“Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.”

Neil Gaiman is not your typical Science Fiction Writer. He would definitely be described as a Genre Bender, most commonly known for drawing heavily on myths in work closer to Fantasy, Magic Realism, and sometimes verging on Horror. However, whether he’s a pure Science Fiction author or not, it is the case that he is an author whose work you should be reading.

If you need his Science Fiction credentials, it is a fact that the second book he ever published was a biography of Douglas Adams entitled Don’t Panic. He is also close friends with a number of Proper Science Fiction Authors, including the late Ray Bradbury, for whom Neil wrote a very moving short story as a 90th birthday present.

Hard core Science Fiction or not, you should be reading Neil Gaiman because he lends everything he writes a great deal of heart. His fan base is made up of near equal parts women and men, and those fans remain so doggedly dedicated to the man because each one of them can tell you of a time when a Neil Gaiman story moved them to tears, or was the one thing they needed in a dark or trying time.

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

In meatspace (c. Neal Stephenson), Neil Richard Gaiman was born on November 10, 1960 in Portchester, England. He attended a number of lovely and not-so-lovely English schools, was a member of a punk band for a time, never completed University, and found his way into writing professionally through journalism. However, all of that is well documented in Hayley Campbell’s The Art of Neil Gaiman, or, you know, Wikipedia.

“Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.”

What is crucial about Neil’s earlier years is the fact that the man had been reading novels, pretty much, since birth. He tells stories of receiving the full set of The Chronicles of Narnia for his 7th birthday and disappearing from the world for a time so he could devour them. He borrowed The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers from his school library, and read them over and over again, not moving on to read The Return of the King until he won the school English prize at 13 and was allowed to request the book as his reward.

“When I was four, I was bitten by a radioactive myth” Neil claims as a way of explaining the cause for his particular brand of writing. However, the culprit could have just as easily been a radioactive book.

Whether myth or book, all those years of reading have left Neil with a beautiful ability to weave existing myths into original stories. The work that saw “Gaiman” become a household name was Sandman, a 75-issue run of comics that Neil created for DC’s mature imprint, Vertigo. The series focuses on the character of Dream, lord of the same and member of a family of supernatural entities (gods?) known as The Endless.

“People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.”

Sandman explored all manner of myth and story, from the biblical to the Norse. It has also repeatedly been credited with being one of the first works to bring female patrons into comic shops, due partially to the portrayal of Death, dream’s sister, as a friendly young goth woman.

“I think I fell in love with her, a little bit. Isn't that dumb? But it was like I knew her. Like she was my oldest, dearest friend. The kind of person you can tell anything to, no matter how bad, and they'll still love you, because they know you. I wanted to go with her. I wanted her to notice me. And then she stopped walking. Under the moon, she stopped. And looked at us. She looked at me. Maybe she was trying to tell me something; I don't know. She probably didn't even know I was there. But I'll always love her. All my life.”

- Character Brant Tucker, describing Death in Sandman Vol 8: Worlds’ End

Since Sandman, Neil has gone on to write in nearly every narrative medium, from comics (Marvel 1602) to novels (American Gods), films (Beowulf, Coraline), children’s books (The Graveyard Book), and even video games (Wayward Manor).

When it comes to SciFi specifically, most recently Neil Gaiman has contributed to the world’s longest-running SciFi series (which is also the world’s longest running television series full stop): Doctor Who.

He had been a long-time fan of Doctor Who, recounting stories of both cowering behind the couch as a child to hide from the terrifying DALEKs he saw on screen, and of making a tradition of watching the revived Russell T. Davies/Stephen Moffat Doctor Who series with his daughter, Maddy.

Gaiman penned the fourth episode of the sixth series of Doctor Who, entitled “The Doctor’s Wife.” In it, he boldly went where no writer had gone before: giving life to the TARDIS. Up until that point, the TARDIS had been a largely inanimate vehicle for the Doctor (though the Doctor would, from time to time, personify the TARDIS in small ways). However, Neil gave the TARDIS an actual body, voice, and a name—Idris—resulting in what may be one of the most moving and profound episodes in the current series.

Idris: “Doctor. Are you there? It’s so very dark in here.”

The Doctor: “I’m here. Hey.”

Idris: “I’ve been looking for a word. A big, complicated word, but so sad. I found it now.

The Doctor: “What word?”

Idris: “ ‘Alive.’ I’m alive.”

The Doctor: “Alive isn’t sad.”

Idris: “It’s sad when it’s over. I’ll always be here, but this is when we talked. And now even that has to come to an end.”

The Doctor’s Wife struck such a chord with Whovians that Neil was asked back to write another episode in series 7. “Nightmare in Silver” was the 12th episode, and it portrayed the return of the Cybermen to the series.

Our Man Neil also contributed the SciFi short story “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury,” a moving and ought-to-be-canonical work that he wrote entirely by hand, all in one go, to read at a performance with his wife, Amanda Palmer. He later gave the story to Bradbury as a 90th birthday present. The short story is written as a letter from a man who is in the process of forgetting Ray Bradbury, and it serves as a haunting—at-times-gooseflesh-and-tear-inducing—survey of Bradbury’s work, playing heavily on the themes of Farenheit 451.

“There are things missing from my mind, and it scares me. Icarus! It’s not as if I have forgotten all names. I remember Icarus. He flew too close to the sun. In the stories, though, it’s worth it. Always worth it to have tried, even if you fail, even if you fall like a meteor forever. Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing the people who borrowed, but did not return, your candle.”

When he’s not creating new stories, Neil acts as an advocate for the stories of others. He is a strong supporter of the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund (CBLDF), an American non-profit organization created in 1986 to protect the First Amendment rights of comics creators, publishers, and retailers by covering their legal expenses. He is also a very vocal supporter of libraries and an opponent of the censorship of texts.

“Don't ever apologize to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for. Use your library). Don't apologize to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy. What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read... ”

Though Neil Gaiman may not cleanly fit into a mold as a “Great of Science Fiction,” he is a Great, who has written some science fiction in his time, and someone who you should be reading if you haven’t already. He writes stories that never quite leave you, haunting places in your mind that you may rarely visit, whispering beautiful, almost-true things like the following:

“There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow and endless drizzle.

You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sing, and a voice that might be hers will say something that you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken.

Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again.

Whenever it rains you will think of her.”

― Neil Gaiman

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Written by NicholasQuill