The one who wrote Coraline, and co-wrote the book of Good Omens and made the TV show, also the Sandman comics writer and co-creator who made the Sandman TV show. Quite nice really.
I just wanted to share a little personnal victory with you.
I am 43 and I recently read “Fortunately the Milk”. It's not much you'll tell me, and you're probably right, but it should be noted that I'm french, and this was the very first book I read in english. So thanks to you and the recent discovery of Good Omens (which I adore), I checked off a dream on my bucket list: read an entire book in english.
You and Good Omens made me get back to english lessons, almost 25 years after my last lessons at high school.
And as I want to continue discovering your other books, I bought a few, still in english, and I'm going to build on my momentum.
So thank you so much Neil for your incredible work.
You probably won’t see this and that’s ok obviously. Just wanted to say it anyways.
Good Omens challenged me in a lot of ways and I rather think that, that’s a good thing.
My knee jerk reaction was to dislike the show, simply because the way specific Christian elements were portrayed and altered made me uncomfortable at first, but when I took a step back and really thought it through I realized something very important. This was a fictionalized world with its own celestial system just like many other books I’ve read and shows I’ve watched. It became crystal clear to me that this wasn’t an attack on my beliefs but rather a statement about how the opposite extremes can be equally toxic.
I learned that it was ok to like this media even with my religion, because at the end of the day it was just a story, and the fact that I recognized the names used didn’t make it anymore wrong than the media I willingly participate in where the creators make up their celestial beings completely. Because it’s not wrong, it’s fiction. It is a world you created to entertain others, to teach others, yes Good Omens is a book and also a show, But it is also so much more. It represents people who have been pushed into the background, people who have been mistreated, it demonstrates the fight for change in a broken system.
So thank you. This lesson I’ve learned is something I should have understood before but no one else seemed to explain it in a way I understood. Many try to combat hate with more hate. But you saw the hate and countered it with something much more effective: a simple dose of perspective.
When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.
Think about Unity President Marc Whitten’s nonpology for his company’s disastrous rug-pull, in which they declared that everyone who had paid good money to use their tool to make a game would have to keep paying, every time someone downloaded that game:
The most fundamental thing that we’re trying to do is we’re building a sustainable business for Unity. And for us, that means that we do need to have a model that includes some sort of balancing change, including shared success.
“Shared success” is code for, “If you use our tool to make money, we should make money too.” This is bullshit. It’s like saying, “We just want to find a way to share the success of the painters who use our brushes, so every time you sell a painting, we want to tax that sale.” Or “Every time you sell a house, the company that made the hammer gets to wet its beak.”
And note that they’re not talking about shared risk here – no one at Unity is saying, “If you try to make a game with our tools and you lose a million bucks, we’re on the hook for ten percent of your losses.” This isn’t partnership, it’s extortion.
How did a company like Unity – which became a market leader by making a tool that understood the needs of game developers and filled them – turn into a protection racket? One bad decision at a time. One rationalization and then another. Slowly, and then all at once.
When I think about this enshittification curve, I often think of Google, a company that had its users’ backs for years, which created a genuinely innovative search engine that worked so well it seemed like *magic, a company whose employees often had their pick of jobs, but chose the “don’t be evil” gig because that mattered to them.
People make fun of that “don’t be evil” motto, but if your key employees took the gig because they didn’t want to be evil, and then you ask them to be evil, they might just quit. Hell, they might make a stink on the way out the door, too:
Google is a company whose founders started out by publishing a scientific paper describing their search methodology, in which they said, “Oh, and by the way, ads will inevitably turn your search engine into a pile of shit, so we’re gonna stay the fuck away from them”:
The Lost Cause is my next novel. It’s about the climate emergency. It’s hopeful. Library Journal called it “a message hope in a near-future that looks increasingly bleak.” As with every other one of my books Amazon refuses to sell the audiobook, so I made my own, and I’m pre-selling it on Kickstarter:
That’s a lot to unpack, I know. So many questions! Including this one: “How is it that I have another book out in 2023?” Because this is my third book this year. Short answer: I write when I’m anxious, so I came out of lockdown with nine books. Nine!
Hope and writing are closely related activities. Hope (the belief that you can make things better) is nothing so cheap and fatalistic as optimism (the belief that things will improve no matter what you do). The Lost Cause is full of people who are full of hope.
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The action begins a full generation after the Hail Mary passage of the Green New Deal, and the people who grew up fighting the climate emergency (rather than sitting hopelessly by while the powers that be insisted that nothing could or should be done) have a name for themselves: they call themselves “the first generation in a century that doesn’t fear the future.”
I fear the future. Unchecked corporate power has us barreling over a cliff’s edge and all the one-percent has to say is, “Well, it’s too late to swerve now, what if the bus rolls and someone breaks a leg? Don’t worry, we’ll just keep speeding up and leap the gorge”:
That unchecked corporate power has no better avatar than Amazon, one of the tech monopolies that has converted the old, good internet into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”:
Amazon maintains a near-total grip over print and ebooks, but when it comes to audiobooks, that control is total. The company’s Audible division has captured more than 90% of the market, and it abuses that dominance to cram Digital Rights Management onto every book it sells, even if the author doesn’t want it:
Neil Gaiman are you trolling us about the Bentley's seat color and missing bullet holes? 😭 The fandom is obsessing over this and I accidentally caught some secondhand obsession over the differences. Anyway love you so much, thanks
No. I checked with Sarah-Kate, our producer, who told me that there were different seat covers in the shell-Bentley interior to match the correct Bentley exterior with the correct seats, and that any changes in seat cover from shot to shot is probably just a result of the grading process. On the bullet holes, she reckons that the window was probably wound down.
By “to match the correct Bentley exterior with the correct seats” do you mean the seat covers change to black while Aziraphale is driving to Edinburgh?
No, I mean that there were two different interior seat covers, one that of the original Season 1 Bentley (which in Season 2 was used in the episode 4 1941 flashback sequences) and one to match the regenerated Bentley of Season 2.
I don’t know if Neil is lying about the seats or if the crew just got it wrong but the fact is that they were brown when Aziraphale left for Edinburgh and were black when he got back…
Anyway, if it is the former then I’m sure Neil has a very good reason (no idea what but I trust him), and if it’s the latter then, well, at least it’s given us all something to obsess about 😂
First of all, HUGE fan of Good Omens (both the book and show). I don’t remember the last time I’ve been so enthralled by characters and a story. I absolutely adored Season 2 and have been recommending the show to all my peers. It’s also inspired me to get back into my art, so I thank you for that.
Okay, on to the question: I’ve been on my n’th rewatch of the show and am a little confused with something regarding how Crowley talks about his fall. Throughout the whole first season he’s going on about how he didn’t mean to become a demon and only ever asked questions, hung out with the wrong people, etc. But then in season 2 he talks about remembering fighting in the Great War (regardless of whether he recalls poor Furfur being there). I feel like knowingly fighting in a war against the forces of Heaven must come with the expectation or at least consideration of being cast out or punished in some way. So why say “I only ever asked questions” when he evidently did much more?
I’m not sure that Crowley is the most reliable of narrators when talking about his Fall.
A random thought I came up when talking with my friends. I believe this had been asked before (perhaps way back when s1 came out), but why was the role of the Supreme Archangel given to Gabriel???
Why not Michael? I am a bit of a Bible nerd, so I know that in the Bible canon, it was Michael who defeated Lucifer/Satan... So what did Gabriel do to be above them in the Angel Hierarchy???
Hey Mr Gaiman, thoroughly enjoying your books and I was wondering where is the best place in the UK to find signed editions? I know you've mentioned The Golden Notebook before but they don't seem to ship to the UK. I've managed to find a few on Ebay and private booksellers who'd probably give Aziraphale a run for their money but unfortunately I can't stretch to the hundreds of pounds, it's a shame that The Golden Notebook can't ship outside the US but I totally understand keeping an eye on overheads etc as their prices seem reasonable.
On a side note Stardust was one of our favourite films when my kids were growing up, it was our "sick day" film, whenever the kids managed to con me into a "I'm too poorly to go to school, I need to stay home on the sofa" this was the film of choice.
Golden Notebook ships all over the world – just email them, and they can work out shipping prices.
Hi Neil Gaiman. Thank you for writing books. In season 1 of the Good Omens television show, when Aziraphale discorporates, he is wearing different clothes in heaven. When Adam separates him from Madam Tracy, he once again has his earth clothes on. Are these the actual, physical clothes? Or are they miracled?
Wasn't the concept of having Heaven and Hell's office in the same building inspired by a Coca Cola commercial Sir Terry had seen?
I tried to look for it in class today for an assignment, but was unable to find any evidence it ever existed, though I've seen this commercial before.
Thank you🌻
It was a KitKat commercial, starring Ken Campbell as a demon.
I had remembered it as Kenneth Williams as the angel, because I remembered Kenneth mentioned shooting this commercial in his diary, but if it happened he was obviously replaced (by PG Stephens).
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