The Disappearance of John M. Ford

There's also this sonnet, composed on a whim in response to a half-joking prompt:

  The worm drives helically through the wood
  And does not know the dust left in the bore
  Once made the table integral and good;
  And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
  Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
  A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
  The names of lovers, light of other days --
  Perhaps you will not miss them. That's the joke.
  The universe winds down. That's how it's made.
  But memory is everything to lose;
  Although some of the colors have to fade,
  Do not believe you'll get the chance to choose.
  Regret, by definition, comes too late;
  Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

This is, as noted later in the thread, a person who once won a World Fantasy Award for the poem on his self-published Christmas card (the absolutely brilliant "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station", on line here: https://sigridellis.wordpress.com/2014/12/21/winter-solstice... ).

It has, but in this case, the family was (by their own account) not so much unfavorable, as clueless -- they say they inquired about getting the books back into print, but asked Ford's former agent, who was in the process of ghosting pretty much everybody and never responded. Meanwhile, the former publishers would have loved to get the books back into print, and privately complained bitterly about the supposedly intransigent family that was preventing this, but it's really not clear how seriously they tried to ever get in touch. Crossed wires all around.

I think the surest sign of everyone's actual intentions is that when the reporter who was investigating this finally had contact information for everybody, they wound up making a deal to get everything the estate had the rights to back in print. (The exceptions to this are things like Ford's utterly brilliant Star Trek tie-ins -- fanfic written by a master at the height of his form -- to which the family never had the rights. Though ironically, for that very reason, they're among the very few Ford works that are still in print!)

Amazon UK is currently showing only one used paperback copy at £799 ($1036 USD). I have a horrible feeling I left mine behind in my last move.