Monday, August 5, 2013

In Memoriam: Andrew Sewell (1971-2013)

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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