from the St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, 4th ed. St.
James Press, 1996.

Neil (Richard) Gaiman

Also known as: Neil Gaiman, Neil Richard Gaiman
Nationality: English
Occupation: Writer
 

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

Neil Gaiman is the most respected, successful writer working at
the cutting edge of mainstream comics. Gaiman personally stopped
reading mainstream comics when he was 16, convinced that nothing
interesting was going on. His interest was rekindled by Alan
Moore's Swamp Thing and strengthened in 1986 by the publication
of Moore's Watchmen  and Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight
Returns.  Suddenly the world of comics appeared to be full of
possibilities for an imaginative young writer, and Gaiman began
scripting  Violent Cases, an exploration of memory/fantasy that
was illustrated in faded tones by Dave McKean.

By that time, however, Gaiman already had established himself as
a resourceful journalist and occasional writer of prose fiction.
The pieces collected in Angels & Visitations show his growing
skill in handling recurring concerns. In particular, Gaiman's
first-person characters show a constant propensity toward
superficial relationships, willingness to betray others for
selfish ends, and insensitivity to the damage they inflict. They
are not so much deliberately evil, however, as they are merely
underdeveloped, temporary creatures--humans, in other words. To
the extent they become aware of the limits of that condition,
they desire to escape from it by making contact with something
larger, more permanent. In the early story "Looking for the
Girl," for example, an ogler of men's-magazine nude photos
finally meets the archetypal, perpetually-19-year-old model and
refrains from approaching her sexually because "[s]he was my
dream; and if you touch a dream it vanishes, like a soap
bubble." Though he ages, he somehow is comforted by awareness
that the dream of eternal youth exists. The more recent "Murder
Mysteries" combines conventions of the violent modern detective
story and the Mystery plays that were intended to illuminate
religious issues by acting them out. The framing story is told
by a young man with odd gaps in his memory, approached by a
derelict who claims to be a dispossed angel--who tells of his
having been commanded to investigate the murder of an angel in
Heaven during the turbulent period as the Universe was being
designed. The story first involves readers in the fundamental
question of reading: What's happening? Then a contemporary
reader turns naturally to the familiar mystery-fiction puzzle:
Who dunnit? As the story ends and the implications of both
levels of action sink in, however, readers are left with an
awareness of the unsolvable Mysteries of love and forgiveness.

Shortly after he began to work in comics, Gaiman was approached
by representatives of DC Comics to see if he could revitalize
any of that major publisher's stable of characters. He picked
the female crimefighter the Black Orchid and wrote a
determinedly unconventional script that begins with blunt
violence where readers have learned to expect talky temporizing
("I've read all the comics," the gangster says, "So . . . I'm
not going to set up some kind of complicated LASER BEAM
DEATHTRAP, then leave you alone to escape. . . . I'm going
to kill you. NOW.") and concludes a long buildup toward violent
confrontation with the villains' discovery that they can't bring
themselves to attack the heroine because she is simply too
wonderful to hurt. Gaiman's script is a striking, if not quite
convincing, treatment of conflict, and Dave McKean's painted
panels reinforce the uncomicbook mood.

Before taking a chance on publishing a lushly illustrated work by
a new writer, however, DC suggested it would be advisable to
build Gaiman's reputation by doing a monthly comic for awhile.
After brief consideration, Gaiman suggested the idea of The
Sandman. The magazine was an immediate popular and critical
success. It was the mainstay of DC's Vertigo subdivision and was
a consistent prize winner from its beginning in 1988 until
Gaiman chose to end it in late 1995. All the stories from the
monthly have been collected in reprint albums, with
introductions by the likes of Clive Barker, Harlan Ellison,
Samuel R. Delany, and Gene Wolfe. In total, it is an immensely
rich, subtle exploration of Gaiman's concerns.

Part of the magazine's interest is due to Gaiman's presentation
of the titular character. Continuing characters in fantastic
comic books are usually either mere hosts who introduce the
stories' actual characters or superbeings whose exploits are
themselves the stories. The Sandman's relation to other
characters--and the magazine's readers--is more complicated. The
first issue of The Sandman begins with a group of occultists
plotting to trap Death so they can live forever. The victim of
their conjuring, however, is Someone Else. As Gaiman describes
him in a synopsis that begins The Doll's House (first-published
of the albums but containing issues #8-16 of the magazine), "The
Man in the circle was dressed in black, His head hidden by a helm
carved of bone, and glass, and metal. Fires danced in the velvet
darkness of His robe; around His neck hung a precious stone, a
ruby; and by His side was a leathern pouch, drawn tight at the
top by cords." While helpless, he is stripped naked and
imprisoned in an airless glass globe; the humans realize this is
a being of immense power, but they do not know what to make of
him. Readers, too, are not sure how to approach the character.
His face is not even seen until over halfway through the story--
lean, pale, grim, with sunken eyes and dark, shaggy hair. Only
in the last pages of that issue, when he escapes his prison,
does he show some of his powers as Morpheus, Lord Dream. To some
extent, thus, readers identify with Dream; however, readers also
are shoved away from the character, aware that they do know and
perhaps can know very little about him. He reminds us of the
comment in Miller's Batman album, quoted with approval by
Gaiman, that heroes are too big to understand, let alone judge.

References throughout the series make it possible to piece
together Dream's background as one of seven powerful,
supernatural beings, the Endless, along with his older brothers,
cowled Destiny and burly Destruction, his cute and perky older
sister Death, and his three younger sisters, androgynous Desire,
grim Despair, and feckless Delerium. Though the Endless
sometimes appear in religious rituals, they are not gods. Gods
die with their worshipers; the Endless continue. They appear to
represent categories of experience, reflecting the way
intelligence organizes life. According to Gaiman, mythologies are
"the stories that we tell each other to try and make sense of the
world." The Endless embody that effort.

Readers were not given all that background initially, of course,
and Gaiman has presented the basic situation with considerable
ambiguity. The human character Rose Walker, looking back on her
nightmarish experience in The Doll's House, interprets it as
meaning that people are "just dolls. We don't have a clue what's
really going down, we just kid ourselves that we're in control
of our lives while a paper's thickness away things that would
drive us mad if we thought about them for too long play with
us." Just a few pages later, however, Dream warns Desire not to
meddle in human affairs: "We of the endless are the servants of
the living--we are NOT their masters. We exist because they
know, deep in their hearts, that we exist. . . . We are their
toys. Their dolls, if you will."

In the character of the Sandman himself, Gaiman illustrates this
uncertainty. Dream has supernatural powers and proudly declares
his superiority to mortals. On the other hand, Dream frequently
makes mistakes because he fails to understand human
relationships; he doesn't know how to make the kind of response
humans do because we appreciate our weakness and know how much
we depend on each other. Death is more sympathetic because she
is in touch with people daily and because she periodically
becomes human herself to feel what that condition is like. Dream
tends to retreat to his separate realm, insulated from much
direct human contact.

Or at least this is how things seem to be. Remember Dream's
assertion that the Endless reflect humanity, rather than the
other way round. Interrupting the grim Doll's House main
storyline is "'Men of Good Fortune,'" in which Death and Dream
inform a contemporary of Chaucer's that he can go on living as
long as he wishes; Dream chats with the man every hundred years
after that, until the man highly offends Dream late in the
nineteenth century by presuming to guess that Dream continues
their meetings because of loneliness, a need for friendship.
Dream angrily storms out. In contemporary times, therefore, the
man is pleasantly surprised when Dream shows up again, remarking
that "I have always heard it was impolite to keep one's friends
waiting." Dream is consistently remote, too large to approach in
human terms; yet he startles readers by revealing feelings that
he either has found in his nature as created out of mortal
yearnings or, perhaps, has learned by experience with humans.
Samuel R. Delany sees this as the basis of Gaiman's work,
focussing his introduction to A Game of You on the characters'
interpersonal relationships--playing the game of you rather than
withdrawing into the game of I.

This has a great deal to do with the way Gaiman has chosen to end
the series, with the Sandman's death and his replacement by
another embodiment of Dream. Morpheus must die because he has
shed family blood and thus become fair prey for the Furies, "The
Kindly Ones." What actually has happened is that Dream has given
the boon of death to the severed head of his son, Orpheus,
centuries after he declared he would have nothing further to do
with the young man for entering Hades to retrieve Euridice. At
that point, Calliope, Orpheus' mother,made the harsh judgment
that Morpheus "cannot share anything; any part of himself. I
thought I could CHANGE him. But HE does not change. He WILL not.
Perhaps he CAN not." Events prove this to be untrue. Dream fully
understands that releasing Orpheus is an absolute violation
of inhuman, unchanging rules. He must do it, though, for his own
personal, human reasons. Readers are left with the unanswerable
question of how long Dream has been preparing for the act of
mercy that ends Orpheus's mutilated existence. As Death remarks,
shortly before she ends her brother's present existence, "you've
been making [preparations for death] for AGES. You just didn't
let yourself know that was what you were doing." One translation
of "Morpheus" is, after all, Shaper.

We shape our dreams, yet are shaped by them. That is true of
humans and appears to be true of The Sandman too. Sometimes our
dreams are dark. From Violent Cases on, Gaiman has shown his
understanding of how ready humans are to give away their
individual perceptions. In Gaiman's The Compleat Alice Cooper,
the Showman offers young adolescents a trade: He'll remove the
future's uncertainty if they give up its potential; although the
protagonist rejects the deal, the Showman is still waiting
patiently at the album's end. In his recent short story "Snow,
Glass, Apples," Gaiman upends the tale of Snow White, with an
heroic queen using benign witchcraft to protect her subjects
from an inhuman girl-creature that mimes wholesomeness; readers
know too well which version of the story has survived. And
finally, taking over the Miracleman comic series from Alan Moore,
Gaiman has begun showing the mingled attraction and horror of
living in a world with godlike superheroes.

Gaiman's major work to date, however, is the Sandman  series.
Like most superior fiction The Sandman  supplies fewer answers
than sharply focused questions. In "A Midsummer Night's Dream,"
winner of the World Fantasy Award for best short story of 1990,
Dream brings together a troupe of Elizabethan actors and an
audience from Faerie. Dream has commissioned a play from one of
the performers, previously a fumbling young hack encountered
in "Men of Good Fortune" as Will Shaxberd. As part of his
bargain with Dream, William Shakespeare will have access to "the
great stories"; as Dream says, "Through him they will live for
an age of man; and his words will echo down through time." Yet
Shakespeare's son Hamnet complains to one of the actors that
stories are all the writer cares about now: "If I DIED, he's
just write a PLAY about it. 'Hamnet.'" Dream himself ponders
whether giving Shakespeare what he most desired was the right
thing to do. The story raises larger questions, however. Seen in
the overall context of the series, references suggest that even
centuries ago Dream was (unconsciously?) beginning to prepare
for Orpheus' and his own deaths. And where do
Shakespeare's  "stories" come from: Is Hamlet, for example, one
of the eternal tales of humanity or was it produced by one
individual's circumstances--such as his frustrated, helpless
grief at his son's death? But  which oblivious father and
rebellious son are the real subjects here? What The Sandman
suggests finally, is that we can discover all manner of horror
and hope within ourselves.

This a writer to watch. One way we transitory humans can get in
touch with something larger than ourselves is by listening to
stories, and Neil Gaiman tells honest tales.
 

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Nationality: English
Born: Portchester,England, 10 November 1960
Education: Ardingly College, 1970-74;Whitgift School, 1974-77.
Family: Married Mary McGrath in 1985; one son, one daughter.
Awards: Mekon Award, 1988; Eagle award,1988, 1990; World Fantasy
award, 1990.
Memberships: Society of Trip Illustrators (chair, 1988-90);
Science Fiction Foundation (committee member); British Fantasy
Society.

WORKS
 * Science Fiction Publications

 * Novels

 * Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter,
Witch, with Terry Pratchett. London, Victor Gollancz, and New
York, Workman, 1990.

 * Short Stories

 * Angels & Visitations: A Miscellany. Minneapolis, Minnesota,
DreamHaven Books, 1993.

 * Other Publications

 * Graphic Novels

 * Violent Cases. London, Titan, 1987; Northampton,
Massachusetts, Tundra, 1991.
 * The Sandman, with others. London, Titan, and New York, DC
Comics, 1990.
 * The Books of Magic. New York, DC Comics, 1991.
 * Black Orchid. London, Titan, and New York, DC Comics, 1991.
 * Signal to Noise. London, Victor Gollancz, 1992.
 * Miracle Man, Book Four: The Golden Age. Forestville,
California, Eclipse, 1992; London, EclipseGraphicNovels, 1993
 * Death, the High Cost of Living, with Chris Bachalo and Mark
Buckingham. New York, DC Comics, 1993; London, Titan, 1994.
 * The Children's Crusade, with Chris Bachalo. New York, DC
Comics, 1993-94.

 * Other

 * Duran, Duran: The First Four Years of the Fab Five. New York,
Proteus, 1984.
 * Don't Panic: The Official Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Companion. London, Titan, and New York, Pocket, 1988; revised as
Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy, with David Dickson. London, Titan, 1993.
 * Editor, with Kim Newman, Ghastly Beyond Belief. London,
Arrow, 1985.
 * Editor, with Stephen Jones, Now We Are Sick: A Sampler. East
Grinstead, West Sussex, Neil Gaman, 1986; Minneapolis,
Minnesota, DreamHaven, 1991.
 * Editor, with Alex Stewart, Temps, Volume 1. London, Roc, 1991.
 * Editor, with Alex Stewart, Eurotemps. London, Roc, 1992.
 * Editor, with Mary Gentle and Roz Kaveney, The Weerde. London,
Roc, 1992.