Eggs and Endorphins

You know why John M. Ford kicks ass? Not only does he write really cool sf and fantasy, and such, and write really well, he's one of the few writers, anywhere, who writes stories about gamers.

Not The Player of Games' "because of your gameplaying skills, you're in this plot" or the gameplaying culture of Xanthony's "Proton" or the D&D-esque frame of the "Guardian of the Flames" novels, but characters involved in a novel who just happen to play games, like many authors have characters who happen to be musicians, artists, or writers -- like the historical gamers in Scholars of Night or the roleplayers in Growing up Weightles. And despite the roleplayers (so I'm told) in a Jim Bucher "Harry Dresden" novel, that's still -damn- rare.

The fact that the protagonist of another of his novels, _The Last Hot Time_, has a similar relationship with a different non-mainstream *cough* interest of mine doesn't lower him in my estimation one bit, mind.