Writer Kurt Vonnegut, literary champion to some and ignored by others, died this Wednesday.
Though never exactly a part of the science fiction community, Vonnegut used science fiction heavily in his works, many of which were humanist morality tales. He is probably best known for Slaughterhouse-Five and Galapagos . The latter earned him an honorary anthropology degree and demonstrated he had a better understanding of evolutionary theory than some scientists.
I will probably remember him most as the creator of the character Kilgore Trout, a fictional sleazy sf writer. One of Trout's novels, Venus on the Half-Shell , actually saw print as a hoax. Famed sf author Philip Jose Farmer, best known for Riverworld , eventually admitted to being the author. Apparently it took some wheedling to get Vonnegut's permission to write it.