Long before 1961, when Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shephard became the first humans to journey beyond Earth's atmosphere, writers envisioned spaceflight and life on other planets. These authors, all born before 1900, took their readers to the moon ... beyond ... and into our future.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Murray Leinster (1896-1975)

William Fitzgerald Jenkins, son of George B. Jenkins and Mary L., was born in Norfolk, VA on 16 Jun 1896. In 1921 he married Mary Mandola with whom he had four daughters. Jenkins died in Gloucester, VA on 8 Jun 1975.

He wrote under the pen names of Murray Leinster (the name used for the rest of this biography), William Fitzgerald, Louisa Carter Lee, Will F. Jenkins and Fitzgerald Jenkins. He wrote and published more than 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays. He was also an inventor (using his given name), best known for the front projection process used in special effects.

Leinster was two months short of his 20th birthday when his first story, "The Foreigner", appeared in the May 1916 issue of H. L. Mencken's literary magazine The Smart Set. Over the next three years, he published ten more stories in that magazine. During and after World War I, he began appearing in pulp magazines like Argosy, Snappy Stories and Breezy Stories. He continued to appear regularly in Argosy into the 1950s. When the pulp magazines began to diversify into particular genres in the 1920s, Leinster followed suit, selling jungle stories to Danger Trails, westerns to West and Cowboy Stories, detective stories to Black Mask and Mystery Stories, horror stories to Weird Tales ... even romance stories to Love Story Magazine under the pen name Louisa Carter Lee.


Hear it HERE
His first science fiction story, "The Runaway Skyscraper", appeared in the February 22, 1919 issue of Argosy and was reprinted in the June 1926 issue of Hugo Gernsback's first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. In the 1930s, he published several science fiction stories and serials in Amazing and Astounding Stories (the first issue of Astounding included his story "Tanks"). He continued to appear frequently in other genre pulps such as Detective Fiction Weekly and Smashing Western, as well as Collier's Weekly beginning in 1936 and Esquire starting in 1939.

Leinster is credited with the invention of parallel universe stories. Four years before Jack Williamson's "The Legion of Time" came out, Leinster published his "Sidewise in Time" in the June 1934 issue of Astounding. Leinster's vision of extraordinary oscillations in time ('sidewise in time') had a long-term impact on other authors: Isaac Asimov's "Living Space", "The Red Queen's Race" and "The End of Eternity."

His 1945 novella "First Contact" is also credited as one of the first (if not the first) instances of a universal translator in science fiction.

Leinster was one of the few science fiction writers from the 1930s to survive in the John W. Campbell era of higher writing standards, publishing over three dozen stories in Astounding and Analog under Campbell's editorship. The last story by Leinster in Analog was "Quarantine World" in the November 1966 issue, 36 years after his appearance in the premier January 1930 issue.

His 1946 short story "A Logic Named Joe" contains one of the first descriptions of a computer (called a "logic") in fiction. In the story, Leinster was decades ahead of his time in imagining the Internet. He envisioned logics in every home, linked through a distributed system of servers (called "tanks"), to provide communications, entertainment, data access, and commerce; one character says that "logics are civilization."

After World War II, when both his name and the pulps had achieved a wider acceptance, he would use either "William Fitzgerald", "Fitzgerald Jenkins" or "Will F. Jenkins" as names on stories when "Leinster" had already sold a piece to a particular issue.

Leinster continued publishing in the 1950s and 1960s, appearing in Galaxy Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as The Saturday Evening Post. He won a Hugo Award for his 1956 story "Exploration Team". He ended his writing career writing novelizations of episodes of the science fiction series "Men into Space," "The Time Tunnel" and "Land of the Giants."