Can you write a sonnet that’s a palindrome? Can you write a present-day retelling of the Oedipus myth as a road movie? Can you write a story embodying and describing a Kuhnian paradigm shift in how humans see the world? Ford could, and did. In brief, it seemed to me that a lot of his short fiction (and poetry) was spurred by formal challenges. Those characteristics come through in his writing, as I discussed in a long review of his last collection, Heat of Fusion (2004) in The New York Review of Science Fiction (April 2006). For those who knew him – and I certainly can’t claim to have – he was clearly an enormously erudite and witty polymath. Although one of his books, The Dragon Waiting (1983) won the World Fantasy Award (and has been reissued in the UK as a Fantasy Masterwork), it doesn’t feel like he’s yet a part of the canon in the same way as the other authors I’ve discussed here. He was a very difficult author for readers to get a fix on. Ford (1957-2006) had a career that appears, at least from the outside, to have jumped from one genre to another.

Liza has kindly allowed me an indulgence: a final column on an author whose work I love, but whom I might not otherwise have been able to justify writing about. I very much hope to reappear in these pages before too long. I’m enormously grateful to him for the opportunity, and to Liza Groen Trombi and the rest of the team for their continued support. It’s been six years since Charles Brown first invited me to write them, and it feels like time for a break. This is my last Yesterday’s Tomorrows column, at least for the moment.

The dragon waiting by john m ford