Neil Gaiman

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Name:	Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman
Also Known As:	Neil Gaiman
Occupation:	author, comics writer, screenwriter
Medium:	books, film, comics
Works:	American Gods, Anansi Boys, Beowulf (2007 movie), The Books of Magic, Coraline, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), The Graveyard Book, Neverwhere (TV series and novelization), Norse Mythology (book), "The Problem of Susan", Sandman, Stardust, A Study in Emerald
Official Website(s):	http://www.neilgaiman.com/ https://journal.neilgaiman.com/ neilgaiman at Facebook neilhimself at Instagram neilhimself at Mastodon neil-gaiman at Tumblr neilhimself at Twitter
Fan Website(s):	Gaiman's IMDb Gaiman's Wikipedia Article Gaiman's Wikipedia Bibliography
On Fanlore:	Related pages

Neil Gaiman is a very successful British writer in the genres of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He is notable for being a fairly fannishly accessible author, as he tours, signs books, tweets, blogs, and is generally extremely gracious to his fan-base.

Gaiman's accessibility to fans has led to interest and investment in his personal life. He has mentioned being autistic. From 2011 to 2022, he was married to the singer Amanda Palmer. In 2024, five women accused Gaiman of sexual assault, abuse, or coercion, leading to polarizing fandom reactions.

The members of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society awarded Gaiman the 2020 Forrest J Ackerman Award for Lifetime Achievement at their October 22 meeting of the same year.

Gaiman and Fanfic

Gaiman is a well-known fanfic enthusiast, having written some—"The Problem of Susan" (2004)—in addition to defending the activity for a long time; for example in 2008 he mentioned that he prefers a fanfic of his works after he passed away, rather than sequels:

Several people wrote to ask what I thought about Eoin Colfer writing a new Hitchhiker's book -- […]

[…] when Douglas asked me if I'd like to adapt Life, The Universe and Everything for radio I said no, and that was with Douglas alive and asking. […]

I like Eoin very much, and wish him well with the book. He'll probably write a sixth Hitchhiker's book with more enthusiasm, and certainly faster, than Douglas would have done. But it won't be a Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's book.

For the record, if I don't get around to writing a sequel to something while I'm alive, I'd very much rather that nobody else does it once I'm dead. It should exist in your head or in Lucien's library, or in fanfic. But that's me, and not every author feels the same way.

In a 2015 interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, he again cited fanfiction and his position on them:

It’s not a new phenomenon. I love the fact that, you know, in the early versions of King Lear, the story had a happy ending. Shakespeare turned it into a tragedy, and through the 18th and 19th centuries they kept trying to give it a happy ending again. But people kept going back to the one that Shakespeare created. You could definitely view Shakespeare as fan fiction, in his own way. I’ve only ever written, as far as I know, one book that did the thing that happens when people online get hold of it and start writing their own fiction, which was Good Omens, which I did with Terry Pratchett. It’s a 100,000-word book; there’s probably a million words of fiction out there by now, written by people who were inspired by characters in the book.

What do you feel about that?

Mostly I feel happy about it.

In November 2017, he answered a tweet denigrating fanfiction, citing his Hugo Award-winning story "A Study in Emerald":

I won the Hugo Award for a piece of Sherlock Holmes/H. P. Lovecraft fanfiction, so I'm in favour.

Fannish Engagement

Although Gaiman has written widely, most fannish engagement seems to be with his character Death, one of the Endless introduced by him while writing Sandman for DC Comics. Since Death can appear to any character when they die or approach death, she is a fannish Little Black Dress, and well suited for crossovers.

Good Omens (1990), a novel co-written with Terry Pratchett, has a small but active fandom which increased significantly after the release of the television series of the same name in 2019. Gaiman's works Neverwhere, American Gods, and A Study in Emerald (the story that he referred to as "Sherlock Holmes/H.P. Lovecraft fanfiction") are perennial requests at Yuletide, and fanfiction for his other novels turns up there from time to time.

Interaction on social networks

The Official Neil Gaiman Tumblr is a blog where Neil Gaiman frequently answers asks and interacts with fans. As time has gone on, his interactions on Tumblr have become more and more in line with the typical culture of the site, such as utilising memes and similar Tumblr vernacular.

In 2022 with the Twitterpocalypse taking place after the platform was sold to Elon Musk, many users decided to migrate to Mastodon, but some servers are overloaded and as one of the few ways to enter the site is by having an invitation Gaiman decided to offer all his fans a link so that they could ascend to the platform.

Controversies

Gaiman has generated discourse within fandom regarding taboo content in his fiction and his statements about the modern state of Israel and the Palestinian people, among other topics.^{[citation needed]}

2024 allegations

On July 3, 2024, British online outlet Tortoise Media reported that two women had accused Gaiman of sexual assault and began releasing a podcast series about the allegations. As of August 2024, the stories of five women so far have been shared. These alleged violations took place as early as 1986 and as recently as 2020. As of this writing, Gaiman has denied all these accusations.^{[citation needed]}

Fandom has been polarized around whether or not to believe the news, with some casting doubt on the allegations based on the venue in which they were first published and others arguing that the venue shouldn't matter or that there had been other warning signs previously. Some fans on social media expressed grief, disappointment, solidarity with the victims, and some have discussed the larger problem of how or whether to separate the art from the artist. On reddit a new community was set up to discuss the news, neilgaimanuncovered; the existing neilgaiman fan community also discussed the news and debated what to do with their subreddit in the future.

Links

• Pink News: The Sandman creator Neil Gaiman denies sexual assault claims
• Rolling Stone: Neil Gaiman Denies Sexual Assault Allegations Made by Two Women
• Fail_fandomanon: Re: Sexual abuse and rape culture - Neil Gaiman, ^{Archived version} (2024-07-03)
• muccamukk: Neil Gaiman Sexual Assault Link Round Up

Meta & Further Reading

• HELL IS A BESTSELLING AUTHOR WITH A TWITTER ACCOUNT: THE NICE AND ACCURATE CANON OF NEIL GAIMAN by Hannah P.S., July 24 2019