Murray Leinster
(pen name)
William Fitzgerald Jenkins
(1896-1975)
he has received
Hugo Award for his novelette "Exploration Team" in 1956
Jenkins was a major American
sci-fi writer from the 1920s until he died, with several hundred stories
published in the pulps. Jenkins also wrote and published over 1,500 short
stories and articles for the mainstream magazines such as The Saturday
Evening Post, Liberty, and Collier's. He wrote 14 movies
and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays, inspiring several series
including "Land of the Giants" and "Time Tunnel." Noted sci-fi
novels included War with the Gizmos, Four from Planet 5,
The
Pirates of Zan, and Colonial Survey.
He began appearing in the late
1920s in pulps like Weird Tales and then sold to Astounding
in the 1930s on a regular basis. After World War II, when both his name
and the pulps had achieved a wider acceptance, he would use either William
Fitzgerald or Will F. Jenkins as names on stories when "Leinster" had already
sold a piece to a particular issue. He was very prolific and successful
in the fields of western, mystery, horror, and, of course, especially in
science-fiction.
Four years before The Legion
of Time of Jack Williamson came Leinster's important story Sidewise
in Time, originally published in Astounding, June 1934. This
was probably the first time that the strange concept of alternate worlds
appeared in modern science-fiction. In a sidewise path of time some cities
never happened to be built. Leinster's vision of nature's extraordinary
oscillations in time ('sidewise in time') had long-term effect on other
authors (e.g., Asimov's Living Space, The Red Queen's Race,
or the famous The End of Eternity).
Quotations from Sidewise
in Time:
"... those other strange
states of existence we learned of, those other universes, those other pasts
and futures...""
(Murray Leinster:
Sidewise
in Time,
a story, orig. publ. in Astounding
Stories, June 1934)
"We assume that the future
is a line instead of a coordinate, a path instead of a direction. We assume
that if we travel to futureward, there is but one possible destination.
And that is as absurd as it would be to ignore the possibility of traveling
to eastward in any other line than due east..."
(Murray Leinster:
Sidewise
in Time,
a story, orig. publ. in Astounding
Stories, June 1934)
"Groping, Blake said fumblingly:
"I think you're saying, sir, that - well, as there must be any number of
futures, there must have been any number of pasts besides those written
down in our histories. And - and it would follow that there are any number
of what you might call 'presents'"
Minott gulped down the last
of his sandwich and nodded, "Precisely. And to-day's convulsion of nature
has jumbled them and still upsets them from time to time. The Northmen
once colonized America. In the sequence of events which mark the pathway
of our own ancestors through time, that colony failed. But along another
path through time that colony throve and flourished. The Chinese reached
the shores of California. In the path our ancestors followed through time,
nothing developed from the fact. But this morning we touched upon the pathway
in which they colonized and conquered the continent,...""
(Murray Leinster:
Sidewise
in Time,
a story, orig. publ. in Astounding
Stories, June 1934)
