Nathan Schachner

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Nathan "Nat" Schachner (born January 16, 1895 in New York City ; died October 2, 1955 in Hastings-on-Hudson , New York ) was an American writer, best known as a science fiction writer and author of historical non-fiction and Biographies.

Life

Schachner studied chemistry at City College of New York , where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1915 . He then worked as a chemist in the New York City Department of Health . During World War I he served in the US Chemical Warfare Service from 1917 to 1918 . In 1919 he earned a Juris Doctor degree from New York University . In the same year he married Helen Lichtenstein, with whom he had a daughter. From 1919 to 1933 he was a lawyer, then a freelance writer. From 1945 to 1951 he worked as an editor for the American Jewish Committee and from 1954 to 1955 head of public relations for theNational Council of Jewish Women . In 1933 he was President of the American Rocket Society .

In 1930 Schachner had published the science fiction short story The Tower of Evil in Wonder Stories Quarterly together with Arthur Leo Zagat , further collaborations with Zagat followed, in 1931 the novel Exiles of the Moon appeared , from 1932 Schachner appeared as the sole author. In the decade leading up to 1941 he published over 100 SF stories, occasionally under the pseudonyms Chan Corbett and Walter Glamis, and was productive in other genres as the author of the pulp magazines of the era. In 2011, a collection of his weird fiction appeared as The Devil's Nightclub and Other Stories . A biography of the politician Aaron Burr was published in 1937. In the early 1940s, Schachner turned away from science fiction and turned to biographies and non-fiction, primarily from the field of US history. He also wrote several conventional novels, most recently The Wanderer in 1944 , a historical novel about Dante's love for Beatrice .

A hallmark of Schachner's science fiction was the thought variant story, a term coined by F. Orlin Tremaine in December 1933 . Tremaine was at the beginning of his editing of Astounding and used the term to describe a type of narrative that, in contrast to the action-oriented space adventure (keyword: Space Opera ) that dominated the Pulps at the time , uses speculative narrative means to convey an idea or a concept illuminate. He named Ancestral Voices , a story from Schachner in the same issue of Astounding , as the first example of this new direction. This also included the fact that Schachner dealt with current social problems and conflicts in his science fiction and, in particular, took a stand against the rising National Socialism , which is why Paul A. Carter made him one of the first in The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction " anti-Nazi Paul Reveres "called.

Schachner died in 1955 at the age of 60. He and his wife are buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson.

bibliography

Series

The series are arranged according to the year of publication of the first part.

20,000 AD (short stories, with Arthur Leo Zagat)
  • 1 in 20,000 AD! (1930)
  • 2 Back to 20,000 AD (1931)
Revolt of the Scientists (short stories)
  • 1 Revolt of the Scientists (1933)
  • 2 The Revolt of the Scientists II — The Great Oil War (1933)
  • 3 The Revolt of the Scientists III — The Final Triumph (1933)
Redmask (short stories)
  • 1 Redmask of the Outlands (1934)
  • 2 The Son of Redmask (1935)
Messier 33 (Short Stories, as Chan Corbett)
  • 1 Nova in Messier 33 (1937)
  • 2 When Time Stood Still (1937)
Past, Present and Future (short stories)
  • Past, Present and Future (1937)
  • City of the Rocket Horde (1937)
  • Island of the Individualists (1938)
  • City of the Cosmic Rays (1939)
  • City of the Corporate Mind (1939)
Kerry Dale / Space Lawyer
  • Old Fireball (1941, short story)
  • Jurisdiction (1941, short story)
  • Space Lawyer (1953)
    • German: The space attorney. Balowa Bestseller des Kosmos # 292, 1961. Also: Moewig (Terra # 248), 1962.

Novels

  • Exiles of the Moon (1931, with Arthur Leo Zagat)
  • By the Dim Light (1941)
  • The King's Passenger (1942)
  • The Sun Shines West (1943)
  • The Wanderer: A Novel of Dante and Beatrice (1944)

Short stories

  • The Tower of Evil (1930, with Arthur Leo Zagat)
  • The Song of the Cakes (1931, with Arthur Leo Zagat)
  • The Dead-Alive (1931, with Arthur Leo Zagat)
  • The Emperor of the Stars (1931, with Arthur Leo Zagat)
  • The Menace from Andromeda (1931, with Arthur Leo Zagat)
  • The Death-Cloud (1931, with Arthur Leo Zagat)
  • The Revolt of the Machines (1931, with Arthur Leo Zagat)
  • Venus Mines, Incorporated (1931, with Arthur Leo Zagat)
  • Emissaries of Space (1932)
  • Pirates of the Gorm (1932)
  • Slaves of Mercury (1932)
  • The Time Express (1932)
  • The Memory of the Atoms (1933, with R. Lacher)
  • The Eternal Dictator (1933)
  • The Robot Technocrat (1933)
  • Fire Imps of Vesuvius (1933)
  • The Orange God (1933, as Walter Glamis)
  • Ancestral Voices (1933)
  • The Time Impostor (1934)
  • He from Procyon (1934)
  • The Dragon of Iskander (1934)
  • The 100th Generation (1934)
  • Marble Murderer (1934)
  • Stratosphere Towers (1934)
  • The Living Equation (1934)
  • Monsters of the Pit (1934)
  • The Great Thirst (1934)
  • I Am Not God (1935)
  • They Dare Not Die (1935)
  • The Ultimate Metal (1935)
  • Thirst of the Ancients (1935)
  • Death Takes a Bride (1935)
  • Mind of the World (1935)
  • When the Sun Dies (1935, as Chan Corbett)
  • Death Teaches School (1935)
  • Satan's Antechamber (1935)
  • The Devil's Brewers (1935)
  • Hospital of the Damned (1935)
  • Railroad to Hell (1935)
  • The Orb of Probability (1935)
  • Creatures of the Dusk (1935)
  • Intra-Planetary (1935, as Chan Corbett)
  • Vault of the Damned (1935)
  • City of the Scarlet Plague (1935)
  • World Gone Mad (1935)
  • Kiss of the Iron Maiden (1935)
  • Master of the Space Ray (1935)
  • Infra-Universe (1936)
  • The Isotope Men (1936)
  • Entropy (1936)
  • A Feast for Hell's Angels (1936)
  • Death Unmasks at Midnight (1936)
  • Ecce Homo (1936, as Chan Corbett)
  • Reverse Universe (1936)
  • The Devil's Night Club (1936)
  • Pacifica (1936)
  • The Return of the Murians (1936)
  • The Saprophyte Men of Venus (1936)
  • The Eternal Wanderer (1936)
  • The Thought Web of Minipar (1936, as Chan Corbett)
  • Wedding Night of the Damned (1936)
  • Cauldrons of the Damned (1936)
  • Beyond Infinity (1937, also as Chan Corbett)
  • Beyond Which Limits (1937)
  • Satan's Children Are Hungry (1937)
  • The Shining One (1937)
  • Earthspin (1937)
  • The Plague of Evil Love (1937)
  • Sterile Planet (1937)
  • Crystallized Thought (1937)
  • Hostess for the Dying (1937)
  • Children of Murder (1937)
  • Lost in the Dimensions (1937)
  • Simultaneous Worlds (1938)
  • Governess for the Mad (1938)
  • Negative Space (1938)
  • Factory for Death (1938)
  • The Flowering Corpses (1938)
  • The Sun-world of Soldus (1938)
  • The Corpses' Christmas Party (1938)
  • Merchant of Screaming Death (1939)
  • Parade of the Tiny Killers (1939)
  • Welcome, Mr. Death (1939, as Chan Corbett)
  • Palooka from Jupiter (1939)
  • Terror of the Corpse Balloons (1939)
  • Worlds Don't Care (1939)
  • The Corpse Clinic (1939)
  • The Great, Gray Hounds of Death (1939, as Chan Corbett)
  • When the Future Dies (1939)
  • City Under the Sea (1939)
  • Cold (1940)
  • Space Double (1940)
  • Master Gerald of Cambray (1940)
  • Runaway Cargo (1940)
  • The Return of Circé (1941)
  • Beyond All Weapons (1941)
  • Eight Who Came Back (1941)
collection
  • The Devil's Night Club and Other Stories (2011)

Non-fiction

  • Aaron Burr: A Biography (1937)
  • The Mediaeval Universities (1938)
  • Alexander Hamilton (1946)
  • The Price of Liberty: A History of the American Jewish Committee (1948)
  • Joe Worker and the Story of Labor (ca.1948, with Jack Alderman)
  • Thomas Jefferson: A Biography (1951)
  • Alexander Hamilton, Nation Builder (1952)
  • The Founding Fathers (1954)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ David Langford : Thought Variant. In: John Clute, Peter Nicholls: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. 3rd edition (online edition), version dated April 2, 2015.
  2. ↑ In: Paul A. Carter: The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction. Columbia University Press, New York 1977. Quoted from: Donald M. Hassler: Schachner, Nathan . In: Noelle Watson, Paul E. Schellinger: Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers. St. James Press, Chicago 1991, ISBN 1-55862-111-3 , p. 695.
personal data
SURNAME Schachner, Nathan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schachner, Nat; Corbett, Chan (pseudonym); Glamis, Walter (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 16, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH October 2, 1955
Place of death Hastings-on-Hudson , New York