It seems science fiction author Fred Saberhagen died a couple weeks back.

I read the entirety of the Berserker series (at the time) in high school, after becoming acquainted with it via Larry Niven's short story A Teardrop Falls in an issue of Omni Magazine. Fun reading, but as the wikipedia entry notes, the stories were so scattered in place and time that the series' sense of continuity suffered as a result.

Wikipedia doesn't say, but I've always wondered if the Borg were modeled after the Berserkers.