Charles Sheffield, a physicist and science fiction author, died Nov. 2 at a hospice near his home in Silver Spring, Md. He was 67.
The cause was brain cancer, said his literary agent, Eleanor Wood.
Mr. Sheffield, a native of Britain, had a doctorate in physics from American University. He was a consultant to NASA and later the chief scientist of Earth Satellite Corp., a Washington-based company specializing in natural-resource management.
But after 1977, the year his first wife, Sarah Sanderson, died, he turned more to writing. John Clute, an editor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, recalled that Mr. Sheffield responded to his wife’s death by diving “into his own mind, where he found stories forming in the illimitable dark.”
Mr. Sheffield wrote, or was a co-author of, more than two dozen novels.
In his “Summertide,” the known universe is believed to be populated by humans and by sizable buglike beings called Cecropians. Gerald Jonas, in The New York Times Book Review, praised that book’s scientific explanations and called it a “likable, well-made puzzle” in which Mr. Sheffield clearly was “concerned with the inner life of his characters.”
A half-dozen collections of short stories by Mr. Sheffield have been published. One of them, “Georgia on My Mind and Other Places,” was praised in Publishers Weekly for its “valuable ideas from a master craftsman.” The book won two notable prizes for science fiction writing, the Hugo and Nebula awards.
He is survived by his third wife, Nancy Kress, also a science fiction writer, and by his four children.
