Thomas N. Scortia
Thomas Nicholas Scortia ( born August 29, 1926 in Alton, Illinois, † April 29, 1986 in La Verne, California ) was an American science fiction writer, scientist and editor. He used occasionally pseudonyms such as Arthur R. Kurtz, Scott Nichols and Gerald MacDow.
Life
Scortia completed in 1944 at a college of Michigan State University, his schooling and went immediately to the U.S. Army where he served during the Second World War. After his return in 1946 studied at Washington University in St. Louis, was a chemist by profession and worked in the aviation and aerospace industry. His specialty were chemical mixtures for solid rocket; for a special fuel that was used in a Jupiter mission, he held a patent. He wrote the way since the 1950s science-fiction stories for magazines such as Future, SF Adventure and Fantastic. In 1970 he became a freelance writer and published thriller with science fiction elements, and usually accompanied by Frank M. Robinson. His biggest success was The Glass Inferno, very successfully filmed as The Towering Inferno. Most of his books deal of disasters in the expiry Scortia his professional experience was incorporated. In the submarine thriller The Gold Crew, for example, bring to exhaling chemicals the crew of a nuclear-armed submarine slowly out of his mind.
He died at the age of 59 from leukemia, perhaps going back to his activities as an observer at atomic bomb tests in the 1960s.