Some kids want to be firefighters or ballet dancers or teachers or astronauts. When I was six years old, I wanted to be a detective. Mysteries were my first genre fiction addiction*; I didn’t turn to SF/F until I’d read through the school library’s Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Cam Jansen, and Agatha Christie collections, followed by my mother’s treasure trove of books by Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, Dick Francis, and Mickey Spillane. Donald J. Sobol and Encyclopedia Brown started it all. To this day, I think of those books when I remember not to file my nails after taking a bath, or turn off a light so I can see out the window at night, or pause and pretend to think before giving someone an answer I know off the top of my head, or know which parts of a goose are dark meat. (That last one is in The Encyclopedia Brown Cookbook, which is even more awesome than you are imagining right now.) Some of Sobol’s work felt dated even when I was a kid, but the facts that earned Encyclopedia his quarters are timeless.

^{* Followed quickly by thrillers. I recall Elmore Leonard being rather startled that the nine-year-old had dragged her mother to his signing rather than the other way around, and I treasure my copy of Freaky Deaky inscribed “To my youngest fan”.}

I think the world needs an Encyclopedia Brown movie, as long as it’s understood that Sally is a lesbian and Encyclopedia is African-American. Seriously, when’s the last time you met a white kid named Leroy Brown?

According to Random House via GalleyCat, Anne McCaffrey died yesterday of a stroke. She introduced a generation of readers to both fantasy and science fiction, and was known for being gracious to her legions of fans. She will be greatly missed.

Memorial discussion threads: Tor.com, MetaFilter, The Whatever.

I am very sad to see that SFSite reports the death of Martin H. Greenberg.

The anthologies I read as a kid are the reason I grew up wanting to be an editor. Greenberg’s name is on so many of those anthologies that I have a separate bookshelf for them. He was immensely prolific and very rarely recognized for his editorial talent, perhaps because his books were mass market originals and unabashedly commercial. I’m sure I’m not the only editor he inspired, and he collaborated with many notables as well as up-and-comers. He will be missed.

Multiple sources are reporting that Joanna Russ has died following a series of strokes. She was 74.

I don’t even know how to talk about her: her influence on writing, on writers, on the direction of the genre, on generations of readers, and especially on other women in all areas of the field. She was tremendous. I read The Female Man when I was in college, and was awed. I read “When It Changed” some time later, I think when it was first reprinted on SciFi.com (for which I am very grateful to Ellen Datlow, the site’s fiction editor, who ran a phenomenal series of reprints there), and I read it again today when Graham Sleight posted a link to it. It is just as powerful as I remember. Do yourself a favor and read or reread it now; it isn’t long, and is well worth the little time and effort it requires. I always expect it to end differently, or maybe I want it to end differently: the simple ending, the brute force ending. But that wasn’t Russ’s way; she always went for the complex ending, the realistic ending, the ending that is not really an ending because human stories don’t end in that neat and tidy way.

Her story also has not ended, as long as we remember her–which I hope will be for a very, very long time.