The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible (Vladimir Nabokov)
Christopher Hitchens was an angry man, no doubt about. Even though, cosmologically speaking, he and I agree more than we disagree, even I could say “come on, now!”
But he was, above all, a brutally honest man. Agree with him or hate him, he never told you anything but what he really felt. That’s a rare quality. He will be and should be missed. The world is poorer tonight.
Late last year submitted a short story to Asimov’s Science Fiction. It’s called “Passing Sentence,” and I wrote it quite some time ago. I’m not sure exactly how long it’s been, but I found files in the same folder with dates reaching back to the year 2000. That can’t be right, because this is one of the last things that I completed before this year, and that would mean that I took nearly a ten-year break from writing.