Cliched
though it may sound, the most important thing Andrew Sewell taught me
was how to be myself. When we attended middle school and high school
together, back in the 1980s, there was no cultural cachet attached to
being smart, or nerdy, or to having an interest in science fiction or
fantasy. My sister, who was a few years older than us, referred to
such interests as “girl repellent”; they wouldn't necessarily
lead to bullying, but they certainly wouldn't make one popular.
The
most refreshing thing about Andrew, aside from the great breadth of
his interests, was his cheerful insouciance regarding others' opinion
of them. If he liked something, he would indulge in it and let
others know, and what he liked was almost always intellectually
stimulating, or entertaining, or funny, or all of the above. It was
Andrew who introduced me to the works of Terry Pratchett, back when
there were two Discworld novels rather than thirty; to John Varley's
Ophiuchi
Hotline,
still a breathtaking story 30 years later; and to the novel Marooned
in Realtime,
and the first appearance in fiction of the concept of a technological singularity.
It was Andrew who accompanied me and my brother Patrick and several other
friends to our first Doctor Who convention, and got to see Colin
Baker's monstrous ego firsthand. Andrew had been watching the show
since childhood, and I still remember him bellowing “Exterminate!
Exterminate!” into an electric fan to simulate a Dalek's voice.
Andrew also helped my brother and me crack some of the tougher text
adventure games from Infocom, and spent a year helping Pat develop a
text-based computer game centered around a Turkish taffy factory.
And of course he was always a ready, if highly opinionated, player in
any role-playing game my brother and I cared to host, be it Dungeons
& Dragons or a more obscure offering like Call of Cthulhu.
If
we grew out of these childhood interests, we did so only very slowly.
Andrew and I still shared them after college, when we were both
living in our parents' basements and figuring out what to do next
with our lives. Having a fellow gaming and sci-fi fan living nearby
helped make that otherwise dull and lonely time entirely bearable. Our
interests by then inclined toward old-fashioned war games, which
Andrew generally won unless he was unfamiliar with the outcome of the
battle they simulated (a history degree is good for something after
all), along with a new card game called Magic: The Gathering, which
we played obsessively in the winter of 1993.
We
stayed in touch for the next decade or so, and Andrew continued to
demonstrate that he was a good person as well as a smart one. He
congratulated me when I got my doctorate and my first permanent job,
reminding me that he now knew two Dr. David Nichols in Indiana, the
other being a licensed drug researcher at IU. Andrew also expressed
his sympathies on learning of my parents' protracted divorce,
comforting me with the memorable words “This too shall pass.” It
was around this time I learned of Andrew's health problems, but in
discussing them Andrew used the same phrase. Cheerful stoicism was
another essential part of his character.
Now
the obscure interests Andrew so enthusiastically pursued are the
cultural currency of young people everywhere. Terry Pratchett is an
international best-seller, Dr. Who is wildly popular on both sides of
the Atlantic, and fantasy role-playing games, or at least their
online variants, have hundreds of millions of players. Being a
sci-fi nerd is the new normal. If a time traveler from the 1980s
were to ask me today “What does popular culture look like in the
early twenty-first century?” I would reply “Go back to 1985 and ask Andrew Sewell
what he's interested in.” Sometimes a nerd is just a visionary who
is generous with his ideas and interests. I am privileged to have been one of the beneficiaries of Andrew's generosity..
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