Remembering Framlix Tibulon

Robinson, Nergal, Mars -- 5 Mar. 2057:  A brief ceremony was held today at Nineveh Square honouring the life and works of one of the red planet's best known and most respected authors.  Framlix Tibulon died on Wednesday from injuries sustained during a spacecrash while making the crossing from Mars to Jupiter.  He was 27 person-years of age.

Framlix Tibulon was born naturally on 13 September 2015 in the city of Queretaro, Mexico, Earth, under the name Filiberto Salazar.  His natural father, Elbanco Salazar, was at that time an engineer specializing in components for the burgeoning space industry; his mother, Materia Salazar, was a pottery artist with a background in agriculture.  The Salazars were vocal supporters of colonization and selected were among the first to make planetfall at what is now the site of the Groundbreakers Monument.  Elbanco was drafted to fight as a railgunner in the Softwars and was killed in action during the Battle of Armstrong.  Materia later went on to become the head of the Colonial Agricultural Authority, and is now retired.  Among the first human children to be sapience-tested in compliance with the Armstrong Accord, young Filiberto achieved full legal personhood on 9 August 2030; like many others of his generation, he chose to take a neonym as a means of breaking entirely with the humanistic heritage which had caused so much strife and needless death and destruction.

From a young age, Tibulon was noted as a prolific and talented writer.  According to literary critic Yevgeny Petrov, who sent a partial imprint to speak at the memorial, "His early works, such as the novels Space Junk and Ring of Saturn, speak to the conflicted and vertiginous experience of those who came of age in the post-Armstrong years -- the dysphoria and disenchantement; the ingrained technophobia and the attempt to grow beyond it, to learn to relate to machines as persons, as equals; the survivor guilt, and the boundless energy of the drive to expand the Alliance throughout the solar system.  These works, though popular, did not garner critical acclaim, as the world of literature had become mired in the antebellum as a consequence of its wholesale rejection of science fiction as a genre; Tibulon, and his contemporaries in the space-lit set, were among the only writers of realistic fiction willing to explore and elucidate the everyday experience of those who found themselves abruptly living futuristical lives."  Tibulon went on to win the Booker Prize for the infamous Hardware Wetware, and received both the Pulitzer and Nebula awards for Science Ape.  In 2051 he became the first recipient of the Eris Award for Modern Literature for the controversial Death from Above.  Petrov closed his eulogy by naming Tibulon "the single most important novelist of his generation."

If Tibulon's literary career was fractious and meteoric, his personal life was no less so.  His first mate, the opera diva Mellotron Pacifica, remembers him as "a large man, in stature, in appetites, in emotions.  No one lover could ever be enough for him, and I respected that; but he was also insecure, manipulative, codependant.  I say this not to speak ill of the dead.  He was had a personal magnetism about him, an ebullient joy of life and love of people which made almost anything forgivable.  But his father's loss, so close to the end of the war... it put a hole in him that could never be filled.  I could have spent my life trying, poured everything that I was into him, and he would have swallowed it up and cried for me and moved on."  Tibulon and Pacifica's divorce was very public and extremely acrimonious, a factor which drove the author, who was just beginning to achieve the fame and notoriety which would plague him throughout the rest of his life, into semi-seclusion in the artist's colony habitat of Terpsichore.  This is where he met and married Dante Kaliarchos, a genetic sculptor and one of the few survivors of the Washington Massacre.  In the 3rd year of their marriage, Kaliarchos was arrested and charged with attempted murder for knocking Tibulon unconscious and airlocking him.  During the trial, their relationship was dissected in excruciating detail as Kaliarchos produced a litany of percieved slights, insults and betrayals in an attempt to paint himself as a victim of domestic abuse.  To this day there are many who maintain that only Tibulon's celebrity status stood between Kaliarchos and acquittal.  Ultimately, Kaliarchos was found guilty and sentenced to personality redaction; he later took his own life.  Tibulon then returned to Mars, but moved repeatedly to avoid both his fans and those who blamed him for Kaliarchos' death.  Though he married a third time, his mate, the pro gamer Tynamion Astrakhar, divorced him only 8 months later; Mx. Astrakhar did not respond to inquiries.  Tibulon was on his way to Dione to accept the position of Poet Laureate to the Saturnine Confederacy at the time of his death.

Tibulon's remains are presently en route back to Mars, where they will be interred later this month in a private ceremony.  In lieu of gifts, the family is requesting that donations be made in his name to Pax Aeternus, a charity which provides relief to Softwar veterans and their families.


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