Lucius Shepard, one of science fiction’s great writers, has died. He was 66 70. I had met Lucius on several occasions and found him to be just as you’d hope from his novels: smart and witty (but lots of writers are smart and witty), and kind, and weird in the most delightful ways. I watched a chess-boxing match with Lucius and I have never seen someone more delighted. Shepard was involved in many good causes, and we had brainstormed many ideas for helping friends of his who were eking out a living in Central America as skin-divers and facing grave physical peril. It had been a few years since I’d seen him in the flesh, and I knew his health was often poor, but this was sudden and terrible news out of the blue.
Tor.com’s obit does a good job of getting at the facts of his career:
Shepard began publishing short stories in 1983 and his first novel, Green Eyes, appeared in 1984. In 1985 he won the John Campbell Award for Best New Writer; over the course of his career he won the Nebula for his novella “R&R,” the Hugo for his novella “Barnacle Bill the Spacer,” and the Shirley Jackson Award for his novella “Vacancy” in 2008.
But to stop there is to miss how Shepard’s fans and friends reveled in his work — its originality, its dazzling language, its hardbitten and hard-won verisimilitude. He was a writer who changed the readers who found him, and I miss him already.
Update: A fitting eulogy from Michael Swanwick.