Charles Sheffield (1935–2002)

Sheffield, Charles. The Compleat McAndrew. 2000. Gateway, 2013.
Charles Sheffield was an Anglo-American science fiction writer who worked from 1977 until his death in 2002. In 1978, he and Arthur C. Clarke each published novels featuring space elevators. Trained as a mathematician and physicist, Sheffield certainly deserves to be mentioned alongside such scientifically literate writers as Clarke, Niven, Benford, Bova, and Brin.
The Compleat McAndrew is a collection of short stories featuring physicist Arthur Morton McAndrew and Jeanie Roker, who pilots him around the solar system. The stories are narrated by Jeanie, a cautious pilot who sees her job as keeping McAndrew out of trouble when he gets lost in a physics experiment. She provides common-sense explanations of some of McAndrew’s more difficult locutions. She helps him battle the bureaucrats who want to reign in his experiments, but she is often jealous of the young women who see him as a scientific rock star.
Each story in the collection has a central scientific problem or idea at its center, often dealing with gravity and other astrophysical issues. Jeanie and McAndrew are more at home in space than on a planet. In “With McAndrew, Out of Focus,” when Jeanie observes a supernova from space while McAndrew is stuck on Earth, she feels sorry for him: “Me, I could look into the evening sky and see herringbone patterns of gorgeous rose and salmon-pink clouds catching the light of the supernova. McAndrew looked at the same thing and saw an annoying absorbing layer of atmospheric gases cutting off all light of wavelength shorter than the near ultraviolet. The Cassiopeia Supernova was flooding the Solar System with hard radiation—and here was McAndrew, down on Earth, condemned to visible wavelengths and missing half the show.”… (more)