Murray Leinster (/ˈlɛnstər/) was apen name ofWilliam Fitzgerald Jenkins (June 16, 1896 – June 8, 1975), an American writer of genre fiction, particularly ofscience fiction. He wrote and published more than 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays.
Leinster's "Juju" was the cover story ofThe Thrill Book in October 1919.
Leinster was born inNorfolk, Virginia, the son of George B. Jenkins and Mary L. Jenkins. His father was an accountant. Although both parents were born in Virginia, the family lived in Manhattan in 1910, according to the 1910 Federal Census. A high school dropout, he nevertheless began a career as a freelance writer beforeWorld War I. He was just 20 when his first story, "The Anti-Climax", appeared in the July 1916 issue ofH. L. Mencken's literary magazineThe Smart Set. Over the next two years, Leinster published four more stories and almost a dozen sketches in the magazine; in a September 2022 interview, Leinster's daughter stated that Mencken recommended the use of a pseudonym for non-Smart Set content.[1]
When the pulp magazines began to diversify into particular genres in the 1920s, Leinster followed suit, selling jungle stories toDanger Trails, westerns toWest andCowboy Stories, detective stories toBlack Mask andMystery Stories, horror stories toWeird Tales, and even romance stories toLove Story Magazine under the pen name Louisa Carter Lee.
Leinster's first science fiction story, "The Runaway Skyscraper", appeared in the February 22, 1919 issue ofArgosy, and was reprinted in the June 1926 issue ofHugo Gernsback's first science fiction magazine,Amazing Stories. In the 1930s, he published several science fiction stories and serials inAmazing andAstounding Stories (the first issue ofAstounding included his story "Tanks"). His work continued to appear frequently in other genre pulps such asDetective Fiction Weekly andSmashing Western, as well asCollier's Weekly beginning in 1936 andEsquire starting in 1939.[2]
Leinster was one of the few science fiction writers from the 1930s to survive in theJohn W. Campbell era of higher writing standards, publishing over three dozen stories inAstounding andAnalog under Campbell's editorship. The last story by Leinster inAnalog was "Quarantine World" in the November 1966 issue, thirty-six years after his appearance in the premier January 1930 issue.
Murray Leinster's 1946 short story "A Logic Named Joe" contains one of the first descriptions of a computer (called a "logic") in fiction. In the story, Leinster was decades ahead of his time in imagining theInternet. He envisioned logics in every home, linked through a distributed system ofservers (called "tanks"), to provide communications, entertainment, data access, and commerce; one character says that "logics are civilization."[4]
DuringWorld War II, he served in theUnited States Office of War Information.[2] After the war, when both his name and the pulps had achieved a wider acceptance, he would use either "William Fitzgerald", "Fitzgerald Jenkins" or "Will F. Jenkins" as names on stories when "Leinster" had already sold a piece to a particular issue.
Leinster's career also included tie-in fiction based on several science fiction TV series: an episodic 1960 novel,Men into Space, was derived from the series' basic concepts, but Leinster had little knowledge of the series' actual content, and none of the book episodes bear any relationship to the filmed episodes.[6]Men Into Space was followed, seven years later, by two original novels based onThe Time Tunnel (1967), and three based onLand of the Giants (1968–69).
Leinster was also an inventor under his real name of William F. Jenkins, best known for thefront projection process used inspecial effects.[7] He appeared in September 1953 on an episode of the educational seriesAmerican Inventory, in which he discussed the possibility of space travel.[8]
"Murray" is a reference to Leinster's mother's maiden name ("Murry"), while "Leinster" alluded to the connection between his middle name ("Fitzgerald") and theDukes of Leinster.[1]
Her Desert Lover: A Love Story, Chelsea House 1925.
Her Other Husband: A Love Story, Chelsea House 1929.
Love and Better: A Love Story, Chelsea House 1931.
Leinster's "Planet of Sand" was cover-featured on the February 1948 issue ofFamous Fantastic Mysteries.Leinster's "The Strange Invasion" was the cover story on the April 1958 issue ofSatellite Science Fiction. It was issued in book form later that year asWar with the Gizmos.
The Time Tunnel, Pyramid, January 1967; original promotional novel based on the 1966–1967 U.S television seriesThe Time Tunnel, a very different story than Leinster's 1964 novel of the same name.
The Time Tunnel: Timeslip!, Pyramid, July 1967; original novel based on the television series.
Land of the Giants, Pyramid, September 1968; original novel based ontelevision series, reinventing the origin story.
Land of the Giants 2: The Hot Spot, Pyramid, April 1969; original novel based on the television series.
Land of the Giants 3: Unknown Danger, Pyramid, September 1969; original novel based on the television series.
^This phenomenon was not uncommon in the pre-VCR era. In the effort to rush a book onto the shelves to coincide with the airing of a new TV series, the commissioned novelist often had only limited source material to work from, such as a series "writer's bible", some production photos and perhaps a pilot script.
.jpg)
.jpg)
