Shaara, Michael
Entry updated 23 June 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1928-1988) US author who began publishing sf with "All the Way Back" in Astounding for July 1952, the first of twenty-one stories he released in the 1950s, followed by a gap of more than two decades before he returned briefly to the form. Soldier Boy (coll 1982) assembles tales from both periods of his sf work, in which a slightly distanced diction is at times absorbingly applied to straightforward genre plots involving strange planets and Aliens, a seemingly standard mixture of ingredients subtly enriched with quick revelatory ironies about the human condition. For a few years Shaara seemed to be one of the heirs apparent to the sf pantheon, but his energies were directed elsewhere; his Civil War novel, The Killer Angels (1974), won a Pulitzer Prize, though none of his work gained commercial success until after his death. Bad health for the last fifteen years of his life hampered his ability to write, but in the early 1980s he returned to sf for a short while with The Herald (1981; rev vt The Noah Conspiracy 1994), a novel set in a Near-Future America, where a Scientist has developed a plague as the first part of a master plan to kill off most of humanity in preparation for his creation (see Mad Scientist; Pandemic) of a race of Supermen. [JC]
Michael Joseph Shaara Jr
born Jersey City, New Jersey: 23 June 1928
died Tallahassee, Florida: 5 May 1988
works
- The Herald (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981) [hb/]
- The Noah Conspiracy (New York: Pocket Books, 1994) [rev vt of the above: pb/]
collections and stories
- Soldier Boy (New York: Pocket Books, 1982) [coll: pb/Boris Vallejo]
- Conquest Over Time (place not given: Project Gutenberg, 2010) [story: ebook: first appeared November 1956 Fantastic Universe: na/]
- Wainer (place not given: Project Gutenberg, 2010) [story: ebook: first appeared April 1954 Galaxy: na/]
- The Book (place not given: Project Gutenberg, 2010) [story: ebook: first appeared November 1953 Galaxy: na/]
- Citizen Jell (place not given: Antenna Books, 2014) [story: ebook: first appeared August 1959 Galaxy: na/]
- Orphans of the Void (place not given: Project Gutenberg, 2016) [novelette: ebook: first appeared June 1952 Galaxy: na/]
- Soldier Boy (place not given: Project Gutenberg, 2016) [novelette: ebook: first appeared July 1953 Galaxy: na/]
- Man of Distinction (place not given: Project Gutenberg, 2016) [story: ebook: first appeared October 1956 Galaxy: na/]
- The Vanisher (place not given: Project Gutenberg, 2020) [novella: ebook: first appeared Winter 1954/1955 Planet Stories: na/]
- The Sling and the Stone (place not given: Project Gutenberg, 2021) [story: ebook: first appeared MArch 1954 Imagination: na/]
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