RIP: Charles Sheffield

uberdood writes "Dr. Charles Sheffield, noted for such SF works as the Heritage Universe series, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Higher Education, The Ganymede Club, Brothers to Dragons, Cold As Ice, and The Mind Pool, has died of brain cancer at the age of 67. Sheffield will be remembered for colorful characters such as McAndrew - and the wealth of short stories that helped make SF pulp rags so enjoyable. More information can be found via the Washington Post article. One of my favorite authors, dammit."

Comments

The nice thing about Slashdot's slowness

[plover]

is that the first post under this article WASN'T about Stephen King. And I'm sorry to be heretical, but I don't consider Charles Sheffield to be an American icon, either.

Re:The nice thing about Slashdot's slowness

[ThufirHawat]

You're not heretical-you probably lacked many basic nutrients in your diet.
I am not an American, but not to consider a man who was a renowned scientist and science-fiction writer an American icon means that you must have been abducted by aliens 40 years ago, forced to watch only US commercials, Tony Blair footage and Ally McBeal having a romantic fit, to see how long would your neuronal structures survive to this onslaught!!!
He was so kind to grant me a special authorisation to copy an out of print book of his, Trader's World, as I was using it in a graduate course I was teaching in an American university.
Had more Americans read this book, probably there would be by now a different administration in the White House, as it is a novel that furthers tolerance and understanding, rather than sending in the Special Forces to solve international conflicts...
Of my 18 bright graduates students not a single one thought he was not a very good writer [and they didn't even know what he had achieved as a scientist an a technologist].

His books live

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of you who haven't read his books, you have a treat coming. Many of them are available in open etext formats at http://www.webscription.net as part of Baen Books' wonderful webscriptions. His latest novel "Resurgence" just showed up in full there two weeks ago, and I have my usual library-donation hardcopy sitting on my desk as I type this.

Re:cat got my tongue

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there's a difference between brain-cancer and a brain tumor. A brain tumor is a mass solid lump of cancerous cells that is actually removable by surgery if caught in time. cancer in itself isn't always identitfied by a tumor, and therefore may exist simply in an area or the body, without growing into a mass of solid cancerous tissue.

This may be what Sheffield died from. Brain cancer.

"It's not a tumor"

*p.s. don't think me a coward, I just don't have the time to register at this moment! Feel free to email me back at cybergothgirlie@yahoo.com*

Sandra

Re:cat got my tongue

[l1_wulf]

What do you call cancer found in other parts of the body? Here (the US) we say lung cancer, throat cancer, skin cancer, etc. While I personally don't know, I just can't see people saying throat tumor or skin tumor, but that may just be the American in me, :P. Sure, I've seen the term "brain tumor" used here in the US but it seems to have been supplanted with the cancer label, as I have not seen any type of cancerous condition referred to as tumors anytime recently. Perhaps the label change has something to do with the whole political correctness movement that has had such a huge impact on the way we speak, but I don't know. Because I know next to nothing about modern medicine, perhaps there is another reason this label changed from tumor to cancer...?

Getting back on topic, I agree his death is truly a great loss and a shame.

Re:We should strive to be like Sheffield

[0xdeadbeef]

Wow, you weren't full of shit for a whole two and a half paragraphs. Keep trying, little scamper, you'll get it all, someday.

Sheffield had three wives, four children, and was a physicist before he started writing. His first wife actually died of cancer. His widow is Nancy Kress, also a well known author of science fiction who has won more awards than he has.

You may take a gander at this short autobiography.

SF Author Necrology (Somewhat OT)

[Embedded Geek]

Sheffield is just the latest of a large number of SF authors pass on in the past two years. It just a consequence of demographics, but still a little sad.

In any case, Locus Magazine has acknowledged the fact and dedicated a link to it. If you have a favorite who has passed away recently, you might want to look there and then click on their obituaries. You just might discover something you didn't know about your favorite author.

A far-sighted author

[squiggleslash]

What a pity most of the replies so far have been trolls and bad taste attacks. *sigh*

Sheffied was a worthy contributor to the "hard" science fiction genre. One of his most famous works, The Web Between The Worlds, came out within weeks of Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise, both of which championed the idea of a space elevator, then an virtually unknown concept. Clarke and Sheffield, in very different styles, brought this concept to a wide audience. This coincidence was to be referenced by Kim Stanley Robinson in his superb Mars series, for which Sheffield is credited as a major influence. In Red Mars, the elevator is tethered at a city called Sheffield, and the wieght at the other end is called Clarke.

Sheffield's books were thought provoking and often humourous - I'm convinced the character of Bat, introduced in Cold of Ice, is more than a little inspired by the same characters that brought us "Comic Store Guy" in the Simpsons, for instance. But themes from drug use, the use and abuse of genetics, as well as the basic generic science and technology standard for everyone in this field, haunt his novels and are investigated in ways rarely seen elsewhere.

This is a great loss to science fiction. Charles Sheffield was an original one-of-a-kind thinker, who wrote books anyone could enjoy. RIP, Charles Sheffield.

Re:Can someone suggest a reading list?

[gabec]

I've only read a few of his books, but Godspeed was a good one. The premise is that humans learned to control the Einstein-Rosen Bridge (I think that's the right name) where you essentially bend space, push through, and come out on the other side of the universe. Faster-than-light travel. (Like in the movie Event Horizon, only without the retarded evil dimension nonsense.) So because of this we've populated the universe with little human colonies that were all part of this hive network. Then one day the supply ships stopped coming. All the ships they sent out through the ERB never came back, so they had to start fending for themselves. This story follows a group of people from one planet as they attempt to find the rest of human civilization again. pretty cool.

I also read Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which started out really cool but probably should have been a short story. Basically this classical musician's wife dies of a rare sickness and so he has her cryogenically frozen so that she can be fixed and reborn. But he wants to be there when she wakes up, so he has to come up with a bunch of money in order to freeze himself too as well as keep them both on ice for the duration... He also realizes that no one is just going to decide to wake him and his wife up because they're nice people. They're going to need a reason to wake him up. (Which I thought was a very astute observation.) So he spends the next few years making uninteresting (to him) movie soundtracks and so on that sell well for money then once he has enough he goes around and interviews everyone he thinks will become 'the 21st century Mozart/Shakespeare/etc.'

Anyway, he spends the rest of the book racing through time trying to wake his wife. My opinion through most of it was that it was very well done and a fantastically interesting vision of the future, but in the end the main character was overwhelmingly obsessed with his lovly late wife. :/ But that aside, it was really cool.