Charles N. Brown, 1937-2009

[calimac]

When I started reading it, Locus really was the newsletter of the science fiction field. It didn't cover the more ephemeral fannish doings, but it dealt with the people of the field as much as with their professional activities. It was, as PNH puts it, the neighborhood newspaper.

Gradually it evolved into a magazine specifically about SF publishing, which it covers very well; and it simultaneously evolved into something called a semiprozine, a Hugo category invented mostly as a place to put Locus.

I administered the Hugo Awards the first year that Locus failed to win in all the years that Best Semiprozine had been in existence. "I knew this would happen eventually," said Charles N. Brown, its editor, to me philosophically after the ceremony as I handed him a diskette with the Hugo result statistics (and oh, did we ever think we were being really hi-tech about it).

Locus has been off-and-on, mostly on, in Hugo winnings since then, and it continues to be the Publishers Weekly (except that it's monthly) of the field, and it will continue on without him. Which is as Charles wanted it: he'd long since given the hands-on operations of the magazine to others, partly in anticipation of this; and no true SF fan would call a halt to the future on the petty grounds of the cessation of his mortal body.

But I like to remember Locus as it was in the wayback, when Charles and his then-wife Dena were running it by themselves, when it was just a few folded, unstapled bedsheets of white paper* without even any photos, when every editorial began, "Well, this issue is late again," and when tiny news items carried sparkling headlines, like the one about the impending closing of a famous anthology series, headed "Orbit Decays."

*I know, some can remember even further back than that.

Comments

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

Charlie gave me a long lingering look from the breakfast table adjacent to mine yesterday morning, where I sat with Greer and Faye. I mean so long that after I noticed and looked away, a full minute or more later when I looked back, he was still looking at me. There's a clue in there somewhere, or not; I know who can tell me. Anyway that second time I waved and grinned at him, a real wave, hand held aloft and waving a good many seconds; he waved back, less elaborately but not cursorily. He looked tired; he looked sad: it utterly amazes me how the fact of his death transforms that memory.

Friday evening, we spent an hour together in his hotel room, just the two of us. Talked business for twenty minutes or so, then talked music the rest of the time. I mentioned you, asked him if he ran into you often at local concerts; he said no, that Thursday night was his night at the symphony, that he almost never saw you.

He talked about Mahler, how every symphony had a theme; he listed them for me, and I took notes. I told him about the private concert the Zemlinsky Quartet gave me in February, how amazing to hear two Reicha quartets close up. He listened and didn't say anything.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

My San Francisco Symphony tickets are Wednesdays. Come to think of it, I have seen CNB at the SFS on rare occasion. I hope he enjoyed it as much as I do.

[divertimento.livejournal.com]

I was sad to hear this news. I remember in the mid-1970s going over to Charlie's house several times to help with mailings of Locus. I forget if we also had to collate and staple separate sheets at that time.