Saturday, November 9, 2013

The Pulbic Domain Works Of The Maestro Of Science Fiction Murray Leinster For Your Old School Science Fiction or Fantasy Campaign


Murray Leinster was one of the most productive and creative science fiction writers around. According to wiki : 

Murray Leinster (June 16, 1896 – June 8, 1975) was a nom de plume of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an award-winning American writer of science fiction and alternate history. He wrote and published over 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays.

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He is the father of the alternative universe or  the invention of parallel universe stories. Leinster's first science fiction story, "The Runaway Skyscraper", appeared in the February 22, 1919 issue of Argosy, and was reprinted in the June 1926 issue of Hugo Gernsback's first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. In the 1930s, he published several science fiction stories and serials in Amazing and Astounding Stories (the first issue of Astoundingincluded his story "Tanks"). He continued to appear frequently in other genre pulps such asDetective Fiction Weekly and Smashing Western, as well as Collier's Weekly beginning in 1936 and Esquire starting in 1939.[1]

Leinster is credited with the invention of parallel universe stories. Four years before Jack Williamson's The Legion of Time came out, Leinster published his "Sidewise in Time" in the June 1934 issue of Astounding. Leinster's vision of extraordinary oscillations in time ('sidewise in time') had a long-term impact on other authors, for example Isaac Asimov's "Living Space", "The Red Queen's Race", and The End of Eternity.
He was a genius far ahead of his time imagining something like the Internet, computer networks, A.I. of a sort and all kinds of technological applications long before the world caught even a hint of it.
According to wiki : 
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 the Internet. He envisioned logics in every home, linked through a distributed system of servers (called "tanks"), to provide communications, entertainment, data access, and commerce; one character says that "logics are civilization.

 He continued publishing into the 50's and 60's then ending his career in writing in the latter half of the early 60's. 
Leinster continued publishing in the 1950s and 1960s, appearing in Galaxy Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as The Saturday Evening Post. He won a Hugo Award for his 1956 story "Exploration Team". Leinster ended his writing career writing novelizations of episodes of the science fiction series Men into Space, The Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants.
Murray Leinster and I share the birthday of June 16th but on June sixth in 1975 we lost  one of the most prolific writers of fiction. Leinster was also an inventor under his real name of William F. Jenkins, best known for the front projection process used in special effects. He also left behind a legacy of over 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays.
His official website is right over 


Here are a listing of his wonderful works over at Project Gutenberg. Click on the links to download! 

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