I've made the decision that this blog is going to go weekly from now on, so look out for new posts on Friday mornings, unless the universe collapses in the meantime.
Ray Harryhausen, the master of stop-motion animation, died last year. I used to be amazed at the patience it took to re-animate a model twenty four times a second. It took for ever to get his skeletons to fight Sinbad. By the time he died stop-motion animation had already disappeared, replaced by computer generated imagery. There can be no starker example of the passing of the old order.
In books too there's the sense of a major change. Looking down the list, I hadn't realised just how many of the old order had died last year. Iain Banks was the biggie, and will be much missed. The Player of Games is a firm favourite of mine, clever and inventive, and with several powerful messages buried in its narrative. And Doris Lessing, another heavyweight who'll be sorely missed. Jack Vance, James Herbert, Frederick Pohl. A lot of heavy hitters left the planet in 2013.
But the passing of this old order brings new opportunities for undiscovered writers. Publishers have holes in their author lists they now need to fill, and perhaps they'll be ready to listen to our voices now they don't have a sure-fire success author to bank on. There are gaps in agents' client lists, holes in publishers' schedules, and a chance for the so-far ignored to fill them.
Yes, we do stand on the shoulders of the greats, but their departure from the world stage also frees us. There may now be space and time for our voices and our take on the universe to get heard and seen. The passing of the greats offers us a chance to have our work looked at afresh, without being subject to the cast shadows of the great falling over it.
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