On Jeffro’s Departure
Jeffro Johnson blazed up through the game blogging scene in record time. Never one of the more prolific writers on gaming, his posts were nevertheless widely recognized as making up in for their lack of quantity with massive amounts of quality. Early on, his analytical gaze turned toward Car Wars, OSR scholarship, and gaming with kids. That was what initially drew me to him, but once he sat down at the bad kids table of sci-fi and fantasy, his fate was sealed. He could have been just another casualty of the War on Noticing, but instead of sitting down, shutting up, and obeying the orders of the gaming scenesters, he forged ahead with a very un-gamerlike survey of Appendix N, and the rest is history.
In doing so, he blazed a path for those of us lost in the woods to follow. After a decade of poking fun of the SJWs in gaming – to their faces – and repeated sanctions for violating one of the many taboos present in what passes for culture amongst the SJWs, he showed me that gaming existed outside of the rainbow haired fatty crowd. He showed me that fans of the Campbellian style of science fiction – and its predecessors – didn’t just exist, they had a strong enough presence in fandom to tilt the Hugo Awards away from the steady march of Progress(ivism). As a result, my steady output as a wargame blogger sequed into the vastly more lucrative and emotionally rewarding world of literary self-publishing.
If you’ve ever enjoyed any of my stories, or any of my columns here or at the Castalia House blog, you have Jeffro to thank for it. His influence in my own work should be plain to all but the most casual reader. (For the record, Alex over at Cirsova comes in a close second, with a veritable army of other writers tied for a distant third.)
So it is with some sadness that I learned of his decision to step down as the Editor of the CH blog. I can tell you that working with Jeffro is as much fun as reading his columns. He has an infectious enthusiasm for fantasy and sci-fi in all its forms and an unabashed love of Western culture. Together, those traits helped him inspire so many others to take up the fight to recapture the themes and styles that made sci-fi and fantasy tales such an important part of our culture, and his influence will continue to be felt long after he has hung up his editorship.
I know that his influence on me will remain. He has always been ready with advice when my own certitude wavered, and support when my own doubts cropped up. Even if he never writes another word, he has already set something big in motion that not even Jeffro himself could stop. Even if the history books fail to recognize his influence – and many of those who would write such histories have already stuck his name down the memory hole for his crimethink – the fact of his influence will remain and linger for at least as long as my own works continue to hit the digital shelves over at Amazon.com.
On the bright side, his successor, Morgan Holmes, has been an excellent source of information about some relatively obscure topics in sf/f. His long running series on forgotten sf/f artists has been fascinating, even for those of us who never paid much attention to art beyond Frazetta and a few of TSR’s stalwart painters. Jeffro leaves the blog in good hands, and I continue to be excited to be a part of it.