Another Trek author gone. I admired both her technical skill and her prose style, and if I am remembering correctly (not a sure thing these days), she was the one who (in The Entropy Effect? now I wish I'd kept all my old Trek paperbacks so that I could check) offhandedly made Spock a fan of avocados--and then had his Vulcan training kick in, so that he cautioned himself not to enjoy them too much. McIntyre thus taught by example how to create a revealing character attribute in just a few words. The obits are saying that she died of pancreatic cancer--yet another person lost too soon to this horrible disease.