Exploration Team

"Murray Leinster" was one of the writing names used by the late William Fitzgeraid Jenkins, who also wrote as "Will F. Jenkins" and employed another half-dozen pseudonyms. Although he wrote copiously in many other fields, turning out millions of words of pulp stories, little of it other than the science fiction work he produced as Murray Leinster is known today—and, in fact, little outside of his SF work gained much attention even during his lifetime. As Murray Leinster, though, Jenkins had a profound and lasting effect on the development of modern science fiction.

"Leinster" sold his first SF story to Argosy in 1919, had work published in Hugo Gernsback's Amazing during the '20s, and went on to be one of the mainstays of John W. Campbell's "Golden Age" Astounding in the '40s and '50s, where most of his best work appeared. Most of Leinster's novels are heavily dated and long forgotten—one of the few figures of the day who made his reputation almost entirely on his short fiction, he was somehow never able to make much of an impact with his novels, which were widely regarded as inferior to his short work even during his working lifetime—but the best of his short stories remain fresh and powerful today In his short work, Leinster more or less invented several subgenres still active today: for instance, he is credited with writing one of the first Alternate History stories, "Sideways In Time," and one of the earliest First Contact stories, the famous "First Contact," and both stories still hold up as among the best treatments of their subjects. Also among his most famous stories is the taut, suspenseful, and scary tale that follows, "Exploration Team," which won Leinster his only Hugo Award in 1956, and which is practically the model of how to write an intricate and intelligent adventure set on an alien world, a story which has been an influence on—if not indeed the inspiration for—countless other stories and novels, as well as television shows and movies, over the years. Nobody before Leinster had ever written the tale of Terran explorers battling a hostile alien planet any better than he wrote it here—and, you know what? Forty years later nobody has done it any better yet.

Leinster's best novel is probably The Wailing Asteroid, above-average among Leinster novels for imagination and evocativeness, with some quirky detail work that holds up fairly well. His other novels include The Pirates of Zan, The Forgotten Planet, The Greks Bring Gifts, and The War with the Gizmos.

"Exploration Team" was collected, with other Survey Team stories, as Colonial Survey, one of his best collections. His "Med Service" series—not as successful as his Survey Team stories, but still of interest—was collected in S.O.S. from Three Worlds and Doctor to the Stars; there were also two Med Service novels, The Mutant Weapon and This World Is Taboo. Other Leinster collections include Monsters and Such and The Best of Murray Leinster.

Almost all of Leinster's books are long out-of-print, and almost impossible to find; you probably have the best chance of finding The Best of Murray Leinster, published in 1978, in a used-book store, but even that's rather unlikely these days. Fortunately, NESFA Press has just brought out a big retrospective anthology of his work, First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster (NESFA Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 07101-0203, $27), which features most of his best stories. Buy it while you still can, since much of this work is unfindable anywhere else.

A multi-talented man, Will Jenkins, the person behind the Murray Leinster mask, was a successful inventor as well as an author having created, among other things, a front-projection method for filming backgrounds still used in the film industry today, where it is known as the "Leinster Projector." During World War II, he also came up with an ingenious method for disguising the wake left by submarine periscopes that probably saved the lives of thousands of submarine sailors over the course of the war. He died in 1975.