Dr. Robert L. Forward, author and physicist, died a year ago. His family has released a brief autobiography which he dictated just before his death. This is a must read for any science fiction reader, and indeed for anybody interested in technology.

My philosophy as a scientist has been to work on problems that other people consider impossible. I chose that philosophy as a very young man, because if you make any progress at all on that problem, it is still an advance.  When I felt I had launched a new technology, I wanted to move on to something new, different, and more difficult.

Dr. Forward wrote Dragon’s Egg and Starquake, realistic speculations about life on a neutron star, and several other “hard SF” books. I have most of them in my library. He also had 28 patents, invented the gravitational mass detector, smart structures, space tethers, various types of interstellar propulsion, and so on and so forth…