Seekers of Tomorrow

by Sam Moskowitz

  A three-part novel, The Strange People, about a group of foreigners held in bondage in a New England valley because of an artificially induced skin condition that resembled lepro-sy, beginning in the March, 1928, issue of weird tales, scored very high with the readers and kept the name of Murray Leinster before the readers in the fantasy field at a time when most of his efforts were concentrated elsewhere. In 1929, Leinster submitted a novelette entitled Darkness on Fifth Avenue to detective fiction weekly, along with sketches of three sequels. Howard Bloomfield, the editor, returned the story and recommended a try at argosy, noting that though it might qualify as a detective yarn on a techni-cality, its suggested sequels could make no similar claim. The editors of that magazine gave the cover of the November 30, 1929, issue to this story of a detective who, using nothing but common sense, hunts down and defeats a brilliant scientific criminal who has built a device which will absorb all light from any area in which he desires to function. This carefully wrought story deserved the bouquets it received from its readers. The sequel, The City of the Blind, went into print in the December 28, 1929 issue. This time the evil genius extends the radius of his machine so it will keep New York in perpetual impenetrable darkness until it pays ransom and delivers up or destroys the men who are fighting against him. A side effect of the process of drawing light from the atmos-phere is the generation of heat. This heat, over so large an area, rises, permitting cooler currents to sweep in beneath and resulting in tremendous storms that accompany the blackness.

  This second attempt is overcome, and the storm-creating effect becomes the focus of the third story in the series, The Storm That Had to Be Stopped in argosy for March 1, 1930. Winds of many times hurricane force devastate New York State and the arch-criminal demands power and money to stop them. U. S. tanks and science foil this plot, only to fall into a fourth and final situation in The Man Who Put Out the Sun, in argosy for June 14, 1930. In this one, the Heaviside layer is impregnated with an electrical field which renders the air no longer transparent to the sun's rays. If the problem is not quickly solved, the world will freeze to death. In the corniest action of the group of stories, the errant scientist is destroyed and all's right with the world.

  In most of Leinster's stories, the basic theme is that of man battling against nature. The Runaway Skyscraper finds men desperately striving to wrest subsistence from the wilderness. The Mad Planet and Red Dust play weak and ignorant men against savage and powerful insect life. Even though a man technically has created the problem in Dark-ness on Fifth Avenue, the emphasis is never on the villain (who does not appear in any of the four stories until the final pages of the last one), but always on the battle of men against the physical manifestations of the mad scientist's actions. In Darkness on Fifth Avenue the battle of men against darkness is almost allegorical and much of the story's appeal lies in the link between darkness and evil. The City of the Blind under-scores both man's helplessness and his ingenuity in combating and overcoming a condition of perpetual darkness; The Storm That Had to Be Stopped chronicles the effort against wind, rain, and darkness; The Man Who Put Out the Sun pictures man fighting against killing cold.

  A majority of Leinster's stories emphasize that it is the battle, not the ultimate victory, that is important. Man coura-geously, sometimes magnificently, fights a mindless, implaca-ble creature, phenomenon, or condition. Even if some man has caused the situation, he is rarely the fundamental antago-nist. This principle reappears in many of the more recent Lein-sters, specifically Sand Doom (astounding science fiction, December, 1955) where man is confronted by death from frightful heat and shifting sand; Exploration Team (astound-ing science fiction, March, 1956), in which a new plane-tary colony is almost destroyed, then ingeniously works to stay alive against the viciousness of alien beasts; Critical Difference (astounding science fiction, July, 1956) depicting the struggle to keep an entire planet from freezing over after its sun's heat output has fallen off; The Swamp Was Upside Down (astounding science fiction, September, 1956), in which men on a watery planet exert desperate efforts to prevent the sea from overwhelming them and to keep their land from sliding into the ocean.

  Another group of stories, known as the "Medic" series, including Ribbon in the Sky, The Mutant Weapon, and The Grandfathers' War are chronicles of medicine against other-worldly disease. Basically, Will Jenkins, writing as Murray Leinster, does not concede that there can be a struggle of man against himself. He recognizes man against nature and he will permit the appearance of man battling against man but disallows the Freudian concept of man against himself. He believes that psychosomatic ills can exist, but (as in Ribbon in the Sky in astounding science fiction for June, 1957, where people in isolated cities who believe they will become ill if they come in contact with inhabitants of other communities do become ill because they believe they will) he indicates that the cure of this condition is physical action, not psychiatric treat-ment.

  Perhaps an explanation of this attitude may be found in Leinster's religious faith. Born into an Episcopalian family, he married a Catholic girl with the understanding that their children would be raised as Catholics. To understand his four daughters better and answer their questions intelligently, Lein-ster began to study the Catholic religion. The more he learned the more certain he became that these were beliefs with which he could live in harmony, because they rep-resented his attitudes even as a youth. Like many converts, he is, if anything, a more enthusiastic and outspoken supporter of his faith than most born into it. Yet, no evidence of proselytizing appears in his works. That Catholicism has on occasion expressed reservations concern-ing psychiatry and that Murray Leinster's stories express a similar attitude doubtless results from the fact that Leinster thinks that way, not that he is pushing religious belief. His is a philosophical dislike of Freudian psychology. There is little probing for motivation. Things happen and man responds to events. In science fiction, where what happens is frequently more important than why it happens or to whom it happens, this tendency has easily been overlooked.

  Tanks, a well-constructed short story which appeared in the very first issue of astounding stories, January, 1930, presents a crucial incident in a war between East and West. The story is noteworthy for the importance it sets on tank warfare. It also indicates the value of helicopters in a battle area. But no reason is given for the war to which the reader is a spectator. While it is evident that wars are planned by men and men have motivations, for all practical purposes Leinster handles warfare as though it were an act of nature.

  The Fifth Dimension Catapult (astounding stories, Jan-uary, 1931) is a takeoff on the well-worn theme of another world existing in the fourth dimension. Leinster makes the interesting point that since the fourth dimension is time, only our past or future may be found there, so to find another world we must explore a fifth dimension. This story, closely allied to the scientific romances so popular in the old argosy, made good enough ready to justify a sequel, The Fifth Di-mension Tube (astounding stories, January, 1933), in which that other world is more thoroughly explored and the fight is joined against the jungles which are gradually destroy-ing the cities of the intelligent race of that dimension.

  One of the few stories in which Leinster takes any pains to bring his villain into focus is the four-part novel, Murder Madness, which ran serially in astounding stories begin-ning in May, 1930. A man known as The Master gains control over a large part of South America by introducing into the water supply a drug which regularly needs an an-tidote to prevent people from going berserk and killing one another. The populace becomes dependent upon the antidote for their sanity, just as diabetics depend on insulin to maintain a normal life. The Master is eventually introduced to the readers as a rather kindly old man whose ultimate purpose is to use his dictatorial powers for the good of mankind. Heroes are something else again, and Leinster will fre-quently have two or more in a single story. He is also inclined to attach a nationality to his heroes, so we find in the "Darkness" series the Irish detective H
ines and the accented German scientist Schaaf. In The Power Planet (amazing stories, June, 1931), a prophetic space story of a disk-shaped station in space (not an earth satellite), whose function is to convert the sun's heat into power which it then transmits to Earth, the heroes are a German (Ferdel) who commands the station and will not surrender it to a war rocket from Earth and a Russian Jew (Skeptsky) who sacrifices his life to blow up the threatening vessel.

  In Morale (astounding stories, December, 1931), a ship beaches itself on the New Jersey shore during wartime. It blows up and releases a tank many times larger than a house which wreaks havoc in the countryside with the purpose of diverting thousands of troops away from the front to combat it. The monster tank is eventually destroyed by its own supporting bombing planes through a trick played on its crew. The story is of interest primarily because it suggests LSTs for landing tanks, and air support for land armor.

  Far more prophetic was Invasion (astounding stories, March, 1933), in which the countries of the world are divided into two factions, the United Nations (no less!) and the Com-Pubs (communists). The Russians, who have been leading in space exploration, build a spaceship which is detoured so that it will appear to be a visitor from Mars. This first lures the air fleets of the United Nations to investigate, then traps them between two spheres of force so that the communists can conquer the world at will. Though not a particularly outstanding story, it was nevertheless a chilling projection of future political conditions. The Racketeer Ray (amazing stories, February, 1932) belongs with the Darkness series. An electromagnetic beam, so powerful that it can draw anything of metal and even siphon off electrical current, gets into the hands of gangsters and is used for criminal purposes. When the gangsters are eventually tracked down, one of them, learning that the machine's range is infinite, turns it on the moon overhead and disappears into space clinging to the apparatus rather than spend his life in prison. Bombing from a height of eight miles through the use of an infrared camera is a projection that Leinster made first in Morale and then again in Politics (amazing stories, June, 1932), in which political chicanery almost causes the sinking of the fleet and the surrender of the United States. Pocket battleships such as Germany used in World War II are introduced, and the aircraft carrier and air power are given some recognition, though it is a battleship with automat-ic range finders that eventually wins the day. Leinster's motif of a scientific invention used by gangsters for criminal purposes is repeated in The Sleep Gas, a long novelette in argosy for January 16, 1932. With most writers, a device such as this would bring on simple hack work, but the care with which this story is plotted and the realism with which it is told, combined with a very evident and intimate knowledge of New York City, make this story of the use of a sleep gas for criminal purposes outstanding. Leinster's inter-est in science has been sustained throughout his writing career and he has always had a home laboratory. As a result, even when he was improvising his science out of blue sky, it was usually convincing.

  A powerful foundation for convincing science fiction was derived from Leinster's very real interest in science. At his summer home, "Ardudwy," in Gloucester, Virginia, which he acquired in 1921 and has lived in ever since, he tinkered incessantly in his own laboratory. Strange things, with useful applications, came out of that laboratory. Before World War II he had set up a way of isolating radioactive isotopes utilizing equipment costing but $10. He developed a method of reproducing photographs between wet newspapers on a wooden bench. There were scores of other innovations, but most remarkable was Jenkins Systems, a method for making moving pictures without sets, in which live actors walk into sets made up of projected backgrounds. It is currently being used by CBS and is under license to Fairchild Instruments, New York, which maintains a demonstration studio which can be rented by anyone desiring to make use of the method. The Earth Shaker, an exciting and very readable three-part novel beginning in argosy for April 15, 1933, adopts another Leinster formula that originated as far back as A Thousand Degrees Below Zero in thrill book. A scientist discovers a means of manufacturing earthquakes through the use of ultrasonic waves and begins to shake down city after city in an attempt to establish himself as dictator, but he is finally tracked down.

  Back in the 1930's, argosy was a leader in pulp magazines and regular contributors were generally of superior writing ability, on a level halfway between the pulp and the slick magazines. Murray Leinster, under his own name Will Jenk-ins, was already appearing in Saturday evening post, col-liers, liberty, American, and other mass-readership magazines of the period. He was in every sense a cut above the markets in which his science fiction appeared. His short story, A Very Nice Family, won a $1,000 first prize in liberty at that time and was subsequently reprinted some twenty-five times. Hard-cover book and motion picture sales were also accumulating. Up to 1965, of over 1,300 stories, one-third would be sold to the big-time slicks and a dozen would become pictures.

  However, guaranteed assignments from science-fiction magazines were generally filled, even at the relatively low rates that market paid, because they took care of periods when Leinster had nothing else on the fire and because he had always remained an avid fan.

  When F. Orlin Tremaine assumed editorship of astound-ing stories in 1933, he inaugurated a policy of

  "thought variants," stories with daring new ideas, to make a bid for leadership in the field. An old friend of Leinster, he ap-proached him for stories under the Leinster name. Of all authors in the field, Leinster seemed a poor choice, for while strong on gadgets he appeared limited in plot variations. At that very moment he was putting the final touches on a short novel for argosy, War of the Purple Gas, in which New Asia was again conquering the United States, this time with a device that disintegrated metals. It seemed unlikely that new ideas could be ground from such grain.

  His first contribution to Tremaine, Beyond the Sphinx's Cave, in the November, 1933, astounding stories, tells of the discovery of the mythological creatures of Greece in caves beneath that country. It suggests that radioactive muta-tion of human beings is one of the answers to their existence; the Gorgon's head becomes an artistically wrought projector of a paralysis ray.

  This was merely a test run. The story that followed, Sideways in Time (astounding stories, June, 1934), intro-duces an idea on time travel which had never previously been used. It suggests that the past, future, and present travel not in a straight line, but like a curving river, a concept similar to J. W. Dunne's theories. Not only are events of the actual past, present, and future blended, but also time tracks that never actually happened. As the result of a fault in time, segments of all of these elements superimpose simultaneous-ly, creating a world where Roman Legions still march, the South has won the Civil War, Chinese have settled America, prehistoric monsters roam mindlessly, and Indians raid towns, all in one kaleidoscopic melange. The unfortunate thing was that Leinster took only 20,000 words instead of 100,000 to expound his hypothesis. The result was an outline more than a story, from which other authors reaped the benefits. Sideways in Time proved no one-shot success. Altering his old formula of letting a remarkable invention fall into the hands of a criminal so as to let the emphasis rest on extrapo-lation rather than on detection, Leinster's The Mole Pirate in the November, 1934, astounding stories easily ranks among the half-dozen best science-fiction stories he has produced. The seldom-used concept of a machine whose atomic struc-ture can be altered so that it can serve as an underground ship, passing wraithlike through all solid substances, offered fascinating and highly dramatic sequences in an immensely satisfying conjecture. Proxima Centauri, which ran only a few months later, was as remarkable an effort. Readers of the March, 1935, astounding stories were treated to one of the earliest stories of an interstellar spaceship that is a world in itself, as well as one presenting a civilization of intelligent carnivorous plants, logically thought out and with intimations of their psychology and motivations.

  Leinster was not letting his astounding efforts distract him, fro
m argosy. The Rollers in the December 29, 1934, issue of that magazine was a dramatic story of a man who creates supertornadoes by temporarily nullifying gravity in limited regions. The Morrison Monument in the August 10, 1935, issue was intended to be the time travel story to end all time travel stories, pointing out that time machines might remain permanently fixed, indestructibly present in the same spot for the entire duration of their journey into time, to be viewed by generation after generation of humans. The Extra-Intelligence in the November 30, 1935, issue was one of Leinster's weaker efforts, however, dealing with the revival of the dead and the efforts of a disembodied superintendence to take over at the time the feat is accomplished. Much more successful was The Fourth Dimensional Dem-onstrator, one of the funniest stories ever to appear in science fiction. A machine is built which, by moving back in time, will bring into being a replica of an object placed upon it. First used for duplicating valuables, it accidentally copies fiancees and police officers. This frolic is an example of better science-fiction humor.

  Leinster's last science-fiction effort in the thirties was a novel, The Incredible Invasion, a tale more of the variety that he had popularized in argosy, telling of invaders from another dimension who paralyze the entire city of Newark, New Jersey, and loot it until they are stopped. Beginning in astounding stories for August, 1936, and running for five installments, it belongs in the category of "good fun." The slant in science fiction began to change. Technical knowledge was downgraded. An entirely new approach was taken, with the stress more heavily on the sociological and psychological impact of future changes than on the scientific advances themselves. Many of the old-time favorites were unable to adjust and were replaced by bright new stars, such as Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, A. E. van Vogt, Lester del Rey, Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, and L. Ron Hubbard. Leinster, identified with an outdated era, did not seem to belong.