Murray Leinster

by Billiee J. Stallings; Jo-an J. Evans

  I may have turned out as many as six honest-to-god good yarns in my life.

  Some people may cut it down to four, but I hope it is six....

  Most writers of science-fiction don’t write anything else. I do. I had pretty well established markets for other types of fiction before I did “The Runaway Skyscraper” for Argosy, around 1918–19. I had always been a fan, but I was afraid I couldn’t do it myself. I got away with that, and have been writing science-fiction every since. I am an incurable gadgeteer, and I like enormously to set up a theory and then track down the consequences. The result is the type of story that fans have read under the Murray Leinster signature.

  That trick of theorizing and then trying to see what the theory implies is responsible for nearly all my science-fiction. I think that “Sidewise in Time” was the first of the parallel-time-track-yarns to see print. I am inclined to take credit for another genre of “Proxima Centauri,” which I think was the progenitor. I think that in “The Morrison Monument” I wrote the time-travel story which should have ended all time-travel stories, but didn’t, and I think but am not sure — that in “Symbiosis” in Collier’s, (a Will Jenkins yarn) that I did the first biological warfare yarn. But such matters are only curiosities.

  Science-fiction, however, is more than a curiosity. I believe that it contributes definitely, if indirectly, to the progress of science and the pattern of the future.

  There is a good deal of evidence that it presaged, if it did not traceably produce, the devices and happenings of the present. In my own yarns, for instance I find that in “Terror Above” in Collier’s, was explained the necessity for giant bombing planes and the theoretical advantages of blockbusters, years before either were produced. In a yarn called “Morale,” the tank-plane combination, which made the German Blitz in World War II, appeared in detail. In the same yarn, the LST was plainly prefigured. In “Preview of Tomorrow,” in Coronet, I actually happened to describe with some particularity a supersonic rocket-plane and the ending of the war with an atomic explosion in Japan.

  I could extend that list from my own work. Taking in other writers’ stories, I could carry it on indefinitely. As far as I know, there is only one modern device of great importance which was not old stuff to science-fiction readers when it was first described as working. The exception was the electron microscope, and I think it’s an exception solely because it doesn’t lend itself to fictional use. And there is my point for this article.

  Right now, the prophecies in which we science-fiction addicts take such pride are made only by people who can both dream up gadgets and write readable 110

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  fiction. They could write pseudo-factual articles which would be fascinating, but there is nowhere where such article would be welcomed.

  That’s where I think the fans and fan magazines could come up with a contribution to the future. Why shouldn’t there be pseudo-technical as well as fictional data on the future? Kiplings’ accompanying magazine departments and advertisements to “With the Night Mail” are a perfect example of what I have in mind.

  Commercial magazines won’t touch the stuff. There’s no regular source for it but fan magazines could develop it. Read Kipling’s stuff and you’ll see what can be done. A fan magazine could duplicate — save for gossip columns, for example —

  an issue of Spaceways for 1987, and might feature besides its advertisements, an article like “So You’re Going to Mars” which could be a chatty, non-technical account of space-ship routine as a passenger sees it, with advice on etiquette, space-sickness, the spaceport regulations and so on. There should be an article on Mercutian artifacts from the twilight zone, a blistering discussion of IPC rul-ings on salvage, perhaps some vox-pop letters, and that sort of thing. The advertisements should be good sport, too. Just how would the rest resorts in the Halmas —“The only hills on Mars!”— push their wares? And how would the space suit makers — for private space-yachts mostly — describe their competitive features? What would they be advertising that simply doesn’t make sense to us now? Your grandfather, if he’d seen only fifty years ago the regulation advertisements of a television set, neatly equipped with what he’d think was a framed picture, simply couldn’t make head or tail of the advertisement. Radio would not mean a thing. He wouldn’t believe in a dishwasher ad and a “deep-freeze” would be quite cryptic.

  A single issue like that ought to be fun. But what might be called a pre-print policy needn’t go that far. A pre-print of a travel article, “The Cities of Titan” from Holiday of July 2042 would be all right as a feature in itself. The National Astrographic Magazine should have some swell stuff— nonfiction — in almost any edition from 2021 on. And if space could be found for book reviews, one would like to get a look at “Modern Tube-Room Practice” even in a review, with comments (the book will be published by Spaceways Publishers, Venus City, 2038.

  Cr 2.50 post-paid to Earth) on the newest dodges in emergency insulation for the high voltages they will be using and what to do when your fuel polymerizes

  ... and even the digest magazines ought to yield some good stuff, too. I heroically refrain from suggesting that pre-prints from a digest magazine would be predi-gested. But most readers would like to see at least extracts from “Space Drives and the Limit of Speed,” the classic by Titlow. And by all means, that misprint in the third chapter, which instantly gave Faussin the germ of the first working faster-than-light drive, should be included.

  Do you see? Kipling had a good trick in “With the Night Mail,” and it’s time it was used again. Fan magazines could do it. And it wouldn’t necessarily be only a stunt. John Campbell, Bob Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and some others may not go into details, but they’ll assure you as I do, that not all dream gadgets of science-fiction have stayed dreams.

  For the hell of it and as a completely possible contribution to the pattern of the future, won’t somebody try this trick?

  Please!

  Will F. Jenkins

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  Throughout the 1940s, Will and his family remained in New York, except for summer visits to Gloucester beginning after the war. Although the Beechhurst apartment was kept for more than 25 years, Will’s heart remained firmly in Virginia. The tales he spun for his smallest daughter, Jo-an — who barely remembered living anywhere other than New York — were so magical that, throughout her childhood, she imagined that her real home was not this small apartment in suburban New York, but her father’s dream house in the idyllic south. She painstakingly scrawled “Clay Bank, Gloucester, Virginia,” in all of her schoolbooks.

  When the war ended in 1945, Mary was not eager to give up her busy New York life to return to the seclusion of rural Virginia, except for short visits. With the girls settled — Mary by then working in Boston, Betty commuting to college on Long Island, Billee away at college in Virginia, Jo-an in the local school — it was easiest to remain where they were. Another factor was that the Clay Bank house and grounds, first rented during the war to careless service people and then left vacant, needed extensive cleaning and repairing before a permanent return. So they stayed on.

  For Mary, New York was a return to her home — near two of her sisters, Rose and Julia, just over the George Washington Bridge in New Jersey, and to her brother, John, a real estate broker, even closer in Brooklyn. Mary loved the freedom of being in the city, close to new friends, shops and department stores, all easily reachable by foot or bus (she didn’t drive). She volunteered at Jo-an’s school, helped at their fairs, and made aprons and other items for church sales, activities previously not available to her with home-schooled children and no nearby church in rural Virginia. An auction house in Flushing was a treasured discovery, and the apartment was furnished with her finds, including a huge breakfront, a player baby grand piano (on which Jo-an took lessons), and an old trunk, bought for just a dollar, which, when unlocked, was filled with beautiful dresses from the early
part of the 20th century.

  Although this was a big change from Clay Bank, where there was little outside the house to divert her attention from Will, he gave her his complete support and enjoyed admiring her auction acquisitions.

  However, when Mary proposed buying a house in Beechhurst, a sensible financial move, Will was deeply upset at the idea that they might commit themselves to live for any length of time anywhere other than his beloved Virginia and refused to even consider the idea.

  Close, lifelong friends were made in Beechhurst, most especially the Fexas family. Achilles “Chick” Fexas had emigrated from Greece as a very young boy. Now an optometrist, he wore a bushy black moustache, a visible display of his Greek heritage. His laborious stutter did not obscure his keen

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  Betty, Mary, and Will in the Beechhurst Apartment with Jo-an playing on the floor.

  mind, and Will shared his deep interest in theology and philosophy with Chick, and involved him as a partner in some of his tinkering projects. One of Will’s ideas was for improving contact lenses. There was a problem then with the eye drying out under the lens. Will thought, if tiny holes were bored in the lens, the tears could circulate and the problem would be solved. He and Chick spent hours in the tiny apartment breakfast room calling in members of the family from time to time, so they could insert lenses in their eyes and test the theory.

  Chick’s petite wife, Antonia “Toni,” was also an asset to conversations.

  Her father had been editor of a Greek language newspaper, and she had grown up in intellectual company. The Fexas family had a Chris Craft powerboat they kept in Northport, Long Island, and the Jenkins family spent many happy days with them touring the Long Island Sound. Will commented that he never had a boat on the York River in Virginia, because he would have to have one big enough to have his typewriter aboard, and then he would have Seven • The New York Years: The 1940s

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  spent his time writing, not enjoying the water. Tom Fexas, Chick and Toni’s son who was Jo-an’s age, carried his boating heritage to a brilliant international career as a naval architect. Younger daughter Penny married a doctor, Luis Casas, and as Penelope Casas, became a well-known writer of Spanish cook-books.

  There were difficult times during these New York years when first Mary, Will and Mary’s eldest daughter, and later their third daughter, Billee, made their inevitable bids for independence. In 1943, Mary junior graduated from Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts, and Will was devastated when she decided to take a job in Boston instead of coming home to live. Two years later, Mary brought a suitor home, Vahan “Danny” Daniels, and, although he did not pass inspection with her father, married him and settled in Boston permanently. She was 23 years old. And then, in June 1946, just after her 18th birthday and third year in college, Billee eloped with her soldier boyfriend, Peyton “Pete” Stallings, when he came home from Germany.

  Will, in particular, found these events deeply painful. The breakup of his own family in his early teens and the shifts and changes that followed had left deep scars. He had invested so much emotion in his daughters that what in most families is an expected and normal transition was to him a deep and searing loss. In addition, with his chosen lifestyle already threatened by what, in spite of 15 years in New York, he considered a temporary relocation, he saw the destruction of his close sheltered family group.

  John Clute, in discussing Will’s science fiction, saw this in Will’s work where he depicted “a prewar America somewhat idealized after the fact of the slick journals for which Leinster also wrote copiously. At the heart of his work, as befits the creator of so stable a universe, lies a clear and probably personal horror of metamorphosis, of change” ( Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day, Everett Franklin Bleiler, ed., New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982.) Many years later, after his granddaughter Pam Stallings’ 1968 wedding to Clifford Hayes, Will showed Jo-an a photograph of Pam’s father Pete at the door of the church, waiting to escort the bride down the aisle. “This is the saddest picture I’ve ever seen,” he said, looking at it mournfully and shak-ing his head in regret. Asked to explain, he answered: “This is a picture of a father losing his daughter.”

  Will and Mary later bitterly condemned sending one’s children away from home to college, saying it caused you to lose them.

  One daughter did stay at home. After graduating from Adelphi College on Long Island in 1947, Betty took a job in New York City and lived with her parents in Beechhurst. She became a close companion to her mother, 114

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  driving her to the shopping strips now springing up on Long Island and taking her little sister Jo-an to ballet and little-theater lessons at the Adelphi College Children’s Theater.

  For Will, having a young child growing up in the house again was a real pleasure. A young man, Phil Merwin, who had been a boyhood fan in Beechhurst, shared this memory in a letter of sympathy after Will’s death. “[I remember] ... your father was lying on his back in the living room floor holding Jo-anne [ sic] up in the air on his legs.” He was the one to walk her to and from school. She accompanied him to editors’ meetings and particularly loved going to the Street and Smith and Fawcett offices, because she would come home with a fist full of comic books.

  There were side excursions to the Natural History Museum on the West Side of New York, and, before she went to sleep, he spun stories for her about his southern childhood and the animals he had had. Soon, she felt she knew Bruno, a black lab type who had come down to Clay Bank after his owner, Mary’s father, died in 1931, and the mischievous fox terrier who had been Will’s companion when he was a young man. When he finished the night’s tale, she fell asleep to the comforting sound of his typewriter tapping away in a room nearby.

  Much later he told his granddaughter Gail Stallings, “I love young children, but I’m not very good with teenagers.”

  The special relationship between the young Jo-an and her father continued. Like Will, she loved books. He introduced her to the Wizard of Oz series and his favorite science fiction, and she read each of his stories as the pages came out of the typewriter. At twelve, she wrote a fan letter to Wilmar H. Shiras about her story “In Hiding,” saying that her three stories about “the wonder children” were the most interesting she had ever read “except for two of Dad’s.” A thoughtful reply came back, suggesting a book about intelligent children —“Children Above 180 IQ” by Hollingsworth — which she thought she and her father might enjoy, adding: “My older children like science fiction too, and we have read and enjoyed your father’s stories.” Will became more involved in his Catholic religion as Jo-an grew up in it, and he made his First Communion and confirmation, formally joining the Catholic Church, at the nearby St. Luke’s Church in Whitestone at the same time she did. He became very interested in St. Thomas Aquinas and G. K.

  Chesterton’s writings, and his faith deepened as Jo-an went on to a Catholic high school, Our Lady of Mercy Academy, in Syosset, Long Island, and then to the College of Notre Dame in Baltimore, Maryland.

  After the end of World War II, Will was anxious to reclaim at least some of his life in Virginia, despite the ties that held the family to New York, and Seven • The New York Years: The 1940s

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  in the late 1940s the family began an annual summer visit during Jo-an’s long school holidays. As always, Will wove a magical story for Jo-an around the long, eight-hour drive to Gloucester, making the final, fifteen minute, eight-mile drive from Gloucester Court House to Clay Bank a time of mounting excitement — each country store with its rusty old gasoline pump, sleepy dogs and straw-hatted attendant, each white painted clapboard house with its open porch, another marker on the way to Ardudwy, Will’s own personal paradise.

  While Ardudwy, the Clay Bank house, was being cleaned and reopened, the family stayed at the Botetourt Hotel in
Gloucester Court House, now owned and run by sisters Hylda and Augusta “Gussie” Lawson, friends since their marriage. Located in the center of the village, the hotel, as Jo-an remembers it, was a rambling, dark green and white painted building with three stories, including the basement that housed the dining room. The big open porches were filled with rocking chairs and swings where all would gather to rock and chat on hot summer nights.

  There were opportunities to reconnect with old friends. One was Orlin Tremaine, editor of Astoundin g before John Campbell and now in Virginia editing the Southerner Magazine. Tremaine had written a book Short Story Writing (Rodale Press, PA, 1949) and asked Will for permission to use one of his stories to be analyzed in a demonstration of how to check for weak spots while writing. He used “Biography” which had appeared in The Country Gentleman in October 1942. Tremaine follows the progression of the plot step by step and ends with the warning, “Only one thing remains unchanged by understanding — the hours must still be spent alone with your typewriter, dictionary and aching back!”

  During these summers in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Clay Bank became once again the center for family and friends that Will so loved. In the days before television in the rural south, evenings were for visiting. Once it grew dark, car after car would drive up the narrow dirt road, raising clouds of dust, with headlights flashing as they turned into the opening between the tall hedges surrounding the big yard. Sometimes four or five cars would arrive, filled with friends who would laugh and talk far into the night, while Will served the drinks. To the child Jo-an, raised in the confines of the Beechhurst apartment, every night was an adventure. Who would come? Jo-an’s memories of those days are golden, a chance to see and enjoy the promised land her father had described to her so often.

  Magical, too, the daytime parties when piles of steamed crabs would be piled on trestle tables covered with old newspapers on the front lawn under the tall trees swaying in the breeze from the York River. (On river properties the front is the side facing the water.) Bowls of melted butter and cut up 116