Arnold Federbush

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Arnold Federbush (1935-1993) was the author of two 1970s science fiction novels:

• The Man who Lived in Inner Space (1973), ISBN 0-395-14074-9. It concerns a marine biologist who is transformed into a new species of amphibious humanity, which can live in the ocean depths, Earth's "inner space".
• Ice! (science fiction book) (1978), ISBN 0-553-12151-0. It describes a return of the Ice Age in months, rather than centuries. It tells of the realization that an Ice Age is rapidly approaching, yet only a few people know this. And in effect, major weather changes begin to kill out large parts of Earth's population before the glaciers even hit the higher latitudes.

Note: This, and many other details of plot, characters, and package artwork, are similar to the 2004 film "The Day After Tomorrow" -- possibly because of genre convergence.

Federbush was born in New York, the son of a clothing manufacturer who had been a colleague in Palestine of Zeev Jabotinsky. He attended UCLA's film school, where his classmates included Francis Ford Coppola and Noel Black. His ambition was to be a screenwriter. After some years working as a film editor for Black and others, and finding that pitches for screenplays were (at the time) better received if they were based on already published books, he wrote his two novels, both of which were successful enough to be translated into many European languages and to remembered fondly to this day by fans of ecologically-themed science fiction.

Federbush was a life-long fitness enthusiast, and a non-smoking member of the original Muscle Beach crowd. However, he was diagnosed with apparently spontaneous lung cancer after it had fatally spread to his liver. He died with his third novel -- about spontaneous human combustion -- unfinished.