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F.M. Busby
Feb. 20th, 2005 08:14 pmBuz died on Thursday, after having been ill for a while. It's hard to believe: as others have remarked, he always seemed too tough to die.
The thing about Buz is, he looked really ornery: short, grizzled, peppery, rough-voiced, usually carrying a drink.
But he was nothing of the sort: friendly, cheerful, agreeable were how I always found him. And he and Elinor made a constant pair without either being a satellite of the other.
The two of them had been fans for a long time: they and their colleagues had won a Hugo for their renowned letterzine Cry of the Nameless way back in 1960*, and for whatever reason they were the only members of that circle to make the transition into becoming active regular members of the new Seattle fandom that arose in the late 1970s. There they were seen regularly.
Buz was an engineer by profession, but he was able to retire early and become a full-time fiction writer, which may account for his cheerfulness. (Doubtlessly getting everyone to call him Buz rather than Francis Marion helped too.) A few of his stories were favorites of mine, particularly "First Person Plural," which appeared in Terry Carr's Universe 10. This is a fantasy story of a tough but upbeat man, a bit like a younger version of Buz himself, who finds his consciousness sequentially occupying both his own body and that of a previously-comatose young woman, so that he lives each day twice. The story is remarkable for its very matter-of-fact depiction of what this would feel like. In the process of trying to switch over which body lives the day first, the consciousnesses separate and the woman becomes an independent person.
Buz told me that his first thought had been to have her drop back into a permanent coma again, but then he said, "Naah, I can't do this to these people: I like them too much." Sentimental, perhaps, but not inappropriate for the story, which I've just re-read in its author's memory.
*which made Elinor the first woman ever to win a Hugo, fan historians please note
The thing about Buz is, he looked really ornery: short, grizzled, peppery, rough-voiced, usually carrying a drink.
But he was nothing of the sort: friendly, cheerful, agreeable were how I always found him. And he and Elinor made a constant pair without either being a satellite of the other.
The two of them had been fans for a long time: they and their colleagues had won a Hugo for their renowned letterzine Cry of the Nameless way back in 1960*, and for whatever reason they were the only members of that circle to make the transition into becoming active regular members of the new Seattle fandom that arose in the late 1970s. There they were seen regularly.
Buz was an engineer by profession, but he was able to retire early and become a full-time fiction writer, which may account for his cheerfulness. (Doubtlessly getting everyone to call him Buz rather than Francis Marion helped too.) A few of his stories were favorites of mine, particularly "First Person Plural," which appeared in Terry Carr's Universe 10. This is a fantasy story of a tough but upbeat man, a bit like a younger version of Buz himself, who finds his consciousness sequentially occupying both his own body and that of a previously-comatose young woman, so that he lives each day twice. The story is remarkable for its very matter-of-fact depiction of what this would feel like. In the process of trying to switch over which body lives the day first, the consciousnesses separate and the woman becomes an independent person.
Buz told me that his first thought had been to have her drop back into a permanent coma again, but then he said, "Naah, I can't do this to these people: I like them too much." Sentimental, perhaps, but not inappropriate for the story, which I've just re-read in its author's memory.
*which made Elinor the first woman ever to win a Hugo, fan historians please note
