Don Sakers, 1958-2021
Don Sakers died May 17, 2021, of a heart attack suffered at his home in Maryland. He was 62 years old, and in losing him I have lost one of my oldest and dearest friends. His formal obituaries will tell you all about his career — as a writer, a fan, a reviewer for Analog, and a professional librarian — but I thought I’d take this space to tell some stories.
We met — he, Lisa, and I — at Noreascon in 1980, at what was billed in the program as a “gay fandom gathering.” Lisa and I were nervous, but curious, as I think everyone else who attended was, and the person who stood up in front of an audience that included both Samuel R. Delany and Marion Zimmer Bradley was a young guy in gay-boy overalls who said he would help get something started for gay fans. Lisa and I volunteered to help, and we went off to the bar afterward to talk about what we might do. At this point, we discovered that we were all writers, with similar tastes and books and movies and what had been going to be an organizational meeting became the start of a conversation that has just now ended. We put out a newsletter for a while, but didn’t attract much interest, and eventually the newsletter stopped but the correspondence and the friendship continued. We went to cons together, sharing rooms and talking until we couldn’t stay awake another moment; we sent each other stories to read and critique — we did that so regularly, in fact, that in the pre-internet days we bought paper with attached carbons so that we could just sent the carbon off to the others. Don was writing mostly short stories then, and was regularly submitting to Analog. At first he was getting hand-written rejections from Stan Schmidt, then editor — no small achievement — and then he sold a story, and then another. I sold my first novel, and we kept moving forward. At some point, around Constellation, Don took up with Thomas Atkinson, costumer extraordinaire and Star Wars fan/collector, and there were four of us. We continued to share work, go to cons together, and pursue an ever-deepening and very fannish friendship. When Lisa died in 2006, Don and Thomas were pillars of strength. They helped me get back into the world, and I will never be able to thank them enough for all their support.
But most of all, Don was wildly generous. (That was one of the things that made him such a good moderator.) He was more than happy to spend hours helping his fellow writers work out the details of their stories — the plot, the technology, the world, the math. When Jim Baen was looking at the proposal for my novel, The Kindly Ones, he provisionally rejected it unless I could set it on more than one planet, to make it more sfnal and let him put a spaceship on the cover. (He swore that spaceship would sell a couple thousand extra copies.) I agreed to consider it if I could use moons around a gas giant, and then went back to our hotel room to tell everyone what had happened. Don promptly offered to work out the orbital mechanics for me, and we discovered that, among other things, there would be a “midday” eclipse during the moons’ long day. This became not just an incredibly useful piece of background, but a key part of the novel’s plot. When Lisa and I were working on Point of Hopes, a fantasy mystery set in a world where astrology worked, it was Don who helped us calculate the orbits, and gave me the formulae that I still use to case the horoscopes for each of the novels. Most recently, the novelette and eventual novel Finders came out of a long conversation about nanotechnology and Clarke’s Law, and I’m still working out the ramifications of a conversation about computer language. The book that’s likely to come from that will be the poorer for lacking Don’s insight.
Don also built this website, and swore up and down that he was enjoying the process. He once sent me a package of Berger’s Cookies because it had been too long since I’d had any. The last package I received from him contained a game and two huge bags of acrylic scrap from Thomas’s job, which they knew I would use for jewelry.
He was someone you could laugh with, someone you could have serious discussions with, someone you could trust to cry with. He was, as Esther Friesner said, “good, merry, kind, and loved.” I will miss him forever, the brother of my heart.
