David Feintuch; Independent obit (author of Seafort Saga)
Hyfler/Rosner
writer. And of course, it's from England.
The Independent
John Clute
08 April 2006
David Feintuch, lawyer, antique dealer and writer: born New
York 21 July 1944; married (two sons, three daughters); died
Mason, Michigan 16 March 2006.
David Feintuch once recorded that he died of a heart attack
just after completing his first published novel at the age
of 50. Luckily, two doctors were at his side and performed
artificial respiration till the defibrillator arrived. A
decade later, after gaining considerable success in his
writing career, he has died of a heart attack. He was 61.
No matter when they begin to publish, most writers start
young. Born in New York but raised in Yonkers, David
Feintuch was - like many writers-to-be - an avid library
user from childhood, and soon began to draft unpublishable
stories. He took a BA from Earlham College in Richmond,
Indiana, and while he was finishing a law degree at Harvard
Law School he wrote a first novel that he never submitted.
He graduated in 1970 and began his career as an attorney,
with sidebar excursions into the antiques trade, only
turning to writing full-time after the publication in 1994
of the first of his popular Nicholas Seafort novels,
Midshipman's Hope.
He was a reader of science fiction from an early age, but it
is likely that his choice of a science-fiction venue for the
Seafort Saga came after he decided to create a sensitive,
intelligent, guilt-ridden military protagonist forced to
make hard decisions by interpreting the letter of the law so
as to gain his humane ends in a rigid, hierarchical world.
The influence of Captain Hornblower is abundantly clear, and
Feintuch openly acknowledged the importance of C.S. Forester
to his work.
By putting his Hornblower character into a space-opera
framework - Seafort's adroit manipulations of bad laws take
place in a local galactic region dominated by an Earth
itself dominated by the religious right - Feintuch was
following the example of several earlier writers. But he was
unique in giving Seafort an intelligence of Hornblower
calibre, and by making him a kind of lawyer.
In 1996 Feintuch won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New
Writer, and over the next decade continued to produce
Seafort novels, seven appearing by the time of his death,
with a further title awaiting release. As well as Forester,
he cited as influences the brilliant popular historian
Barbara Tuchman, whose example may have helped shape his
careful attention to the ebb and flow of large-scale events
in the making; and Robert A. Heinlein, who adroitly used
every narrative trick available to make his far-flung venues
seem both natural and inevitable.
Far more successfully than other writers of what has become
known as military SF, Feintuch managed to impart a
Heinleinesque domestic verisimilitude to the exorbitant
action arena Seafort comes to govern, as the years pass and
he becomes a kind of dictator. Feintuch was no radical, but,
in later volumes of his ongoing saga, environmental concerns
began to figure significantly.
A large, shambling man, with a cheerful if rather dogged
manner, David Feintuch often spoke openly about his work,
but rarely about his private life. He had gone through a
divorce in about 1994, but was with his family, including
his wife Leianne and five children, at his death. He leaves
behind his work, which was still evolving in 2006; and the
memory of Seafort, convincingly wracked by conscience as he
steers his ship of state through tough seas.