SHERRED, T(homas) L.

(1915-1985)

   US writer who worked in Detroit for the auto industry as a technical writer. His production of fiction was small, and First Person, Peculiar (coll 1972) contains all the stories for which he is remembered,most significantly "E for Effort", his first published story (1947 ASF). It describes, humorously but with a fundamental pessimism, theconsequences of a device that permits its users to view past and present events. Its inventor and his associate are successful at first, but are soon defeated by government forces. Ultimately the existence of the "camera" in the hands of the US military causes a final WAR, as thevictim-narrator has predicted. (It is understood that the story was accepted for ASF in John W. CAMPBELL Jr's absence.) The other tales are "Cue for Quiet" (1953), "Eye for Iniquity" (1953) and "Cure, Guaranteed"(1954); they are clear-cut, forceful and black. The note accompanying "Bounty" in Again, Dangerous Visions (anth 1972) ed Harlan ELLISON revealed that TLS had suffered a mild stroke before 1971 and was unlikely to write further. However, Alien Island (1970), his first novel, had already been written; its sequel, Alien Main (1985) with Lloyd BIGGLE Jr, was completed by his collaborator. Alien Island is a sometimes comic but fundamentally melancholy tale about ALIENS secretly on Earth and the eventual disaster that results; the sequel - set two centuries later, with an Earth-descended alien defending the beleaguered planet - broadens and softens the implications of the first book, but returned TLS, at the close of his life, to the sf main.

   JC

   See also: MACHINES; MONEY; TIME TRAVEL.