Bob Shaw

Bob Shaw invented slow glass, a material that light takes years to cross, so a pane hung facing a landscape goes on showing that landscape long after it has been carried somewhere else. Light of Other Days, the 1966 story that introduced it, is among the few science fiction ideas that people who have read nothing else can still describe. Night Walk, from 1967, sends a blinded prisoner off a hostile planet using a device that lets him borrow the sight of any creature nearby. The Two-Timers puts a man into a world he has produced by preventing his wife's death, and makes him live alongside himself. Shaw was born in Belfast in 1931 and worked in aircraft engineering, structural steel and public relations before he wrote full-time. At conventions he was known for a deadpan comic lecture he delivered for years. He died in 1996.