Also of such works The Peace War, Marooned in Realtime, and True Names, credited as one of the earliest depictions of the cyberspace concept. RIP at 79. He had a good run at least.
Crap. So much for a good conclusion to the Zones of Thought series.
Aw, damn. One of my favorite authors.
Crap. You’re right. The cliffhanger at the end of The Children of the Sky is still hanging.
He is one of the few authors who I still think about his books years after I last read them.
I always loved the way he got fantasy like FTL into the hard sci-fi Zones of Thought. Physics is different in different places. Things we think are impossible are impossible for us.
Didn’t care for The Children of the Sky, personally. Too much “local politics”. But A Fire Upon the Deep? Absolute top-tier sci-fi. Agreed with echoreply that the ideas in his books stick with you years (decades) later.
I’ve re-read AFUtD and ADitS fairly recently, but I grabbed Marooned in Realtime off the shelf. Been a while but I enjoyed it.
I too wish he’d written more. I did enjoy his whole ‘Zones of Thought’ universe concept.
Apparently he’d been suffering from progressive Parkinson’s for many years, tot he ;point that he had to be in a care facility. That is no doubt why his output slowed down, and why there was no resolution of the cliffhanger that ended The Children of the Sky.
It’s a huge loss to the SF community, but I am grateful for the books he wrote that we DO have.
Parkinson’s. Fucking Parkinson’s.
I lost my father-in-law, a dear man with an outsized wit, and encyclopedic knowlege of many topics, and an amazing skill at and love of chess, to the slow ravages of this scourge. I watched him fade away, first into clumsiness, than incoherence, than silence, and finally complete passivity. His last breath was hard fought but the freedom from the suffering both broke my heart and made me grateful through the tears that the travesty of his destroyed existence was at an end.
And now another great mind choked out like a tree killed by parasitic weeds.