Leinster 101
The Dean of Science Fiction
Yesterday it was Murray Leinster’s birthday [June 16, 1896 – June 8, 1975] and I asked myself, “If someone were interested in exploring Leinster’s vast bibliography, what would a good starter pack be?”
Leinster (William Fitzgerald Jenkins) was one of the pioneers of science fiction and he produced some top-notch work still well worth reading today. But he wrote a lot, and that can be overwhelming. So consider this an introductory survey.
About Leinster
Let’s start with an excellent overview and appraisal of his career, over at the Science Fiction Encyclopedia.
For more comprehensive coverage, the standard single-volume reference work on Leinster remains Murray Leinster: The Life and Works by Billee J. Stallings and Jo-an J. Evans.
Short stories
Next, let’s look at the short stories, his strong suit.
If you want only five of his most significant short form contributions to the history of the genre, I’d probably go with these (but it really is tough to choose only five):
“Sidewise in Time” (1934): Leinster introduces the concept of alternate histories and the multiverse in slam-bang fashion, as fragments of other timelines crash into ours.
“Proxima Centauri” (1935): Along with Leslie Stone’s “Across the Void” (1931) this is one of the earliest generation-ship stories, and it involves conflict with sentient plant-like aliens.
“First Contact” (1945): The basic template for all first-contact stories in science fiction. It explores the psychological and tactical standoff between human and alien ships, and how both sides try to avoid a misunderstanding that could lead to war.
“A Logic Named Joe” (1946): This one’s a truly visionary yarn that correctly predicted the concept of the internet, personal home computers, and even search engines!
“Exploration Team” (1956): Another classic. In this Hugo Award-winning novelette prospectors on a harsh, alien planet must team up with the indigenous bears in order to survive the hostile wildlife.
All of these were originally published in Astounding Science Fiction and have been reprinted numerous times.
As a bonus, I’d say that for sheer pulpy, sense-of-wonder titles, my top picks are “A Thousand Degrees Below Zero” (1919), “The Street of Magnificent Dreams” (1922), “The Man Who Put Out the Sun” (1930), “The Fifth-Dimension Catapult” (1931), which has a sequel, and “The Ethical Equations (1945)”. The last of these is probably on a par with the five picks above from a storytelling craft perspective. They’re all a great deal of fun.
Collections
Let’s say you try a few of Leinster’s stories and want to sample his short fiction in greater depth.
To my mind, here are the best introductory single-volume collections:
The Best of Murray Leinster (UK, 1976)
The Best of Murray Leinster (US, 1978)
First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster (1998)
Med Ship (2002) & Planets of Adventure (2003)
Sidewise in Time (2020)
The last one is perhaps the easiest place to start. It’s a nice trade paperback, contains the top five stories I mentioned above, and a good assortment of other tales.
For greater scope, First Contacts is a beautiful hardcover and will provide a richer sampling.
The two Baen collections from 2002 and 2003 are more specific to series Leinster worked on, but nevertheless worth owning.
Lastly, the two Best Of collections provide a great snapshot of what was considered Leinster’s finest work in the 1970s. Though they’ve got the same title, their table of contents are different, and they’re actually quite complementary. The US edition, published by Del Rey / Ballantine, contains four of the top five stories I’ve listed, and so in that regard plays it pretty safe in terms of the greatest hits. (It also has “The Ethical Equations”). The UK one, issued by Corgi, is a slightly more quirky but nevertheless fascinating selection.
Of course, between them all these tomes contain significant overlap, though perhaps not as much as you might imagine.
Novels
The quality of Leinster’s novels tends to be more variable than his short works, so you may want to sample an opening chapter or two before committing to one of them. These are entertaining and thought-provoking romps:
The Pirates of Zan, aka. The Pirates of Ersatz (1959): A rollicking space opera where a clever young inventor is swept into interstellar intrigue, deceptive identities, and swashbuckling cosmic piracy. If you read only one Leinster novel, make it this one.
The To the Stars trilogy, comprised of Space Platform (1953), Space Tug (1953) and City on the Moon (1957): Engineers and astronauts battle sabotage, technical disasters, and Cold War tensions while building and defending humanity’s first orbital platforms and lunar bases on the road to the stars.
The Other Side of Here (1955): A scientist stumbles onto parallel worlds, where tiny shifts in physics unleash bizarre dangers and reality-warping chaos.
Four from Planet 5 (1959): Four mysterious children from a distant world arrive on Earth, forcing humanity to confront an alien intelligence that upends everything we think we know about communication and the mind.
Operation Terror (1961): A stealthy alien force invades Earth, sparking paranoia, desperate investigation, and a high-stakes battle against an unseen, mind-bending threat.
Film Adaptations
There are two film adaptations of Leinster’s work, The Navy vs. the Night Monsters (1966), based on his novel The Monster from Earth’s End (1959), and The Terrornauts (1967), which pulls from The Wailing Asteroid (1960), and is notable for having a screenplay by John Brunner.
I watched both of these movies yesterday and can safely say that despite a few moments of interest and several intriguing concepts, they’re not compelling. Expect disposable B-movie fare. The Terrornauts does have a nice first act and some colorful set design, but soon devolves into goofiness. My favorite aspect of The Navy vs. the Night Monsters was that it reminded me of, a bit distantly, The Day of Triffids, particularly the 1962 version.
I should mention that Leinster penned several media tie-in books, including Men Into Space (1960), The Time Tunnel (1967), Timeslip! Time Tunnel Adventure #2 (1967), Land of the Giants (1968), Land of the Giants #2: The Hot Spot (1969), and Land of the Giants #3: Unknown Danger (1969). Interesting fact: it was Leinster’s own original novel Time Tunnel (1964) that served as the basis for the ABC-TV series for which he would end up writing the two tie-in books I just cited!
To close, I’m going to give Leinster himself the last word, and quote the opening of Chapter Four from The Wailing Asteroid.
It showcases Leinster’s novelistic style and makes points about humanity’s reaction to the existence of aliens that still resonate today.
Incidentally, in my opinion the following paragraphs treat this situation with more insight, and are more entertaining, than the totality of Steven Spielberg’s recent Disclosure Day:
“THE PUBLIC ABRUPTLY ceased to be interested in news of the signals. Rather, it suddenly wanted to stop thinking about them. The public was scared. Throughout all human history, the most horrifying of all ideas has been the idea of something which was as intelligent as a man, but wasn’t human. Evil spirits, ghosts, devils, werewolves, ghouls—all have roused maddened terror wherever they were believed in. Because they were intelligent but not men.
Now, suddenly, the world seemed to realize that there was a Something out on a tiny frozen rock in space. It signaled plaintively to Earth. It had to be intelligent to be able to send a signal for two hundred seventy million miles.
But it was not a man. Therefore it was a monster. Therefore it was horrible.
Therefore it was deadly and intolerable and scary, and humans abruptly demanded not to hear any more about it. Perhaps they thought that if they didn’t think about it, it would go away.
Newspaper circulations dropped. News-magazine sales practically vanished. A flood of hysterical letters demanded that the broadcasting networks leave such revolting things off the air. And this reaction was not only in America. Violent anti-American feeling arose in Europe, which psychologists analyzed as resentment caused by the fact that the Americans had answered the first broadcast. If they hadn’t answered the first, there wouldn’t have been a second.
But also, even more violent anti-Russian feeling rose up, because the Russians had started a man off to meddle with the monster who piped so pleadingly. This antipathy to space caused a minor political upset in the Kremlin itself, where a man with a name ending in -ov was degraded to much lower official rank and somebody with a name ending in -sky took his place. This partly calmed the Russian public but had little effect anywhere else. The world was frightened. It looked for a victim, or victims for its fear. Once upon a time, witches were burned to ease the terrors of ignorance, and plague-spreaders were executed in times of pestilence to assure everybody that now the plague would cease since somebody had been killed for spreading it.
Organizations came into being with the official and impassioned purpose of seeing that space research ceased immediately. Even more violent organizations demanded the punishment of everybody who had ever considered space travel a desirable thing. Congress cut some hundreds of millions from a guided-missile-space-exploration appropriation as a starter. A poor devil of a crackpot in Santa Monica, California, revealed what he said was a spaceship he’d built in his back yard to answer the signals from M-387. He intended to charge a quarter admission to inspect it, using the money to complete the drive apparatus. The thing was built of plywood and could not conceivably lift off the ground, but a mob wrecked his house, burned the puerile “spaceship” and would have lynched its builder if they’d thought to look in a cellar vegetable closet.
Other crackpots who were more sensitive to public feelings announced the picking up of messages addressed to the distant Something. The messages, said this second class of crackpot, were reports from spies who had been landed on Earth from flying saucers during the past few decades. They did not explain how they were able to translate them.
A rush of flying-saucer sightings followed inevitably—alleged to be landing-parties from M-387—and in Peoria, Illinois, a picnicking party sighted an unidentified flying object shaped like a soup spoon, the handle obviously being its tail. Experienced newspapermen anticipated reports of the sighting of unidentified flying objects shaped like knives and forks as soon as somebody happened to think of it.”