[MRM]

The memory is surreal to me too. I was in high school and had stayed up late babysitting for relatives. To stay awake I listened to the local public radio station that had a program reading short stories after midnight. That night they read "Doing Lennon" by Gregory Benford. It is about a man living in the future when real people can be brought back to life. He hatches a plan to pretend to revive John Lennon, steal his identity and lives as though he is John Lennon. Being young and tired and way out in the country after midnight, the story experience was more than a little trippy and it made a huge impression on me. My memory is that Lennon was shot the next day, but that can't be true. It must have been a few days or weeks later, but it was quite close in time. It seemed like a cosmic coincidence to me that I would hear the story so soon before Lennon was murdered by a madman who wanted to be him. Somehow it felt like me hearing the story had something to do with him being shot.

Years later I came across an interview with Benford. The story was published in 1975 and he won a Nebula Award for it. He discussed the story a bit and said that Lennon's murder really weirded him out, but that's he's learned to deal with it and knows it was just a weird coincidence and he had nothing to do with causing it. MDC was a little like the character but MDC never read the story and was just plain nuts.