Hello everyone

Like a lot of parents of my generation, my Dad didn’t really understand my interest in Science Fiction.

There was little enough of it around when he was young and a pragmatic engineering interest steered him away from fiction. Oddly enough, he enjoyed Star Trek - original and Next Generation only, Doctor Who, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, Time Tunnel, Thunderbirds, UFO, Timeslip, Knight Rider, Airwolf and StarGate but didn’t really see them as SF fodder.

I’m sure he thought they were just TV programmes with an unusual slant and enjoyed their technical fantasies.

He certainly wouldn’t have thought of himself as a SF fan. If he thought his son had a rather weird vocation writing about the subject, then he never told me.

If anything, it was his unspoken support that meant a lot more to me. I was never berated for my choice of hobbies or the amount of space my collection took up. He even modified the attic to support the bulk of my collection.

My Dad actually helped me on some of my SF model projects. No doubt spurred on by the belief I couldn’t handle a soldering iron. He helped me with lighting an SR-71A Blackbird so it would resemble the X-Men jet over 20 years ago, ensuing the motors in a Back To The Future DeLorean and FAB1 Rolls Royce worked properly and wiring a Terminator exo-skeleton so the eyes would light up.

We were in the process of sorting out where to put the battery when wiring an Aliens Powerloader model with a flashing red LED light when he became serious ill with cancer of the oesophagus and spent much of the last year in hospital before he died this November.

Death is seen as a commodity when writing Science Fiction. On paper, it is very easy to kill a character off if it moves the plot along. In a story I wrote last December for the SF Macabre e-book, an alien species actually saw it as a way of life based on their interpretation of terrestrial television.

Accident and war deaths tend to come over as statistics unless you know someone who was involved.

When a member of your family is affected by something such as that or cancer than it really brings home how fragile life really is and how you shouldn’t take for granted the life you have. Life is something that should be cherished and death something confined to fiction. Real life, unfortunately, isn’t like that.

With certain cancers, there are no miracle cures or turning the clock back. Death happens all too suddenly and all one can hope for is that science will one day have a remedy that will reduce such statistics.

My Dad never said he was in a lot of pain, although he was largely confined to bed in his last few weeks. He was a very active man and content making things on his lathe or in his workshop.

My comment to an ambulanceman a couple years back about our ‘having nothing in common’ had me also providing my own answer that gave Dad a wry grin: we’re both problem-solvers. His was with all things mechanical and me with story logistics and analysis, although he thought me a genius when it came to understanding computer technology.

We both could look at things and pin-point what was wrong and suggest or work out solutions that other people if not understand could learn from. Those of you who’ve been under my editorial grilling have all experienced that. People were in awe of my Dad for his range of skills from watch-repairs to tool-making.

It was something I could never compete in so probably why I was more into the theoretical side of things with the sciences and the arts.

There was a very strong link and I think it brought us together a little more strongly from that point until the end. Discovering a common bond like that after so many years showed we were very much of a kind and I wasn’t so eccentric in the family stock after all. More so, when I did things about the house, Dad didn’t think I’d know what to do.

Where my Dad was concerned, you watched, you learnt and sometimes could do. Perhaps not as well but better than a layman.

This editorial is a little different to my usual philosophising here but I need somewhere to acknowledge my Dad in print.

Normal editorials next time.

Thanks Dad. You’ll be missed.

Gordon James Brayley Willmetts

05 November 1920 - 18 November 2000

Geoff Willmetts

Hologram Tales e-mail: gfwillmetts@REMOVE.FOR.SPAMhotmail.com
terrestrial address:
74 Gloucester Road,
BRIDGWATER, Somerset TA6 6EA, UK.
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Geoff Willmetts

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