China Mieville, on the Guardian book blog:
In the Sandman story 'Calliope', collected in Volume 3 of the collected decalogy, Dream Country, Neil Gaiman gets disquietingly under the skin of a writer, and presents a dreamlike but perfectly savage investigation of storytelling. Richard Madoc, in his verve to become a 'great writer', imprisons and rapes a muse. His ongoing creativity is predicated on tawdry and brutal violence, in the kind of literalised metaphor that the fantastic is uniquely suited to providing. When Morpheus, Dream, confronts him in disgust, and Madoc repulsively insists that his actions were necessary so he could keep having ideas, Morpheus sentences him to 'ideas in abundance'. Which Madoc then begins to feverishly expound, as he breaks down.
'A city in which the streets are paved with time', he says. 'Head made of light...A were-goldfish...'. And on and on. It ranges from the para-insightful--'Gryphons shouldn't marry'--to the numinous--'An old man...who owned the universe'--via the humourous--'Two old women taking a weasel on holiday'--to the (seemingly) banal--'A small piece of blue cardboard'. It's a bravura sequence. It is terrifying and, in some bleak way, in the slopping speed with which these ideas vomit forth, a baleful antimatter version of 'reassuring' to the would-be writer: see how quickly hooks can be generated? But at what cost, by what violence?
A sideways homage to Gaiman and to his incomparable Sandman, rather than stories set in the comic's universe, would be a collection of all these tales listed but not (yet) written, generated by Madoc's punishment. Each thrown-out line could be turned, by some suitable writer, into a story. It would be loving, respectful, hopefully intriguing and, if done right, not a little unsettling, given the grotesque nature of the crime that spawned these punitive inspirations.
This I'd love to see happen. But I'm no editor. INTG.