Here’s where I—hopefully—get caught up. Murray Leinster’s birthday was a few days ago. Usually, if I fall behind a day or two, I just wait until the next major anniversary. However, this year marks the one-hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of Murray Leinster’s birth. The man was a titan back in the early days of the pulps and I simply could not let this slide.

In the late 1800s, the British Empire had men like H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells to write tales of adventure in a science fictional setting. North Americans had little to boast of during that period. However, in 1912, All-Story Magazine published ‘Under the Moons of Mars’ by Edgar Rice Burroughs. His uniquely American brand of Adventure SF set the pulps ablaze. Imitators and fellow travelers soon followed, their careers brought into existence by the market demand that ERB created.

America, a nation of pragmatic pioneers and inventors, loved the idea of adventure stories told within a scientific framework. Burroughs reigned supreme for several years, but soon there were credible challengers. The first week of 1918 saw the publication of A. Merritt's 'The People of the Pit' in All-Story. Two weeks later, 'Atmosphere' appeared in Argosy. The author was Murray Leinster and he was twenty-one years old.

William Fitzgerald Jenkins was born in modest circumstances in Norfolk, Virginia. From the beginning of his literary career, he nearly always went by 'Murray Leinster', a shout-out to his Irish heritage. 'Atmosphere' got his foot in the door, but 'The Runaway Skyscraper' is what put him on the map. I'll let Murray recount how that went:

"At that time, I was writing some very domestic family-life stories for one of our American magazines, and tiring of them, decided to turn to something more exciting. So I wrote the editor telling him that I was starting a new story entitled “The Runaway Skyscraper”, the first sentence of which read: ‘The whole thing started when the clock on the Metropolitan Tower began to run backward.’ Actually, I had not the faintest idea of writing such a yarn; but the editor replied demanding to see the manuscript when it was finished, and rather than admit I was a liar, I wrote my first science fiction story'."

As far as American SF goes, 'The Runaway Skyscraper' basically created the 'parallel universe/parallel timeline' SF genre. De Camp, Turtledove and Stirling owe a significant part of their literary careers to Leinster's pioneering work.

In June of 1920, Argosy published Leinster's novella, 'The Mad Planet'. A post-apocalyptic tale on a scale beyond even that envisioned by London or Burroughs, 'The Mad Planet' followed the adventures of a 'caveman' of the far future who had to battle the dangerous denizens of an Earth gone mad. The second installment of the adventures of Burl, ‘The Red Dust’, soon followed. Murray had this to say about his tale of future Earth:

‘One doesn’t often get a chance to write something just for the fun of it, without particular regard for the accepted rules of story-writing’ (…) ‘Forty-thousand words of fiction in which the leading character keeps his mouth shut… and I hope you like it!’

I have to wonder if Leinster’s 1921 tale of insects supplanting Man didn’t inspire Lovecraft to posit a similar ‘future history’ in his ‘The Shadow Out of Time’. We know that HPL read Argosy and All-Story.

Leinster would go on to plow right through the Campbellian Divide which saw such pulp SF stalwarts as Doc Smith and A.E. van Vogt cast into the Outer Dark by SF's new gatekeepers. Murray kept selling throughout the 1940s with landmark stories like ‘First Contact’. Meanwhile, his early tales were being reprinted in classic pulps like Fantastic Novels Magazine.

That brings us to 1954—when I come in, sort of. In 1954, Gnome Press published Leinster’s The Forgotten Planet. This was a ‘fix-up novel’ of ‘The Mad Planet’, ‘The Red Dust’ and ‘Nightmare Planet’. In the process, Murray had moved the location of his ‘mad planet’ from Earth to a lost planet partially terraformed by a star-spanning civilization whereon a ship full of colonists crashes with none the wiser. Leinster was a very early adopter of the ‘terraforming’ concept, by the way. Jack Williamson coined the term just a few years before.

In my opinion, this was a stroke of genius from a man who might be expected to rest on his laurels thirty years into his career. Pre-apocalyptic Earth played no real role in ‘The Mad Planet’. Burl—the protagonist—never, ever encountered any ruins/whatnot from pre-Disaster times. He might as well have been an Adam in an Eden gone mad. All of the gonzo evolutionary shenanigans that Burl has to face on the ‘Forgotten Planet’ are more believable because it is not ‘Earth’. Quite frankly, who knows exactly how Introduced Terran fungi and insects would behave/evolve on another planet?

As I said, this is sort of where I come in. My hometown library had a battered/often-checked-out copy of the Gnome Press edition which I read when I was about ten or eleven years old. Looking back, The Forgotten Planet—with its story of a primitive man defeating monstrous odds—was all of a piece with the Burroughs and Howard tales I was reading at the time. As it turns out, Leinster was definitely a fan of REH and very probably a fan of ERB.

Lo and behold, David Drake read The Forgotten Planet decades earlier. Here’s what he had to say in 2009:

‘[The Forgotten Planet] was a great adventure story, and it was hard SF–though not of the usual sort. Leinster’s monsters come from the French naturalist Henri Fabre’s Life of Insects but Really Big. It brought SF into my own back yard–literally. I owe so much to that Ace Single of The Forgotten Planet. Its double replacement is still on my shelves; but more important, it has never left my heart.’

I have to say that when I first read Drake’s The Jungle I immediately thought, ‘This is The Forgotten Planet…on Venus…with super-weapons”. Leinster’s brilliant idea of a partially terraformed planet was used to full effect by Drake.

The 1950s saw Leinster introduce two of his most-beloved SF series: the ‘Colonial Survey’ and the ‘Med Service’ stories. While I can’t recommend them quite as highly as I can The Forgotten Planet, they are quite readable.

One Leinster story I still want to read is the novella/novel The Pirates of Zan/The Pirates of Ersatz. That looks like loads of fun.

Murray Leinster was a pulp pioneer and a pulp survivor who remained productive and relevant for half a century. He was also a born storyteller. Leinster is the third facet in the trinity of American SF authors who, in the second decade of the twentieth century, blazed the star-dusted path for the likes of Hamilton, Heinlein and Brackett. His stories might seem ‘dated’ to some. That is simply because he tended to stay within the bounds of science fiction. Burroughs and Merritt—quite against their stated wishes—have been cast out of the iridium halls of ‘real’ SF. Thus, their works remain far more timeless, in some ways. My advice to any aspiring author who wants to be read a century hence: Don’t write science fiction. The ‘real’ sci-fi guys tend to eat their own in the end.

My advice to anyone who loves Adventure SF is to hunt down the Leinster collection from Baen, Planets of Adventure. It contains The Forgotten Planet and other worthy tales.

The State of Virginia declared June 27 to be ‘William F. Jenkins Day’ in 2009. A worthy honor for a towering figure in the SF genre.

The official Murray Leinster website can be found here.