Englishman Neil Gaiman is a prime example of such a talent at work, with a measurable impact in the worlds of science fiction, fantasy and comic books, plus creditable work with critical biography, regular fiction, television drama, music and full-length novels. Name-checked by everyone from Harlan Ellison to Tori Amos, Gaiman gained his greatest initial fame via the brilliant reworking of DC Comics' Sandman series, ditching the tame crimefighter of the original '40s conception in favor of a vast tapestry reaching, literally, across space and time, where the Sandman is indeed the dream king, a mythic figure of angst and power.

Gaiman's most recent work, which occasioned an interview broadcast on Dan TV's and David Roel's Radio Extropy on June 27, 1997 (KUCI 88.9, Irvine, CA), is Neverwhere, originally conceived as a BBC TV production and then adapted into a novel. As Gaiman noted during the interview, the novelizing of the story, telling of a strange, often nightmarish world beneath the regular streets of London, was 'a way of gaining total and complete control' beyond the necessary compromises of TV work:

"Neverwhere began 'round about the same time, actually, when I was talking to an English actor named Lenny Henry, and Lenny mentioned that he'd started his own film company, and wanted to do some kind of story about 'the tribes of London,' that was his only idea, the homeless tribes in London. And I though about that, and I said, 'I have this idea of this kind of "magic city" novel, this idea of this place where you fall through the cracks.' And I went away and wrote a script, and after awhile the BBC commissioned more scripts, and eventually I wrote the whole story.

"The fun thing with the BBC is that you're not doing a series that will run forever; the idea is you'll do something with a beginning, a middle and an end. So I wrote it, the BBC started to film it, and really, on the day of filming, I decided it was time to start writing the novel, mainly because I really wanted the power of 'because I say so.' There are a hundred different people making decisions ... You're like a general back at base, who's suggested a way of doing something, but there are an awful lot of soldiers in the field, and they all have their own ideas, the all have their own input."

Compromises between Gaiman's own forceful vision and the end product were inevitable as a result; an anecdote he offers helps to illustrate the frustration which has to be faced regardless of the final outcome's overall success.

"There's a thing in the book called The Great Beast of London, and that's based on a real urban legend in London from the 17th century about a piglet who ran away in Fleet Street, got into the Fleet Ditch, which is actually what the Fleet River had become, disappeared into the sewers, and grew eating the gubbins, and the excreta and the dead cats and things, whatever he could find in the sewers of London back then, and it grew huge, and they would send in hunting parties after this enormous boar that prowled the sewers under London. I loved this idea, it kind of antedated the whole alligators in the sewers bit, and it seemed like a fun and interesting idea and something that will be nice to play with.

"So I wrote this thing in, the Great Beast. And after awhile, I go off to Australia for a week to be guest of honor at the Australian nation science fiction convention, and I come back and they show me the ruches for the first of the Great Beast sequences. And here am I, I've described this pig the size of an elephant, this boar with enormous tusks, with old spears and swords sticking out from the side of it like Moby Dick, and you can imagine my surprise when a large, hairy and rather amiable-looking highland cow shuffles around through the sewer, and I'm going, 'That was not what I wanted, that was not what I had in my head.' So for me, the whole novel experience was ... my story, it has an unlimited budget because the only restriction is the imagination, everything I want to be in there is in there."

Gaiman's artistic successes often result from a fortuitous combination of circumstances - the interest of a comic book company or a TV channel helps spark something well beyond what is initially expected of asked for - but possibly the most curious origin of a well-known Gaiman project, the collaboration with Alice Cooper on his album The Last Temptation, arose out of a phone call Gaiman initially thought was a crank effort.

"The Alice thing really began one day when my phone rang, about five or six years ago, and I answered the phone and a voice said 'Hey Neil, this is Bob Feiffer from Sony Records and we have an artist who wants to do a concept album.' And I thought this has got to be some kind of joke. I couldn't think of anyone on Sony apart from Michael Jackson and Barbra Streisand and I didn't really want to work with either of them. I said, 'Who are we talking about here?' and he said 'Alice Cooper.'

"I though about it for a moment ... I loved the idea of Alice Cooper, Alice is a comic book character, Alice isn't real. Alice has become one of these sort of strange, horror icons. I was interested, so they flew me out to meet with Alice in Phoenix, and had a terrific chat, and I liked him, and we wound up going away and doing The Last Temptation album together. I came up with a plot, Alice then wrote the songs, I did a comic, and it did amazingly well all over the world, except in America, where they couldn't quite figure out how to release it or when to release it or anything. But it was great fun and it got amazing reviews, saying it was Alice's best album in fifteen, twenty years, and I felt perfectly happy with it. And it was my first-ever involvement in a concept album."

This heretofore untouched field for Gaiman perhaps also grows out of the fact that, musically speaking, his tastes are less grandiose concept album and more left-field pop and rock. Besides noting his love for such artists as Tom Waits and John Cale, Gaiman draws up a picture of his youth, in typically incisive and evocative fashion, where the division between two camps of music lovers - fans of Pink Floyd and of David Bowie - could not be harsher.

"I suppose I was very much a child of my time. I think it's interesting that David Gilmour and Floyd generally hate Bowie, because I think at the time, at least in England in my day, we divided up into the ones who liked Floyd and the ones who like Bowie, and I fell into the Bowie camp, and stumbled from there into punk. These days it's like arguing about two obscure religious sects from the dark ages - 'Well, what exactly was the difference between the pre-nomials and the anti-nomians ...' By the time I was sixteen, I was a little punk with shades, red hair, and leather jackets and dog collars and trying to teach myself how to spit. And at that age, the last thing one would ever want to listen to was Pink Floyd. They weren't just boring old farts, they were the boring old farts. They had transcended boring old farthood."

While perhaps not so immediately abrasive now, Gaiman still has cut a strong, immediately noticeable figure over time with his many projects. However, it has been argued more than once that Gaiman can never stop being overshadowed by the overarching success of The Sandman. Gaiman himself thinks differently, naming a more recent success as the effort which might forever pigeonhole him:

"I recently brought out a book called The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish which [frequent Gaiman collaborator] Dave McKean illustrated, and it was a children's book. It came out very quietly, and immediately started winning friends and influencing people, and Barnes and Noble made it a Father's Day selection, and so forth. People who have no idea and don't care that I've written anything else are starting to turn up at signing, with 506 copies of the goldfish book because they want to give it to friends. What I'm much more scared of right now is that in fifty years' time, somebody's going to turn to somebody else and say, 'Hey, you know, the guy who wrote the book, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, he did other things too!'"

With so many different things under his belt, from the definitive biography of Douglas Adams to the forthcoming American adaptation of Neverwhere, it seems most likely that Gaiman will eventually be known for many things rather than simply one or two striking successes. Yet, as he concludes, it all comes out of one particular impulse rather than a myriad of them:

"I don't think of myself as being primarily a prose writer, just as I never thought of myself as being primarily a comics writer, I think of myself primarily as a story-teller ... You don't really write for the ages; mostly you write for yourself, you write to try and entertain yourself. Very often, you just write 'cause you have this story in your head, and you want to tell it."