SOHL, Jerry

   Working name of US writer and former journalist Gerald Allan Sohl Sr (1913-), active from about 1950 in sf and other genres as JS and under various pseudonyms, including Nathan Butler and Sean Mei Sullivan. He began publishing sf with "The 7th Order" for Gal in 1952, and soon released The Haploids (1952), the first of several 1950s novels whose slick surface and sharp economy of scale marked him as a professional craftsman. These books include Transcendent Man (1953), Costigan's Needle (1953) - which deftly depicts the colonizing of a PARALLEL WORLD - TheAltered Ego (1954) - which ingeniously treats as a problem in detection an IMMORTALITY puzzle involving personality recordings, though without the concept of CLONES the technology of transference was clearly unwieldy - and Point Ultimate (1955), a fine example of 1950s PARANOIA in its picture of Russians occupying the USA through use of a plague virus. In all these books JS's use of science, though attractive, seems in hindsight somewhat opportunistic, and several of them fail ultimately to make much sense of the premises they dramatize. His sf output began to slacken by the end of the decade, though he remained active in other areas, several non-sf novels being published as by Butler. Of his later sf, The Odious Ones (1959) and Night Slaves (1965), later televised, best demonstrate hiscompetence. From 1958 JS did considerable tv work, including scripts, under various names, for The INVADERS , The OUTER LIMITS, STAR TREK and The TWILIGHT ZONE .

   JC

   Other works: The Mars Monopoly (1956 dos); The Time Dissolver (1957); One Against Herculum (1959 dos); The Anomaly (1971); I, Aleppo (as "I am Aleppo" in The New Mind [anth 1973] ed Roger ELWOOD; exp 1976); Death Sleep (1983); Kaheesh (1983) as by Nathan Butler.