The Best of Murray Leinster
A Del Rey Book - Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright (c) 1978 by Random House, Inc.
ISBN 0-345-25800-2
First Edition: April 1978
The Dean of Science Fiction
“There were giants in the earth in those days.
mighty men which were of old; men of renown.”
-Genesis 6:4
SUBCULTURES, TOO, HAVE their lengendary figures, and in the world of science fiction, Murray Leinster was one.
In his later years, Leinster came to be known as the Dean of Science Fiction. His career in the field spanned nearly fifty years—remarkable enough in itself. More remarkable is that he remained a top-ranked writer for all of those years.
Leinster, in real life an unassuming Virginian named William Fitzgerald Jenkins (1896-1975), would have been amused at the Biblical parallel. But like that of the patriarchs of old, his longevity seemed unbelievable. Dozens of writers vanished into obscurity; entire schools of writing rose, flourished, and died—but Leinster carried on.
That took rare ability, but it also took rare dedication. Nowadays, when science fiction is taught in colleges, and a single, good sf movie bids fair to gross $100 million, it is hard to appreciate the dedication required of writers like Leinster to make of a marginal and despised genre something in which they, and their readers; could take legitimate pride.
A fellow pioneer of those early days once remarked that writing science fiction took more work and paid less, than bricklaying-he’d tried both and knew. Bricklaying pays a lot more these days, and so does science’ fiction-but there were and are easier ways of making a living than sf.
It is important to remember that. The pioneers of science fiction were, by and large, commercial writers. They never talked of Art and Literature; rather, of “craftsmanship” and “professional” standards. But that didn’t mean, as some of today’s less-informed critics seem to think, that they didn’t care about their work. Science fiction might be better off today, if some of these critics, and their favorite authors, loved sf as much as Leinster and some of his colleagues did.
When Leinster began writing science fiction, it wasn’t even called science fiction. There weren’t any sf magazines—what were called “scientific romances” or “different stories” appeared mostly in adventure pulps, mixed in with Westerns, spy thrillers, detective stories, horror tales and the like. Science fiction had no distinct identity, or any generally recognized standards.
Leinster’s own first story, “The Runaway Skyscraper” (1919), was typical of what was called for by a market that demanded exciting stories but as yet had no real appreciation of scientific logic or scientific imagination. A New York skyscraper suddenly plunges backward in time—never mind how or why—and its occupants have to rough it in the wilderness.
But even in his early works, Leinster brought a new kind of imagination to pulp literature. “The Mad Planet” (1920), too long to include, here, was in the tradition of the “scientific romances” and pitted men reduced to savagery against a world of giant insects and fungi. Yet the story still somehow seems fresh today. Leinster was fascinated by the world of insects, and he makes the reader fascinated—not merely frightened.
When the market called for stories about mad scientists who threatened the world with their mad inventions, Leinster could supply them—but his always had a distinct logic behind them. In “The City of the Blind” (1929), a scientific criminal’s invention darkens New York to cover a wave of robberies. Only to Leinster would it have occurred to consider what such a device would do to the weather.
But Murray Leinster did more than improve on existing models; he wrote new kinds of stories. “Sidewise in Time,” which opens this collection, is a classic case in point. One of the most influential sf stories ever written, it developed a concept of “parallel worlds”—worlds that exist in the same time as ours, but in which natural or human history has taken a different course. That idea has since been drawn on by H. Beam Piper, Keith Laumer, and a host of other writers. Some physicists are even reported to be taking the idea seriously—not the specific details, of course, but the concept that our universe may not be the only one in this space-time continuum. Leinster wasn’t a dour theoretician, by any means—he was a man who could have fun with ideas and share that fun with his readers. “The Fourth-dimensional Demonstrator” takes on the old dream of making money easily, but it never occurred to others who wrote parables of greed that a device producing money out of thin air would do the same for other things, including girl friends, or take “A Logic Named Joe,” one of his funniest stories and one of his most prophetic. Most people weren’t aware of computers back then, and nobody realized there might one day be computer information terminals all over the place-with their attendant problems. It’s still fun (and sobering, on reflection) to read about the people who order computer data on how to rob banks or cure their neighbors of concupiscence, but it’s also fun because we know Leinster thought out ideas that hadn’t even occurred to others.
The same kind of disciplined imagination could be turned to a really nasty story like “Pipeline to Pluto.” It’s an uncharacteristically gritty tale of some unpleasant people who meet their comeuppance. But Leinster could create a whole new kind of comeuppance to satisfy morality and scientific logic at once, and he did.
Leinster’s type of imagination was not a mere literary affectation, but was a basic part of the man. When he wasn’t writing, he was inventing. He had a laboratory in his home, and some of his inventions seem the very stuff of science fiction.
Jenkins Systems, widely used in television and the movies, is a device that allows background scenes to be projected on a special screen, without showing-up on the actors standing in front of the screen. As described by its inventor (under the double byline of Will F. Jenkins—Murray Leinster) in “Applied Science Fiction,” the system depends on a precise knowledge of the different ways light can be reflected. But it also depends on a certain psychology—the psychology of a man who can see how to make use of such natural phenomena.
Invention is a matter of problem-solving, and one of Leinster’s favorite forms, especially in his later years, was what is usually called the scientific problem story. “Critical Difference” is one of a series he wrote in the 1950s., and his own experience in solving scientific problems is reflected in the manner in which his hero comes to grips with a natural crisis that threatens the existence of human life in the planetary system of an unexpectedly variable star. The same kind of insight was, however, shown even early in his career with the story of Burl, the primitive who discovers how to use his mind to cope with a savage environment in “The Mad Planet.”
Leinster was a rationalist, a term which often seems to be in disfavor—perhaps through association with the dismal utilitarianism of the Gradgrind School in Dickens’ Hard Times. Anything but a Grandgrind, Leinster saw reason as a normal part of humanity, and his stories are always human dramas, not mere classroom exercises.
An admirer of Thomas Aquinas, Leinster believed that there is a natural order in the universe. In “The Ethical Equations,” for instance, he even suggests the possibility of a natural moral order in the imagined “mathematical proof that certain patterns of conduct increase the probability of certain kinds of coincidences.”