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

We should strive to be like Sheffield

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

Charles Sheffield was a man who did everything we all wanted to do.

He took the usual path of life, went and got a job, got married, and had children. But when he turned 40 and was in Iran doing business for a huge multinational corporation, something in him snapped -- and after reading a Sci-Fi novel, he decided to become a writer himself.

He left his high-paying job, and later his wife left him because he couldn't pay the bills. After miserable failure, he still persisted, and eventually got published and became a famous and respected Sci-Fi writer.

He's gone now, but at least he didn't go through the last years of his life a zombie like everyone else: an overworked corporate zombie with a wife for show, someone who, on the inside, is truly happy but is too afraid to challenge it.

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.

Didn't Live It

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's be honest - he was only 67. He didn't get to live his life to the fullest. His life was taken from him by a brain tumor. If you follow his news on his web site or any of various places he published his thoughts, he still had a lot of writing ahead of him.

I met him years ago and he seemed far younger than his actual age. He was a brilliant man and an author who deserved far more recognition than he received. Sheffield was, perhaps, THE finest writer of SCIENCE fiction during his time. He carried a regular job as Chief Scientist at the Earth Sciences Corporation and was more prolific than most full time writers. In a field that barely pays a fair rate for adult novels, he also wrote short stories and novels for young adults. His name should have been ranked with Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke.

Perhaps now that he's gone the SF community will realize what they've lost - or perhaps they'll just go back to reading Star Wars and Star Trek books.

Kermit

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.

Och, Damn.

[Felix The Cat]

As a long-time fan of his McAndrew stories (I'm in the middle of "The Compleat McAndrew" right now), this really saddens me. With these stories, Dr. Sheffield showed that he really knew how to take an esoteric scientific subject (like Kerr-Newman black holes) and explain it in layman terms (through McAndrew trying to explain it to Captain Roker). I haven't read any of his other works, but if they're as good as the McAndrew stuff, I'm probably missing out on some good stuff.

Re:The nice thing about Slashdot's slowness

[plover]

[ First, as the moderators have so rightly pointed out, my original post was an overrated troll. I did not post it as flamebait, however. I was going for the "funny" points. Quite a mistake, eh? ]

Right or wrong, icon would imply being prominent in the public eye. Dr. Sheffield was brilliant. He was known and respected in the sciences as well as the science fiction circles. I have no doubt that he treated you and everyone he came in contact with kindly.

But, he was not "pop culture." He was not a Hollywood name. He was not a Spice Girl or a member of N'Sync. He didn't have music videos. He didn't do a posthumous duet with Elvis or John Lennon. (Well at least he didn't voluntarily do one during his lifetime.) He didn't appear on Leno or American Bandstand. He didn't host Saturday Night Live (well he might have, but nobody's watched it in the last 10 years anyway.)

I am not saying that these are good things. I'm just listing off the crap required to be an "American Icon (TM)" in the true P.T. Barnum tradition of "never underestimating the taste of the American public."

(And is caffeine a basic nutrient or a food group?)

Can someone suggest a reading list?

[Embedded Geek]

I admit it: Sheffield is one of those authors that I never got around to reading (God knows there's so many). Well, now he's gone and I'm gonna make a point to pick up at least one of his books and give him a try. A quick search got me a list of his works. As with most prolific authors, though, it's difficult for me to figure out where to start.

So, here's my question: Does anyone who has read him have a suggestion on which book would be a good one as a first read? Not necesarrily his best (as that might include his series) but a single novel or collection that would give me a feel for his work and let me know if I would like to dig further into his collected works.

Thanks

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.