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.