The Best of Murray Leinster
Murray Leinster
368 pages
published in 1978
Yesterday was Murray Leinster day in Virginia set up to honour one of science fiction's pioneer writers. Murray Leinster started writing science fiction before it even existed as a genre, 1919 with the story "The Runaway Skyscraper" for pulp magazines like Argosy. When Hugo Gernsback created the world's first dedicated science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories in 1926, Leinster was there, with "The Runaway Skyscraper" reprinted in the July issue. Leinster continued to write science fiction through the Campbell revolution of the late thirties and forties, when the higher writing standards Campbell demanded were too much for many pulp writers and kept being published throughout the fifties and sixties. Though he wrote in other genres, science fiction always seemed to be his first love and several of his stories were first: the first story to predict the internet, the first alternate worlds story, one of the classic stories of first contact.
All of which is why I read this, The Best of Murray Leinster, as a short of honour, a way to remember one of science fiction's pioneers. This is one of a series of absolutely brilliant short story collections put out by Ballentine/Del Rey in the seventies, collecting the best stories of the socalled Golden Age science fiction writers: people like Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett and Murray Leinster. Though long out of print as far as I known, this series can still be easily found in secondhand bookstores and is well worth searching out. As far as possible the collections were selected by the authors themselves, but sadly Leinster had already died by the time this collection was published. Instead it was edited by J. J. Pierce, who did quite a few of these. It's a great selection, including the three stories I alluded to above.
- The Dean of Science Fiction · John J. Pierce
An overview of Murray Leinster's career and the stories chosen for this volume. - Sidewise in Time · na Astounding Jun ’34
The first science fiction story to feature alternate worlds and how to travel to them. Earth is wracked by unforeseen catastrophes, as parts of it are exchanged with pieces from Earths where history went another way. Only one man realises what's going on and sees his chance to become more than just another professor at a minor college, to establish himself as a dictator on another, more primitive earth and carefully kidnaps a group of his best students to help him do so... As the first such story, it has to explain quite a lot more than later stories had to. This makes it somewhat more tedious to modern readers. - Proxima Centauri · na Astounding Mar ’35
When the first starship reaches Proxima Centauri, they make contact with an alien race of plantmen, to whom any animal matter is a drug driving them to frenzy, as precious as gold and jewels to earthmen. And their ships and weapons are much advanced than the Earth ship's. How then to safeguard Earth from an alien invasion horde lusting after its unteeming masses of animals, including humans? A neat little adventure puzzle, but with a couple of plot elements that went nowhere, as in the distinction between officers and Muts, which served no real purpose other than to set up a bit of social tension between the hero, his admiring girlfriend and his rival for her attention. - The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator · ss Astounding Dec ’35
A light romp about the ability of a short range time machine as a matter duplicator. Broke nephew of a rich uncle inventor, who disappeared researching The Fourth Dimension, is driven to desperation by his finacée who needs to be kept in the comforts she's accustomed to. Incredibly sexist in the depiction of the ditzy golddigging blonde. - First Contact · nv Astounding May ’45
In the middle of the Crab Nebula, a human ship makes first contact with a ship from an alien race, the first ever met by humans. They now face a dillemma never encountered before: how to establish friendship with them, while avoiding any possible threat to the Earth itself. - The Ethical Equations · ss Astounding Jun ’45
The Ethical Equations showed that if you behaved unethically to get something for yourself, sooner or later it would be cancelled out. Freddy Holmes had used his uncle's connections to get the command over the Space Patrol's investigation of an extrasolar object, which turned out to be a derelict alien starship. Something is bound to happen to him... Interesting idea, but only used to set up another puzzle story. - Pipeline to Pluto · ss Astounding Aug ’45
Every day a ship leaves Pluto with minerals for Earth. Every day another ship leaves Earth for Pluto with supplies. Together these daily launces form a huge pipeline in space. And some people do everything to hitch a ride on them to Pluto, to become rich. - The Power · ss Astounding Sep ’45
When a fiftheenth century alchemist/magician makes contact with the last survivor of an alien starship which had crashed on Earth long ago, he thinks it's a demon. So when the alien explains the basics of its sciences to him, he's only looking for the demon's sigils of power... - A Logic Named Joe [as by Will F. Jenkins] · ss Astounding Mar ’46
Here we have a story predicting the internet, written in 1946, more than two decades before it was first established and almost fifty years before it became a mainstream communication medium. What's more, it's also one of the first stories, if not the first to feature a proper artificial intelligence. - Symbiosis [as by Will F. Jenkins] · ss Colliers Jun 14 ’47
As a small country, Kantolia can't defend itself military against its much larger, much more powerful neighbour. But when the latter invades its richest province, it soon becomes clear it has other ways to deal with them.... - The Strange Case of John Kingman· ss Astounding May ’48
A six fingered paranoid schizophrenic turns out to be much more than he looks, when it turns out he was admitted to the mental hospital over twohundred years ago... Very oldfashioned in its treatment of psychiatry as a science with answers as reliable as physics. But then that was the way science fiction used to treat all science, as something in which the right questions would turn out the right answers everytime, mechanically. - The Lonely Planet · nv Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec ’49
On the planet Alyx were no animals or plants, but just one huge organism that responded to human thought. It did everything that you could think of and did it because it was lonely. But then it became intelligent, too intelligent for humans to appreciate... - Keyhole · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec ’51
There's a story about a psychologist who wanted to study a chimpanzee at play. He locked him in a room full of toys, then dropped down to look through the keyhole only to find a brown eye staring back at him. When the first lunar colony kidnaps a baby Lunerian for study, who's studying whom? - Critical Difference [Colonial Survey] · nv Astounding Jul ’56
When teh sun in the Lani star system is going through a period of minimal activity it means an unsurvivable ice age for both tehe inhabitated planets in the system, the new colony on the ice planet of Lani III, as well as its mother planet Lani II. Colonial Survey officer Massy knows that no matter what tricks he dregs up from his studies for survival may delay the end, but can't prevent it. And yet people, including the colony director Herndon and his lovely younger sister Riki, think he's a genius...