Fred Saberhagen passed away on June 29 from cancer. I didn’t know until a “Cover to Cover” listener sent me an email about it. The announcement had even been posted to Slice of SciFi, and I didn’t know.
To say the least, I was stunned.
I never got hooked by his Berserker series as some other friends of mine did back in the day, but I liked the “Empire of the East” series, I enjoyed his Dracula books (I’ve only read through “A Matter of Taste”), and also many of the titles in his Swords series.
Some of the earlier Dracula novels had been hard to find over the years, including “The Dracula Tape”, and “The Holmes-Dracula File” until a few years ago. The first couple of Lost Swords books have also been harder to find than the original Swords books, something I painfully discovered when I thought about getting them again about 10 years ago.
side note: losing two boxes of books during a move can be described as a particular level of Hell. I’m still replacing books that went missing then. Yes, I know they’re easier to find online, but a part of me still loves browsing through used bookstores and seeing for myself the condition of the book I’m going to take home.
“Empire of the East” was just added to the list of Future Topics a few months ago, so maybe I’ll try to get that one scheduled sooner rather than later. FYI, “Empire of the East” is the collected version of what had originally been the separate novels “The Broken Lands”, “The Black Mountains”, and “Ardneh’s World”. A sequel, “Ardneh’s Sword”, was published in 2006, but I don’t have it and haven’t read it yet.
He will be missed.
Links:
Berserker: The Official Fred Saberhagen Site
SFWA News
BoingBoing Announcement
2004 Interview (Baen Books )
Not dead. Resting? I’ve...
Wow… Saberhagen had totally fallen off my sensor screen. I loved the Berserker stories when i was a kid. So sorry to read of his passing.