TL Sherred

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Thomas L. Sherred (born August 27, 1915 in Grand Rapids , Michigan ; died April 16, 1985 in Detroit ) was an American science fiction writer.

Life

Sherred worked for many years in Detroit in the automotive industry, first on the assembly line and later as a technical writer and in advertising.

His best-known story is his first, E for Effort (German as Das Zeitkino ), published in May 1947 in Astounding Science Fiction magazine, which has since been reprinted, anthologized and included in Ben Bova's anthology The Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1972 . The story is about a device that can be used to record any scenes from the past and present on film. The inventor and his business partner use the device to produce historical films for the cinema that surprise the audience with their wealth of detail and the number of extras. First of all, there are films about antiquity, about Alexander the great and the Roman Empire . But as events that are closer to the present become the subject of the film - the producers are now less interested in money and more in historical truth - and the dark sides of historical figures are depicted on the screen, contradictions and suspicions rise increasingly. The producers come to court and, after they have been forced to reveal the secret of their apparatus, are acquitted, but then sidelined. The secret service and the military see the device as the ideal espionage device and another means of cementing American superiority. It ends in the catastrophe of a nuclear war.

Algis Budrys wrote of E for Effort that the story "gave the science fiction of that time - which he compared to an" armory of the National Guard "-" such a shock that some old boards still clatter today. "The background is that the Science fiction of the late 1940s and John W. Campbell's Astounding, in particular, represented a position characterized by technical optimism, politically naive to nationalist, in which political satire with current relevance had no place. According to John Clute , the story was accepted even in Campbell's absence.

Sherred's published work is narrow, four other short stories appeared in addition to E for Effort , the last ( Bounty , 1972) in Harlan Ellison's well-known anthology Again, Dangerous Visions , where Sherred confessed that he had written little since he now wrote when he Money needed, and probably wouldn't write anything more as a result of a stroke in 1971. The first four of his five short stories appeared in 1972 collected in First Person, Peculiar .

His only novel, Alien Island (1970), published during his lifetime, is about the first contact between aliens and humans who set up a trading post on earth and make use of an occasional drinker. The sequel to Alien Main was made by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. after Sherred's death . completed. A history of American automobile construction that Sherred had worked on for many years was also no longer completed.

In 1985 Sherred died at the age of 69. Part of his estate is in the Spenser Research Library at the University of Kansas at Lawrence .  

bibliography

Alien Island (novel series)
collection
  • First Person, Peculiar (1972)
Short stories
  • E for Effort (1947)
  • Cue for Quiet (1953)
  • Eye for Iniquity (1953)
    • German: Dollars from the air. In: Kurt Luif (Ed.): Phantom of Freedom. Pabel (Terra Paperback # 255), 1975.
  • Cure, Guaranteed (1954)
  • Bounty (1972)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "[...] handed the field such a knock that many old plinths are still loose in their sockets." Algis Budrys: Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf. Southern Illinois University Press, 1985, ISBN 0-8093-1187-9 , p. 268. See Robert S. Coulson: Sherred, T (homas) L. In: James Gunn : The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Viking, New York et al. a. 1988, ISBN 0-670-81041-X , p. 414.
personal data
SURNAME Sherred, TL
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sherred, Thomas L.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American science fiction writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 27, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Grand Rapids , Michigan
DATE OF DEATH April 16, 1985
Place of death Detroit