Dorothy Fontana has Died

I've just heard that DC Fontana, one of the best writers for Classic Star Trek, and someone who invented almost everything we know about Vulcans, has died. She was 80.
She was the story editor for the original series, after her work on the episodes Charlie X and This Side of Paradise. Other episodes she was responsible for are Tomorrow is Yesterday, Friday's Child, and the wonderful Journey to Babel.
In the third season, as a freelance writer, she wrote The Enterprise Incident, That Which Survives and The Way to Eden (oh, well - the space hippies one was not her finest hour....).
Later she wrote the animated episode Yesteryear, where we finally see Spock's sehlat.
She also worked with Gene Roddenberry on The Questor Tapes and Genesis II (Questor was kind of an early version of Data).
Later she worked on other SF shows, including the original Battlestar Galactica - The Gun on Ice Planet Zero was one of hers, which I remember fondly. It was sort of Guns of Navarone in space. She also worked on Encounter at Farpoint, the pilot episode of Star Trek TNG, and on Babylon 5. She also wrote the Star Trek novel Vulcan's Glory, which I remember snapping up as soon as I saw the author's name.
She attended one of the Star Trek conventions in the 1980s that I went to - I remember being very shy but going up to get her autograph anyway. One of the other guests at that convention was a stuntman friend of Gene Roddenberry's, who had worked on the Errol Flynn film Robin Hood!
She was one of my inspirations when I wanted to become a writer - I've never got any further than self-publishing and blogging, but I know where to look when I want to find out how to write a scene, and how to write three dimensional characters!

Vonda McIntyre has Died

I'd already read Dreamsnake by the time The Wrath of Khan came out, so I knew Vonda McIntyre was a good SF author. She won a Hugo award for Dreamsnake, only the third woman ever to win a Hugo for best novel. She wrote original Star Trek novels as well as film novelisations, and gave Sulu and Uhura their first names, which became canon - Hikaru and Nyota. I think I bought them all.
So her name is inextricably linked with my period of greatest Star Trek fandom, which I remember with great fondness, and I was sorry to hear that she was ill, a little while ago.
It seems that several writers I follow on Twitter remember her with fondness, too, and they have been relating what a welcoming figure she was when they were starting out, or when they met at Conventions, and she was also the "fairy godmother" of people who had attended the Clarion West writing workshops.

Harlan Ellison

I've just heard, via Diane Duane on Twitter, that Harlan Ellison has died.
Harlan Ellison provided one of my earliest tastes of real, grown up, science fiction as the editor of the anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions.
He wrote one of the best episodes of Original Star Trek - City at the Edge of Forever.
He was one of the great science fiction writers, and I'm quite surprised at how upset I feel about his passing, since I didn't know him as a person at all - just the stories, which will continue to be read and appreciated.

Kate Wilhelm

I've just heard that the SF author Kate Wilhelm has died.
Now is probably a good time to recommend Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang to anyone who hasn't read it. She wrote a lot more that that, of course, but it's probably the most easily available of her works.
She also did a huge amount to mentor and encourage new authors, so this is probably also a good time to recommend Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers' Workshop.