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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."
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.
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.
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.