Beloved author Richard Matheson passed yesterday at the age of 87, after a long illness. Best known for his seminal work I Am Legend, he leaves not just a legacy of great science fiction, but an indelible mark on American pop culture.
Along with I Am Legend, Matheson wrote What Dreams May Come, A Stir of Echoes, and The Shrinking Man, all of which became Hollywood movies (in the case of I Am Legend, more than a few times). He was also one of the original Twilight Zone’s greatest screenwriters, penned the classic William Shatner-starring episode Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
. His Twilight Zone episode Steel
became the basis for Real Steel, starring Hugh Jackman.
But Matheson was hardly just a Hollywood idea factory. Matheson’s dark, existentialist style influenced science fiction in every medium. His prose was humanist, but it was also bleak and ambiguous in a way that science fiction hadn’t been before, revealing the way the ambiguities of human nature play into stories of the fantastic — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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