only one-third of us are gone now. Lou, as you know, died several years ago. Piglet was the other. (Larry Carlton, Vincent DiFate, Spider Robinson and myself are -- knock wood -- still alive and kicking).
I still remember George showing up at SUNYCON, the tiny little con that I organized at my college in -- what was it -- 1974? 1973? Perhaps because I was myself painfully shy, I always had seen Piglet in the same way. I saw him as a compatriot in the fight to find what are now know as "coping skills." After the day's program had finished and we retired to the "endless party" area, I was astounded when George commandeered the "film room" (actually a lounge in my dorm with a 16mm projector setup in it) and insisted on running "Bambi Meet Godzilla" endlessly -- sometimes forward and sometimes in reverse. I was too busy drunkenly trying to make the pinball machine stop yelling TILT to care. Besides, I understood that people were loving it. George had certainly, by then, overcome his hesitancy to step forward. It had been a year or two since his justly deserved acclaim at What Entropy Means To Me.
He helped me at Charlie's Locus collations, he helped us (with enthusiastic support) with Xrymph, and he helped at SUNYCON. His passing leaves the world in some obvious and some less obvious ways, diminished.
