author
Fred Sheinbaum
A little-known science fiction writer whose surviving public record points to a sharp, satirical imagination. He is best remembered for “Filthy Rich,” a 1957 story that takes aim at consumer culture and social conformity.
1 Audiobook
Filthy Rich
by Fred Sheinbaum
About the author
Fred Sheinbaum is an obscure figure in science fiction, and only a small amount of reliable biographical information is easy to confirm online. What can be verified is that he wrote "Filthy Rich," a short story that appeared in Worlds of If Science Fiction in April 1957 and has since been preserved through Project Gutenberg and other cataloging sites.
That story gives the clearest sense of his voice: brisk, ironic, and interested in the pressures of status, money, and mass culture. Its future society treats consumption almost like a civic duty, turning the story into a pointed satire of mid-century values.
Because so little confirmed personal history is publicly available, Sheinbaum is best approached through the work itself. For listeners who enjoy rediscovered vintage science fiction, his fiction offers a compact, clever glimpse of the magazine era and its talent for using imagined futures to poke at the anxieties of the present.