Philip Jose Farmer (1918-2009)

Farmer, who died this past Wednesday, is probably best known for his Riverworld series, although as a kid I especially enjoyed his books like The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, where he played mix-and-match with characters from the repertoires of Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs and other authors, anticipating the sort of exercises in genre deconstruction Alan Moore would later make famous in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Lost Girls.

My personal favorite, however, would have to be his short story "The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod" (available in Ellen Datlow's Alien Sex anthology), which imagines Tarzan, as Lord Greystoke, giving his first address to the House of Lords as if it had been written by William S., rather than Edgar Rice, Burroughs.

Patrick McGoohan (1928-2008)

As a kid, I remember being thrilled by the adventures of McGoohan's two-fisted vicar, Dr. Syn, in the surprisingly-dark-for-Disney The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh. Later, like a lot of people, I was simultaneously fascinated with and baffled by The Prisoner. I've seen comparatively little of his work since then, although he brought exactly the right tone of understated menace to his role as Dr. Paul Ruth in David Cronenberg's Scanners.

I have vaguer memories of The Prisoner's immediate predecessor, Danger Man (Secret Agent in the US), but what had always stuck with me, oddly enough, was that show's art direction. The adventures of globe-trotting spy John Drake were shot on the cheap on the studio back lot, but rarely looked it because the show's producers managed to boil the essence of its far-flung locations down to a handful of shorthand visual cues: get a few pieces of rattan furniture, a potted palm or two, and a slowly-rotating ceiling fan, then throw some venetian blind shadows on the wall behind them and voilà -- you were instantly in some Graham Greene-ish post-colonial backwater.

Because, let's face it, McGoohan's intensity as Drake was all the realism you needed anyway.