Gary W. Shockley wrote his first science fiction story at the tender age of eleven. Though most of the details are lost, it involved a monster in a pit. In his early teens he wrote a story about a boy encountering a saucer on a hilltop. Later, in response to essay assignments in English class, he took to writing oddball pieces such as, "How to Rob a Bank Using an Army Surplus Tank."

In his late teens he embarked on the Lavendor trilogy -- actually a pentology -- a sprawling epic detailing the exploits of one Professor Lavendor. This was abandoned many years and boxes of notes later, but not before completing one of its volumes, Beyond the Oobal. This "truly godawful novel" was used as his graduate thesis at Indiana University, and one of its chapters got him into Clarion in 1980.

At Clarion, he was known to post long lists of story titles on his door for general use. This led one morning to the workshopping of four stories with the common title, "The Fall of Déjà Vu Castle."

After Clarion, he embarked on expanding his version of that story into a novel. The novel was completed 22 years later, though it has yet to find a home.

He sold his first story, "The Coming of the Goonga," in 1985. It appeared in Damon Knight's The Clarion Awards and was reprinted in Wollheim's 1985 Annual World's Best SF. Despite the general consensus among writers that "first sale" and "piece of crap" are synonymous, he could never shake the conviction that it was his finest work.

In 1988 he won the Writers of the Future Gold Award for "The Disambiguation of Captain Shroud." In the aftermath of his fifteen minutes of fame, he published a handful of stories, most appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and completed two more novels, The Pulse of Kato Whip and Tomki Chronicles. These, like The Fall of Déjà Vu Castle, have yet to find a home.

In 2008 he died of complications arising from a meteorite wound suffered in his teens. He will be sorely missed by his fan.