If you have enjoyed ANY of the works of Iain Banks or Iain M. Banks, now would be a good time to sign his online guestbook. His bride (soon to be widow) Adele says he's reading all the messages and laughing.
This is a great role for "loved ones": handle most of the outreach so that the person facing death can focus on the things that ONLY they can do. One sub-category of potentially stress-enhancing stressors of the guestbook is people posting suggestions of cancer remedies to try, and Adele handles them as graciously as all the others.
In my message #7131, I wrote about Transition. The only critical reception Wikipedia mentions is "meh", but I loved it. It's more challenging to write a science fictional book where the real year (a concept introduced by John Clute in The New York Review of Science Fiction, January 1991, and happily beaten to death on subsequent Readercon panels) is close to the current year, and yet we need such.
I'll have more to say about Banks, but for now, go sign. He's showing how it's done. May each of us die half as well!
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