The Best of Murray Leinster (US)

The Dean of Science Fiction

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.”

But he was never heavy-handed about presenting his philosophy in fiction. One of, his Med Service stories, concerning a doctor who deals with medical emergencies on far planets, quoted witty aphorisms from an imaginary book called The Practice of Thinking, by Fitzgerald. Intrigued readers pestered him for years afterward with inquiries about where they could obtain the book.

Nor did he ever forget ordinary human touches. On his interstellar ships, there are recorded sounds: “the sound of rain, and of traffic, and of wind in treetops and voices too faint for the words to be distinguished, and almost inaudible music—and sometimes laughter. The background tape carried no information; only the assurance that there were still worlds with clouds and people and creatures moving about on them.”

Leinster saw no necessary conflict between reason and human emotional needs, but he was fully aware of the irrational in man and the evil men do. “Keyhole” is an emotional story, in which it is very fortunate for Butch and his kind that they are able to offer men a “reason” for leaving them in peace. A convert to Catholicism, Leinster never mentioned religion in his sf, never sought to preach—but the idea of sin is certainly there.

“First Contact” is the most famous of Leinster’s stories of encounters between men and aliens. Here he sees them sharing the same weaknesses—fear, greed, and mistrust—but also the same strength of intelligent life everywhere: the ability to use reason to overcome their own weaknesses as well as the problems of their environment. The story earned Leinster a place in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, a volume of stories voted the classics of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

“First Contact” also occasioned a minor ideological flap in 1959, when Soviet sf writer Ivan Yefremov published “The Heart of the Serpent,” a story in which humans and aliens make friendly contact and don’t have any problems because they’re all good Communists. A character in Yefremov’s story speaks disparagingly of “First Contact,” and sees in its author “the heart of a poisonous’ snake.” Characteristically modest and gentlemanly, Leinster refused to be drawn into a debate, and on one occasion expressed more disturbance over Yefremov’s apparent prejudice against snakes than over any criticism of himself.

It would take a very casual reader to suspect Leinster of xenophobia. “Proxima Centauri” was as close as he came to the BEM (Bug-Eyed Monster) story in which innocent humans are threatened by the monsters. And even in this case, the aliens have a very specific—and logical—reason for being a threat to their human visitors. One might almost view the conflict as the unfortunate by-product of a local environmental crisis.

In “The Lonely Planet,” by contrast, the grim moments are all caused by the ignorance, malice, greed, and downright stupidity of humans. Leinster’s sympathy for the world-brain of Alyx is characteristic of him—and of science fiction generally for the last forty years. There are those, not too well informed, who imagine this attitude to have been developed only within the last decade, usually by themselves.

Perhaps the most unusual of Leinster’s contact stories, “The Strange Case of John Kingman,” never moves off the Earth at all. There is a subtle irony to the story: the being in the mental hospital who has been classed as a lunatic for nearly two hundred years really is insane—but not for the reasons human doctors have imagined.

In the 1930s, Leinster wrote several realistic stories of future warfare, like “Tanks” and “Politics.” In “Symbiosis,” he returned to the future-war theme, but in a much subtler manner. Kantolia seems defenseless: no planes, tanks, or heavy guns, no fanciful death rays. But it has a truly deadly weapon—invaders are helpless against it. The fact that a man with a troubled conscience must wield that weapon makes this, too, a very human story.

“The Power” is a science-fiction story set in a period when science fiction would have been impossible. Before you can have either science or science fiction, you have to have the kind of imagination that makes both possible. Poor Carolus—he sees, but cannot observe, still less understand!

One collection could not possibly include all the best stories of a man who was a regular contributor to science-fiction markets for five decades—there are even important types of fiction Leinster wrote, which could not be represented, here because of space limitations. And there are, of course, novels like The Forgotten Planet, based on “The Mad Planet” and its sequels.

Readers haven’t always had a chance to see Leinster at his best. After quitting an insurance company at age twenty-one—his boss wanted him to do something unethical, so he told the boss that he could do with the job—Leinster made his living as a writer, in other fields as well as in science fiction. Unfortunately, it seems that some publishers would rather reprint his potboilers than his classics. Then too, some publishers couldn’t tell the difference between them even when he was alive.

One of his novels, serialized in a magazine, dealt with space piracy. An old and hackneyed theme, but Leinster redeemed it with a climax in which the hero uses his knowledge of the hijacked ship’s communications system to drive the pirates insane. When a paperback publisher picked up the novel, however, virtually all the good stuff was cut out, without the author even being informed.

In recent years, it has become fashionable to look down on the pioneers of science fiction. One contemporary author pretentiously dismissed Leinster with the comment that he wasn’t a Dostoevski—a comment that means about as much as saying Scott Joplin wasn’t a Beethoven.

Leinster himself, of course, never claimed to be a Dostoevski—or anyone else so exalted. He took pride in doing what he could do well, but was never pretentious. Yet it was he, and others like him, who created a new kind of fiction with its own themes and traditions. Without them, there would be nothing for today’s science-fiction writers to turn into Literature—indeed, today’s science-fiction writers wouldn’t be. Period.

A pioneer of the scientific imagination in fiction—Leinster was that. But more than a pioneer; that would not be enough to make him worth reading today. The history of any literary genre is littered with pioneering works that are of interest only to scholars, and plenty of those can be found in the sf magazines of thirty or forty years ago. Leinster’s classics have escaped that fate.

Oh, you can tell which ones were written in the 1930s as opposed to the 1950s; styles change, after all. But his stories hardly seem dated at all. “The Fourth-dimensional Demonstrator,” for instance, could be made the basis for a television comedy tomorrow with only minor changes. Given human nature, the ethical problems of “First Contact” are as real today as in 1944—much as one might regret some ethnic references inspired by World War II.

Leinster was a man who was interested in the world—in people and ideas. Too many writers can’t seem to get interested in anything but themselves. Just as the best teacher is one who can get excited about what he’s teaching, the best writer is one who can get excited about what he’s writing. Leinster could and did, and his stories still communicate that excitement.

From the adventures in parallel worlds of “Sidewise in Time” to the moral conflicts of “First Contact” to the grim struggle to save a seemingly doomed world in “Critical Difference,” Murray Leinster is still a good read.

John J. Pierce

Berkeley Heights, N.J.

June 28, 1977