SEARLS, Hank

   Working name of US writer Henry Hunt Searls Jr (1922-), who began publishing sf with "Martyr's Flight" for Imagination in 1955, and whose sf has been primarily restricted to NEAR FUTURE tales of the early space age. In his first novel, The Big X (1959), a test pilot flies a plane designedto reach Mach 8. HS's best-known tale, The Pilgrim Project (1964) - filmed as COUNTDOWN (1968) - is about a race between the USA and the USSR to get to the Moon first, with both countries launching flights almost simultaneously. Melodramatically plotted, and technologically bound (with considerable expertise) to the world of the 1950s and 1960s, HS's work is now an artefact of an earlier (and in some ways bolder) age. From about 1980 he has concentrated on non-sf tales, some of them TECHNOTHRILLERS.

   JC

   Other works: The Crowded Sky (1960); The Astronaut (1960); The Penetrators (1965); The Hero Ship (1969); Overboard (1977), marginal; Sounding (1982).