Murray Leinster
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lemons were available for those who wanted them — and sometimes oysters to be opened one by one with a special knife and experienced hands. In those days you could wade out into the warm shallows of the York River off the narrow Clay Bank beach and, feeling in the soft mud with your toes, gather as many oysters as you could find, piling them into buckets to be washed and cleaned before eating. (No more, sadly, as pollution has spoiled this simple pleasure.)
Will adored oysters. Often, with his small daughter Jo-an by his side, he would drive to the oysterman at his York River base and buy shucked oysters by the gallon tin. He would happily eat them raw — proclaiming “it was a brave man who first ate an oyster”— but Mary dipped them in egg and cornmeal and fried them in butter or turned them into chowders and stews.
Always inventing, Will contributed a recipe for frozen oysters to Anne McCaffrey’s book Cooking Out of This World (Ballantine Books, 1973).
I’d had a bushel or so of oysters hauled up on the beach for a picnic. There was an unusually cold night. I found some of the oysters frozen and partly opened. I tasted them. Oysters taste best when they are cold. Frozen oysters are as cold as you get. Some people don’t like frozen oysters because they are slimy.
Frozen oysters have the texture of finely crushed ice.
This may sound absurd, but honestly that picnic was a party! They can be frozen in the freezing compartment of your ice box, and frozen oysters are really something!
During the long hot summers, Will worked mostly on the sun porch on the river side of the house, typing on his specially built, slanted wooden desk, his favorite Wellington pipe always in his mouth. Sheltered by a huge weeping cherry tree and with the wall of windows opened to any breeze from the wide York River, it was the coolest you could get before air conditioning. Even then, Mary scolded him for wearing a long sleeved shirt and tie in the summer’s heat. He found old habits hard to change.
It was another ten years before Will’s dream of returning almost full time to Clay Bank was fulfilled.
• EIGHT •
The 1950s
By 1950, the science fiction market was beginning to recover from the paper shortages and the other problems of the 1940s. It is true that Street and Smith had folded all its pulp magazines in 1949, but the number of active magazines had grown from a low of eight in 1946 to twenty by 1950. Fred Pohl says in his book The Way the Future Was (Ballantine Books, 1978) that there were 36 in the mid-fifties.
An important newcomer was Galaxy Science Fiction, launched in 1950
with Horace L. Gold as editor. Before the war, Gold had been an assistant editor at Standard Magazines, reading for their three science fiction magazines Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder and Captain Future. A former colleague, Vera Cerutti, now in the New York office of an Italian publishing company, World Editions, approached him in 1949 looking for new magazine ideas. Gold suggested a new, more serious science fiction monthly, similar to the new Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
His idea was to publish a quality product that would compete with the slicks in literary merit yet appeal to the present readers of science fiction. He proposed to attract good writers by offering three cents a word instead of the usual one cent. He planned to publish stories that were more focused on soci-ology, psychology and satire than on technology and pulp adventures.
The first issue appeared in October 1950, and, in March 1951, Gold published “The Other Now,” the first of a series of Murray Leinster stories in this more cerebral mood. Always enjoying the challenge of a new kind of story, Will produced a gentle tale of a husband and wife who find themselves in opposing worlds after a fatal car accident — in one, the husband has died and the wife is left bereft; in the other, it is the husband who grieves at his loss.
A door between the worlds opens, and they find a way to be together again.
Gold included it in his Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction 1952, along with
“If You Was a Moklin,” published in September 1951. One of Will’s favorites, 117
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this tale of a planet of creatures who so admired humans that they wanted to become just like them — and did — appeared in three later collections of his stories: Monsters and Such (Avon, 1959), The Best of Murray Leinster (Corgi, 1976), and First Contacts, The Essential Murray Leinster (NEFA, 1998).
Will again extended his range. Barry N. Malzberg, in “The Dean of Glou cester, Virginia” (Prologue, A Logic Named Joe, Baen Books, 2005), singles out “The Other Now” and “If You Was a Moklin” as stories that managed in “Gold’s sardonic early-fifties Galaxy” to “embrace Gold’s grim world-view in a no less sprightly manner than ‘First Contact’ had embodied Campbell’s more positive mien, and there is little doubt that a Jenkins born fifty or seventy years later could have functioned very well on the contemporary edge of contemporary science fiction.”
In October 1951, a disagreement with World Editions led to the sale of the magazine to its printer, Robert M. Guinn. The new company was named Galaxy Publishing Company.
“Sam, This Is You,” is another Galaxy story published in May 1955. It was also a favorite of Will’s and appeared in the two most recent of the collections above as well as in Twists in Time (Avon, 1960). It is a whimsical piece about a man who, to his amazement, is contacted by his future self to warn him of events to come.
Two more Leinster stories appeared in the early sixties, “Doctor to the Stars” in 1961 and “Med Ship Man” in 1963.
Galaxy was successful, and Gold won a Hugo for best magazine in 1953, the first year it was awarded. However, since his service in the war, he had suffered from agoraphobia, and, in an effort to overcome it, began making therapeutic excursions in the city at night. He was in a taxi accident and never fully recovered from his injuries. He began to depend more and more on his wife and his friendship with Frederik Pohl and others for help with his duties.
In 1960, it became too much for him, and Pohl was hired as editor, a position he kept for the next ten years.
Pohl was one of the new breed of writers and editors who had come out of fandom. He was born in 1919, the year “The Runaway Skyscraper” was first published. By the time he was 19, he was editing two of Popular Publications’
science fiction magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super-Science Stories, working under Rogers Terrill (who was Will’s agent in the 1950s). He recalls that he was paid $10 a week.
Pohl had been a member of one of the local science fiction leagues for young fans that were promoted by Hugo Gernsback and later was one of the organizers of the legendary Futurians. Early members of the Futurians included Cyril Kornbluth, Dirk Wylie, Isaac Asimov and Donald A. Wollheim.
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It has been estimated that at one point in the 1940s former Futurians edited approximately half of the science fiction and fantasy magazines in the U.S.
In addition to editing, Fred Pohl was a prolific writer and successful agent.
Donald A. Wollheim was already a published author when he joined the Futurians. He had sold his first story, “The Man from Ariel,” to Wonder Stories when he was nineteen. It was published in the January 1934 issue. He was one of the organizers of the first U.S. science fiction convention, which was held in Philadelphia in 1936, and he continued to be an active fan, publishing many fanzines.
Wollheim was editor for Ace Books from 1943 to 1946 and for Avon from 1946 to 1952, when he went back to Ace.
At Avon, he edited the Avon Fantasy Reader, a magazine that was sometimes referred to as a series of anthologies. In it, he republished science fiction and fantasy stories by well-known authors. The Murray Leinster novella
“Power Planet” was printed in the February 1947 issue, followed by “The Morrison Monument” in April 1951. There were 18 issues published in all.
During his second tour at Ace, Wollheim instituted the Ace Doubl
e, which became a very popular format. Two novels were printed, back-to-back, one upside down to the other, with two covers. Several Leinster stories came out in doubles beginning in 1954 with The Brain Stealers. They included Gateway to Elsewhere, The Duplicators, Space Captain, The Other Side of Here and City on the Moon. Pirates of Zan, backed with The Mutant Weapon, was published in 1959.
Two more fans, Martin Greenberg and David A. Kyle, started Gnome Press in 1948. Kyle was a Futurian. Gnome printed The Forgotten Planet in 1954, and it was reprinted by Ace three times. Colonial Survey, also known as The Planet Explorer when published by Avon the same year, was a collection that came out in 1957. Stories included “Combat Team” (also known as
“Exploration Team”), “Sand Doom,” “Solar Constant” (also known as “Critical Difference”), and “The Swamp Was Upside Down.”
Gnome also printed many significant science fiction stories, including Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and several Heinlein stories, but, unfortunately, it was undercapitalized and went under in 1962.
Shasta, a small press started in 1947 by a group of Chicago area fans, published the Murray Leinster collection Sidewise in Time in 1950. It was titled after its lead story, which was first printed in Astounding Stories in June 1934 . The contents also included “Proxima Certauri,” “The Fourth-dimensional Demonstrator,” “A Logic Named Joe,” “De Profundis,” and “The Power.” In 1953, Shasta printed two new juvenile science fiction books by Will 120
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featuring a young hero, Joe Kenmore. They were Space Platform and Space Tug. Another in the Joe Kenmore series, City on the Moon, came out in 1957
and was published by Avalon. These books were highly praised by prominent educators, including Max L. Hertzberg, past president of the National Council of Teachers of English, who said of Space Tug, “There is current-events interest in the book since many news and magazine articles have shown that the creation of a man-made satellite is the next step in man’s conquest of Space.
Leinster is at his best here.”
In Space Platform, Will includes an acknowledgment of Willy Ley saying, “There is Willy Ley whom I would like to exempt from responsibility for any statement in the book, while I acknowledge the value of personal talks with him and the pleasure anyone who has ever read his books will recognize.”
Ley was a leading rocket scientist and advocate for space travel who left Nazi Germany in 1935. In March 1937, he appeared in Astounding Stories with an article, “The Dawn of the Conquest of Space.” He became a frequent contributor to Astounding and, beginning in 1952, had a regular science column in Galaxy titled “For Your Information.” In it, he would reply to readers’
questions. He and Will became great friends. Will enjoyed attributing the invention of the Screwdriver cocktail to Ley, playfully and poorly mimicking Ley’s Berlin accent while he asserted that the drink came out of an evening when Ley was thinking, “Vot can be done with wodka.” The crater Ley on the far side of the moon is named for Willy Ley. Sadly, he died a month before the moon landing in 1969.
“Night Drive,” a Will F. Jenkins story published in March 1950 by Today’s Woman, became a standard in high school creative writing classes. It was inspired by a winding, isolated part of the road between Gloucester and Richmond, Virginia, along which Will had driven frequently when the three older girls were taking ballet lessons in the 1930s. The story is about a woman driving at night who agrees to take another woman along with her, whom she’s told needs a lift. Soon she realizes that the woman is in reality a man. “Night Drive” has been reprinted regularly and has become a classic of suspense.
Will was particularly delighted when he wrote to Jo-an on April 15, 1970, that it was later included in a collection along with several of his favorite writers:
I think I told you about being in a schoolbook with O. Henry, MacKinlay Cantor, Sherwood Anderson, Damon Runyon, Pearl Buck, Saki and Saroyan.
There are two stories in the mystery category. One is “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs and the other is “Night Drive” by Will F. Jenkins. I’m flattered as hell.
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It was memorable to at least one student. In 2010, an inquiry came into Loganberry Books’ online question-and-answer page, “Stump the Bookseller.” This was a short story given us as an intermediate or high school reading assignment. We may have been given mimeographed handouts so I don’t know the source. This story was to demonstrate irony. The plot involves two strangers traveling from one city to another by automobile.... They arrive at their destina-tion without violence, but I can’t remember the ironic ending.... I’d appreciate any help in identifying the title or author of the story and any clue where to find it.
The Bookseller replies with the correct identification and notes that it was anthologized in In the Grip of Terror and Twisted! both edited by Groff Conklin, and that it may have been included in some schoolbook texts.
One of Will’s most frequently reprinted stories is “Keyhole,” published in Thrilling Wonder Stories in December 1951. In an article called “Reverie” in Science Fiction Review, April 27, 1964, Will said: I had a ten-year-old daughter when I wrote that story. She read it and zestfully told me a story about a man who wanted to study the reactions of a chim-panzee. He led the chimp into a room full of things a chimp should find interesting. He went out and closed the door, and then put his eye to the keyhole to see what the chimp was doing. He found himself looking into an interested brown eye only inches from his own. The chimp was looking through the keyhole, too, to see what the man was about. I put my daughter’s tale as a pre-face and a coda to my own yarn and called it “Keyhole.” Will continued his relationship with Argosy with a story, “The Devil’s Henchmen,” that appeared in the May 1952 issue. It was reprinted in The Supernatural Reader, edited by Groff and Lucy Conklin (Lippincott, 1953).
Science fiction novelist Edward Morris found the story in a later reprint that belonged to his mother: Isaac Asimov’s World of Fantasy #2, Witches, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles Waugh (NAL, 1984). It was his introduction to Will’s work.
Morris writes:
I was floored and delighted by his conceptions of mysticism and all the ways that fold mysticism and hillbilly Christianity bump up against each other, and occasionally work together. Like Stephen Vincent Benet and Manly Wade Wellman, Will’s work taught me that it’s okay to talk about the simple things, the fine pride you can take in your life even if you’re shirt-tail poor ... “if your heart’s right.”
From that story, it was but a short hop to the elegantly simple “A Logic Named Joe”; “Sidewise in Time” (without which story another Joe, Mr. Lans-dale, would not have been inspired to write his great Leinster homage “The Drive-In”) and the voluminous trails that Will blazed into the field of good, honest, workmanlike SF.
Being half a Southerner, I have a special place in my heart for all Southern 122
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writers, Leinster and Wellman the most of all. Like Dante, both men spoke in la vulgare eloquentia, the language of real people. I look up to Will because he was a pioneer in the field, and taught me to be absolutely uncompromising about story value.
Will enjoyed playing with abstract ideas and unexpected consequences.
He discussed the most complicated philosophies with his daughters from an early age. “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” was one of them. It is a riddle that has been discussed endlessly over the years and attributed, as Will did, to Bishop George Berkeley. The bishop was a 17th century philosopher whose dictum was “Esse est percipi”—
“To be is to be perceived.” Bishop Berkeley was a familiar name in Will’s home, always good for a lively discussion.
Will’s interest could possibly be traced to the 1910 book Physics by Charles Riborg Mann and George Ransom Twiss. A quiz at the end of each chapter posed the
question: “When a tree falls in a lonely forest, and no animal is nearby to hear it, does it make a sound? Why?”
“The Little Terror” was inspired by Bishop Berkeley, and Will discussed Berkeley’s theories in the story which was published in The Saturday Evening Post, August 22, 1953. He tells about a little girl who was told (rather absent-mindedly) by her father that she could make people disappear. So she did, to everyone’s great alarm. Her father then quickly told the little girl that she couldn’t make people disappear, which she then believed, so the people she’d made disappear came back. “The Little Terror” was reprinted in Saturday Evening Post Stories, 1953 (Random House, 1954), and in The Post Reader of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Doubleday, 1964), as well as Tomorrow’s Children (Futura Publications, 1976) where editor Isaac Asimov calls Will, “The giant Sequoia of the science fiction world, the hardy perennial to whom mere decades mean nothing.”
Who’s Who in America included Will in its 1952 edition, an event that delighted him as a pleasing tribute. He would be listed for the next twenty years.
I think I’ve told you I’ve been thrown out of Who’s Who. They listed me in 1952 and threw me out in 1972. I very foolishly listed only books — annually —
that I was reasonably pleased with, and I think I looked even less important, if possible, than I am in the literary world and was thrown out for discontinued significance.
Letter to Jo-an, August 9, 1972
His real recognition from his peers came in 1956 when he was awarded a Hugo, for “Exploration Team” winning as Best Novelette. The Hugo, named for Hugo Gernsback, is awarded annually at the Worldcon (World Science Eight • The 1950s
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Fiction Convention). The idea of this award was conceived at the 1953 convention, but it was made annual only in 1955. Will’s was the second awarded for best novelette.
Superficially, the story is about an illegal colonist on a dangerous planet using trained bears to rescue survivors of a failed legal colony. Actually it is about two men, each with a strong and conflicting value system, who find a way to resolve their differences in a way that satisfies them both without requiring them to abandon their personal standards. It is one of Will’s better efforts of combining a story with a moral and an exciting adventure. Astounding Science-Fiction published “Exploration Team” in the March 1956 issue. It has since been reprinted more than 30 times in several languages.