S P A C E L I G H T
INDEX
Name: SHEFFIELD, Charles
Aged: 67
Born: June 25, 1935
Where: Hull, England
Died: November 2, 2002
Where: Silver Spring, Maryland
Interred: _ _ _
Married: Sarah Sanderson
When: died June 1977
Married2: Linda Zall
When: (div)
Married3: Nancy Kress
When: 1997
Awards: 1992 John W. Campbell Memorial Award , Best SF Novel; Brother to Dragons. 1993 Nebula and 1994 Hugo awards for his novelette "Georgia on My Mind."
Charles Sheffield
"Without a strong scientific content, a science-fiction story fades into fantasy.
...much of what you find in book stores, shelved as science fiction, is fantasy."
Charles Sheffield, scientist, went for a mental jog one day just to prove that he could...and found himself running marathons 20 years later. The plan was to write a handful of science fiction stories; in part to see what would appear and in part to see what Isaac Asimov and Fred Hoyle found so fascinating about it. But, as any mountain climber will tell you, going up is not the same thing as coming down. He was about 40 years old when he started, and he hadn't stopped when he died fighting brain cancer...about 40 books and a 100 plus short stories later.
From the git-go, Sheffield was a hard science fiction writer. I don't think he was even tempted to write fantasy, although all fiction is fantasy. Into his second decade of writing Sheffield met with peer recognition and won coveted Nebula and Hugo awards. He was by nature a sequel and series author, the occasional one-shot novel was a rarity, such as Aftermath, which dealt with our solar system after the sun of Alpha Centauri went super-nova. He wrote a sequence for young adults known as the Jupiter Series, and several sequence novels for adults termed Heritage Universe and Proteus. Even his shorter works fell into this pattern; nine stories collected as The Compleat McAndrew and the series based on Charles Darwin's grandfather, The Amazing Dr. Darwin, aka Erasmus Darwin. He also wrote several 'fix-up' novels created from previously published short stories. He wrote in all of the short fiction forms and lengths about evenly. In short, Charles Sheffield was an all around writer of science fiction.
PEN NAMES: James Kirkwood
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mine here.
OBITUARY: Various
