Murray Leinster
This page intentionally left blank
Murray Leinster
The Life and Works
BILLEE J. STALLINGS and
JO-AN J. EVANS
Foreword by James Gunn
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
“A Logic Named Joe,” copyright © 1946, 1974 by the Heirs of the Literary Estate of Will F. Jenkins a/k/a Murray Leinster; first appeared in Astounding, March 1946; reprinted by permission of the Estate and the Estate’s agents, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.
“To Build a Robot Brain,” copyright © 1954, 1982 by the Heirs of the Literary Estate of Will F. Jenkins a/k/a Murray Leinster; first appeared in Astounding, April, 1954; reprinted by permission of the Estate and the Estate’s agents, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.
Excerpts from “What’s in a Pro?” copyright © 1953, 1981 by the Heirs of the Literary Estate of Will F. Jenkins a/k/a Murray Leinster; first appeared in The Writer, July, 1953; reprinted by permission of the Estate and the Estate’s agents, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.
“Writing Science Fiction Today,” copyright © 1968, 1996 by the Heirs of the Literary Estate of Will F. Jenkins a/k/a Murray Leinster; first appeared in The Writer, May, 1968; reprinted by permission of the Estate and the Estate’s agents, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.
The Murray Leinster/Will F. Jenkins letter from John W. Campbell is used by permission of A.C. Projects, Inc., writers/ owners of “The Campbell Letters.”
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Stallings, Billee J., 1928–
Murray Leinster : the life and works / Billee J. Stallings and Jo-an J. Evans ; foreword by James Gunn.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-6504-0
softcover : 50# alkaline paper
1. Leinster, Murray, 1896–1975. 2. Authors, American —
20th century — Biography. 3. Science fiction, American —
History and criticism. I. Evans, Jo-an J., 1938–
II. Title.
PS3519.E648Z88 2011
813.'52 — dc23 [B] 2011025614
BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE
© 2011 Wenllian J. Stallings and Jo-an J. Evans. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
On the cover: Will F. Jenkins, also known as Murray Leinster, in the mid–1940s; background © 2011 Wood River Gallery Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
Acknowledgments
Jim Gunn — whose encouragement from the start is responsible for this biography.
Fred Pohl — who cheered us on and supported our efforts.
Michael Swanwick — whose editorial comments and generous gift of time were invaluable.
Bob Silverberg — an outstanding example of the true professional who is both helpful and kind in his advice to newcomers.
Lee and Diane Weinstein — multitalented supporters and promoters of science fiction who have been of extraordinary help in this venture.
Steven H. Silver — for maintaining the Murray Leinster website, a treasure for fans.
Bob Harned — dear friend, cheering section, and tireless researcher and proofreader.
And all those contributors who remember our father and were kind enough to share their own memories of him.
v
This page intentionally left blank
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
v
Foreword: The Dean Revisited by James Gunn
1
Preface
3
ONE • The Beginning: 1909
5
TWO • A Southern Family
13
THREE • The Early Days: 1910–1919
22
FOUR • Entering Science Fiction: 1919–1921
33
FIVE • Marriage: The 1920s
38
SIX • The 1930s
61
SEVEN • The New York Years: The 1940s
86
EIGHT • The 1950s
117
NINE • The 1960s
132
TEN • After Mary’s Death
152
ELEVEN • On Writing
164
Appendix A. “A Logic Named Joe”
175
Appendix B. “To Build a Robot Brain”
187
Bibliography
195
Index
215
vii
No two people who’ve been through the identical experiences would write them in just the same way.
Letter from Will to his daughter Jo-an, November 4, 1963
Foreword:
The Dean Revisited
by James Gunn
Murray Leinster became part of my life as soon as I picked up a science-fiction magazine, which was in 1934, when I was eleven. By that time he had been publishing science fiction for 15 years, starting even before there were science-fiction magazines. His real name was William Fitzgerald Jenkins, but he wrote SF mostly under the name of Leinster. The name became synony-mous with science fiction for me, for his stories not only were everywhere, they were there first. He originated more SF concepts that any writer since H. G. Wells. And, as I learned later, he was a rarity of the times, a writer who actually made a living at it.
His career began so early and lasted so long that he became known as
“the Dean of Science Fiction.” His first story, “The Runaway Skyscraper,” was published in 1919, and his last one in 1967, a period covering almost 50
years and six decades. (It would not be surpassed until Jack Williamson, who lived to be 99 and wrote until the end, published work in ten decades.) Jenkins died at the age of 79. During his life he published 1,500 short stories and almost 100 books. He also was an inventor who patented a number of devices, including a front-projection system used to create special effects for motion pictures.
It was only looking back upon his birth year, 1896, that I realized he was only a year younger than my father and a year older than my mother. He was of their generation, but he seemed contemporary until his typewriter stopped.
In 1962, at the age of 66, he was voted one of the six favorite modern writers of science fiction, and his novelette “Exploration Team” won a Hugo award the same year. He was one of the most anthologized writers of SF until his 1
2
F O R E W O R D B Y J A M E S G U N N
death, and his name comes up regularly when some new development in technology is traced to a story he wrote decades before, like “A Logic Named Joe,” published in Astounding Science-Fiction in 1946, which anticipated the internet.
Earlier than that, though, he had written “Sidewise in Time” (1934, Astounding Stories), which provided a framework for the alternate history story that has burgeoned into a separate genre in recent years — so iconic that the award for the best alternate history story is called the “Sidewise.” Even earlier was his ecology story, “The Mad Planet” (1920), which described a world in which plants and insects have grown huge, leaving humanity dwarfed and hunted. His novel Murder of the USA may have been the first of the atomic-attack treatments and was written, surely, before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
Then there was “First Contact,” which was the first story to consider the consequences of a meeting of alien cultures at the same technological level and suggest that there is a way to get around the natural distrust of the other (which offers a lesson for our own quarrels). He manages this by bringing together two spaceships in a place in the galaxy remote from both. Neither has any reason to trust the other and every reason to distrust any suggestion short of mutual destruction to prevent the other from following it home and endangering the entire species. Leinster, however, finds an ingenious solution: make tolerance more profitable to both.
My favorite early Leinster story (it seems strange to pick a favorite from among so many) is his 1934 “Proxima Centauri,” which not only anticipated the generation starship concept that Robert Heinlein explored further in “Universe” and many more since, but imagined the kind of spaceships creatures who evolved from flesh-eating plants would build, and, even more important, how they would behave, and how that kind of knowledge could not only save a couple of crew members but also the human species.
Leinster very early understood that science fiction was the literature of the human species.
Science fiction is what it is today because of writers like Murray Leinster — and there were few like him. Now two of his daughters give us the rare opportunity to see the great writer from the perspective of his own children and let us understand what it was like to grow up with an icon as father.
James Gunn, writer, anthologist and a professor emeritus, is director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas.
Preface
Two sisters, both long past their youth and living on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, chat almost daily by email, occasionally switching to internet telephoning via their laptops for more detailed discussion. There is nothing exceptional about this staple of 21st century life, except that the internet and computers were described more than sixty years earlier by their father in a story, “A Logic Named Joe,” published in the March 1946 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction magazine. The story described personal computers called logics, easy enough for a child to operate and linked to other logics, so that one can call logic to logic (internet telephoning) and obtain a vast range of information. The story, in effect, represents the connected or wired world we now know more than half a century later.
Born on June 16, 1896, Will F. Jenkins, often writing as Murray Leinster, was among the most prominent writers of science fiction for nearly fifty years.
He began with “The Runaway Skyscraper,” which appeared in 1919 when he was in his early twenties. He published more than 1,500 short stories, novellas, and novels, writing variously as Will F. Jenkins, Murray Leinster, William F.
Jenkins, William Fitzgerald, and even Louisa Carter Lee and Florinda Martel.
His output was not only huge, but varied. As well as science fiction, he wrote love stories, murder mysteries, adventure stories, westerns, fantasy, television and film scripts, and mainstream fiction.
Some of his earliest efforts were published in H. L. Mencken and George J. Nathan’s The Smart Set magazine. His first short story, “My Neighbor,” was printed in the February 1916 issue under the name “William F. Jenkins.” He appeared regularly in the most popular magazines of his time, adapting his writing to new markets as they developed. His stories are in textbooks, in endless anthologies, and in translations all over the world.
Will often said, “I think of something impossible, and then write a story about it.” In this way, he initiated new fictional concepts: “Sidewise in Time,” 3
4
P R E F A C E
the first parallel universe story ( Astounding Stories, June 1934); “First Contact,” confronting the implications of the first contact between human and alien spaceships ( Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1945); and “Symbiosis,” presenting a novel but effective weapon against biological warfare ( Collier’s, June 1947).
He was a frustrated scientist. His father’s job loss when he was 13 ended the possibility of college and the career in chemistry he wanted. He tinkered throughout his life, endlessly inventing and leaving bits of experiments all over the house, to his wife’s frequent dismay. The most successful result of his tinkering was a filming method, Front Projection, patented in 1955.
Throughout his life, however, Will remained sensitive to the fact that his formal education ended in the 8th grade. Articulate and intelligent though he was, he never gave himself full credit for his extensive knowledge of an enormous variety of subjects acquired over the years from voracious reading and conversations with people in all walks of life.
Most importantly, he dreamed. He once said to his youngest daughter,
“I couldn’t live without my fantasies.” His imagination — and constant study of philosophy, theology, history and science — fueled his writing for all of his life.
• ONE •
The Beginning:
1909
Will told stories. More precisely, he loved to tell stories. He loved to be at the center of a captivated audience. Whatever tale he told might not always be the complete story or even the true story, but, if it entertained you or made you laugh, that was good enough for him.
He told saucy stories (to men only, after ushering them into the kitchen), kids’ stories (to entrance children who flocked to him as to a magician), funny stories (rejoicing in the roars of laughter that followed), and stories about oddities and curiosities (always to amuse). But, fed by a lifetime of omnivorous reading, he also turned out a steady stream of short stories, novelettes, novels and scripts in a writing career that began in his teens with epigrams in The Smart Set and ended more than fifty years later.
The tapping of his trusty old Remington ran as a counterpoint to our childhoods. Will worked far into the night as we slept, while he perched on a plain wooden chair tilted onto its back legs, squinting slightly against the curls of smoke floating gently up from the small, curved, brown Wellington pipe clenched firmly between his teeth.
How should we begin his story?
Will would tell us. “This makes a good story,” he would say, his eyes sparkling, puffing on his pipe enthusiastically.
It might be the one about how he happened to be in the Today’s Woman’s office just after the atomic bombs ended World War II. He entertained the editor, Eleanor Stierhem, with the tale of the much earlier visit to his home by the FBI. Agents asked him whether a story, published in Astounding Science-Fiction that described the atomic bomb in detail, was a leak. (It wasn’t, and Will explained why.)
Or, it might be how he wrote his first science fiction story, the often-5
6
M U R R A Y L E I N S T E R
told tale of looking out of his window to see the hands of the clock on New York’s Metropolitan Tower running backwards as it was reset, giving him the idea for “The Runaway Skyscraper,” first published in The Argosy in 1919.
But, “Hell’s bells,” as Will would say, this is his story after all, so we will start with one of his favorites, the one about how it all began, when he was twelve years old, at school in Norfolk, Virginia, where he was born.
“General Robert E. Lee is directly responsible for my being a writer and for whatever of my writing you’ve read,” he told the audience at the 1970 Disclave (Washington, D.C., Science Fiction Association convention).
On January 8, 1909, the powers that be of the Charlotte Street School had done the unthinkable for Norfolk, Virginia, in that time. They had forgotten it was Robert E. Lee’s birthday. At 10 o’clock, somebody noticed. The principal rushed around to alert the teachers and to ask them to read to their students about General Lee, and then to ask them to write compositions about him, after which everyone could go home and breathe a sigh of relief that the sky had not fallen.
Will, a member of Mrs. Clay’s sixth grade class, picked up his pencil and began to indulge his inclination for “nice long words,” he later reported.
&nbs
p; He finished his work and happily left for the day. A few days later, Superin-tendent of Schools R. A. Dobie came around and was so impressed with the composition that he sent it off to the Norfolk afternoon paper, the Ledger-Dispatch, as an example of the outstanding quality of the Norfolk schools under his supervision. They printed it on January 28, 1909.
Robert E. Lee
Of all men, if I were asked, I should say Robert E. Lee comes the nearest to being ideal of any man the world has ever known.
Born in 1807, his whole life of sixty-three years shows a character of marvelous beauty. Gentle, yet firm, strong, resourceful and above all, faithful to what he believed his duty, no man could make a better example to follow.
At eighteen years of age he entered West Point, the appointment being secured by General Andrew Jackson, who had taken a fancy to him. Many people marveled at the fact that during the whole of his four years at the academy he never got a demerit.
At West Point his marvelous military talents began to show so strongly that he graduated second in his class of forty-three.
His mother died shortly after this and he was left alone but far from friendless, for his dignified, yet genial manners made friends of all who came in contact with him.
Having served as lieutenant of engineers for part of the Mexican war, he was highly complimented and promoted for bravery at the storming of Chapultec [sic].
His talents were versatile in the extreme. At one moment he was a philosopher, at another a capable engineer, at another a brilliant soldier.
He could have been as great a man as Alexander in a military way, as great a historian as Pliny, as great an engineer as De Lesseps, but he was faithful to his duty, One • The Beginning: 1909
7
and when it called another way he answered its call and he remains today as great a man as ever lived, not in power but in mind, morals, and faithfulness to duty.
WILL F. JENKINS
Captain Manly, a Confederate veteran, of whom there were quite a few around in 1909, read the article and was so impressed that he sent Will $5, an enormous sum for the time.
Will had a use for the money. As later correspondence shows, he was a reader of Fly: The National Aeronautic Magazine, which billed itself as A Popular Aeronautic Magazine for Men, Women and Children. It was published in Philadelphia by the Aero Publishing Company. The detailed plans for a glider that were printed in the March 1909 issue must have caught his eye.
Murray Leinster Page 1