No other people. Just us.

Neil Gaiman on Virginia Tech.  Link thanks to elise. Emphasis added, as if it needs it.

I haven't posted about the Virginia Tech shooting, and wasn't going to. But...

I'm in the UK right now, and it's a long way away, and I'm reading about what happened in newspapers (because I don't turn on TVs in hotel rooms. I don't know why this is, but I don't), still managing to think of this as something that happened, tragically, to Other People. And then I see this, and my heart sinks, because this is the Michael Bishop who I met in 1999 when we were Guests of Honour at World Horror, whose son was a Sandman fan and oh god, and then I click on this, and I get my nose rubbed hard and painfully in the fact that there are no Other People. It's just us.

Comments

[Ken Houghton]

Unicorn Mountain is one of the two books that brought me back to reading science fiction in the late 1980s.

I keep fearing Jamie's death will be blown out of proportion on the Net, because of the Community Connection. And then I remember that every time I've ever dealt with his father, he's been noting but kind and gracious, and decide that would be all right.

Certainly, I'd rather see his widow being interviewed than photos that look as if they're bad Matrix outtakes.

[joanr16]

This is why Terry Pratchett would collaborate with him: Neil is wise.

One of the many terrible things about digesting this tragedy is that it's going to amount to a long, uphill series of "Oh, God" moments, like the ones Neil described. Yet another hideous, invaluable life lesson in alienation and connection.

[Martina]

I've been lurking, reading your wonderful writing for some time now. Thank you for it and for sharing the Gaiman excerpt. Such a simple concept, this "no others but us". For all it's simplicity, it seems we people have a hard time remembering unless something violently hits home to remind us. What a different world it would be if that feeling of interconnectedness were more constant.