Since I was in my mid-twenties, I’ve met a number of famous people. When I start explaining by saying “Isaac Asimov was a friend of mine” it’s pretty damn mind-boggling. Or was. After a) getting to know Isaac at all (if you knew him you knew you couldn’t be boggled very much by the guy) and making the science fiction community my home, I got to know lots and lots of well-known authors. It was never not a thrill. It still is a thrill. I think I’m hugely lucky. Part of it was luck, because I got involved with someone who knew everyone (married him, divorced him, but you know….) and part of it was that after attending a convention or two, I saw that there was more to it and I wanted the more part. That ended up with me co-chairing a couple of Star Trek conventions, and from there, working on dozens of sf conventions. I’ve met an actor over the years as well, and that too ranks up there as cool - way cool because I was a huge fan of hers before we met. No rock stars though.

As I’ve gotten involved in the mystery world as well, I’ve gotten to the point where I know hundreds of authors, at least insofar as they won’t send my email to the trash bin. They’re not all friends – don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to sound like the sort of person who claims friendship with someone they hardly know. But many of them have become my friends. We’ve had dinner, we’ve exchanged email. Sometimes we’ve shared hotel rooms or phone conversations, gossip or a panel or coffee. Sometimes we’re flat out friends. It’s still a thrill because I appreciate that they take the time, and let’s face it, it is cool to name-drop that you’re friends with someone when the audience appreciates it. That’s not why I’m friends with these folks – it’s just a cool thing that happens.

For example, a couple years back, I wanted to write to a comic strip artist about one of his fabulous Sunday strips. The strip is “Frazz” (see above for link) the artist Jeff Mallett. Initially I had some trouble getting his email to work but after a few hiccups, I sent an email saying “oh please please please put this on a shirt”. Turns out that wasn’t a problem – any strip he’d done within like 90 days was available, along with some other gems.

The strip involved a pun on “Sturgeon’s Law”. I think I’ve cited it here before.) Theodore Sturgeon is known for, well, for breath-takingly fabulous science fiction, but also for coining the oft-cited law that “90% of everything is crap.” It’s been cited a number of ways, but that’s basically it. The “Frazz” strip took off on “crap” as “krab” and it went from there.

In my email, I said “I knew Ted Sturgeon and I think he would have loved this joke.” It’s true, and it’s true, he woulda. But when I got back Mallett’s gosh-wow “you KNEW Theodore Sturgeon!!!” I was reminded, only for the thousandth time, how lucky I was.

Science fiction, not surprisingly, has attracted scientist for as long as the field has been around. Some – many – scientists wrote or write science fiction, others are fans of the stuff. Or publish it. One of those was theoretical physicist Sidney Coleman. Sid died in November, at the age of 70. I hadn’t seen him for years, didn’t know he was dealing with Parkinson’s. Sid Coleman was one of the most famous folks I knew. And I liked that.

I liked Sid because well, he was funky. He was for our crowd, sort of, the Richard Feynman of the day. He was a serious scientist but a silly person. I didn’t know him well, but as I remember, his mother lived near Berkeley, so he’d come west fro Harvard every year for the holidays. In the best of days, there was a Christmas Eve party at Dick and Pat Ellington’s house in Oakland, then there was the New Year’s Eve Party at Carol and Terry Carr’s house in Oakland. Sometimes with a staging dinner down the hill at Marta Randall’s. These were arties that happened without invitations – if you knew/heard about it, you were to consider yourself invited. A word-gets-out party. When Pat decided one year not to do the Christmas deal, she told me about it in the parking lot of a supermarket where I bumped into her. In MARCH. Trickle-down. Sid also did the sort of physics work that sent him hither and yon, so he’d be at Stanford for a semester at times, doing whatever it was he did, theorizing I guess, at SLAC, the linear nuclear accelerator. I don’t recall talking specifically to Sid. I probably didn’t say more than “Hi, howareya goodtaseeya, howlongareyouintown?” Damn. Why wasn’t I smarter? Why didn’t I think of a good question to ask him when I saw him?

Someone once told me that of all the people I knew (referring to the sf world) Sid was the one most likely to win a Nobel Prize in Physics. I don’t know how true that was. I wanted it to be true. And I wanted him to win it. Just for the hell of saying I (barely, vaguely, sort of) knew a guy who’d won a Nobel. It would have been fun to try to come up with a way to celebrate. Sid was a goof. He had stringy long dark hair, a mustache and a sense of humor. Go look him up in Wikipedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Coleman) Check the photo. That’s Sid. My major image of Sid was of him at some party where he work a purple suede or velour suit. An all-girl kazoo band, or a welcoming party in gorilla suits might have sufficed. There’s a paper on line by a Nobel laureate which mentions Sid’s work and teachings numerous times. H David Politzer won the award in 2004, and the transcript is full of references to his “beloved professor” and the work the guy did. So many whoever told me Sid was a contender was right.

I’ve ever understood the first thing about physics. It often means that there are sf novels I don’t comprehend and that is a bad thing. I’d like to. I never tried physics and my brain is not happy when dealing with science. It gets bored. It wants to know what it’s for. Had I had even basic physics in high school, I betcha by golly I would have done lots better in astronomy class in college. So be it. I’m in awe of physicists because they seem to function so much on faith – on huge leaps and invisible worlds and theories. I can’t imagine spending one’s entire career on “theoretical physics”. I get impatient and want to know “so what?” and I’m in awe of the patience physicists must have, and the abilities to see and discern what I could never even imagine.

I’m especially grateful to Sid for being the kind of guy he was. Had someone pointed out a man at party and said to me “see that guy? He might win a Nobel some day” I would have shied away, thinking there’s not a lot of common ground to start a conversation. It’s not that I don’t consider myself intelligent, and it’s not that I haven’t HAD those conversations – for a time in my life I was very close to someone who teaches physics at the university level and does research and all that jazz) but that sort of brain and intelligence does tend to make me feel a little bit of a lesser mortal. But whatever Sid was, he was no snob and loved the science fiction part of things, I believe, as much as the serious academic physics part of life (he was, among other things, founder of a small sf press and was one of those guys who never cringed or turned his nose up at being called a fan.) I wish most definitely I’d had more conversations with Sid Coleman.