Planets of Adventure
<p>Bless Jim Baen, who at times seems determined to reprint the entire<br />
Golden Age midlist of SF. for he has given us a good thick anthology of<br />
some of the best stories of Murray Leinster &mdash; a writer once counted<br />
among science-fiction&#8217;s reliable best, but since unfairly forgotten.</p>
<p>I come away from <cite>Planets of Adventure</cite> (pb, Baen 2002,<br />
ISBN 0-7434-7162-8) with a renewed appreciation of something I have<br />
long known.  When John W. Campbell and Robert Heinlein invented modern<br />
SF after 1938, Campbell perforce had to train a new crop of writers to<br />
produce it.  Very few writers with established careers were able to<br />
meet Campbell&#8217;s standards.</p>
<p>Murray Leinster (born Wil F. Jenkins) was one of a very few<br />
exceptions &mdash; and one of only two (with Jack Williamson) who<br />
actually managed to produce better work after Campbell than before<br />
him, rather than merely imitating previous pulp successes on a grander<br />
scale (as did, for example, the now-unreadable Edmond Hamilton and the<br />
still-enjoyable E.E. &#8220;Doc&#8221; Smith).</p>
<p>For this alone Leinster deserves more attention from the historians<br />
and critics of SF than he usually gets.  I, personally, was ready to<br />
rediscover him because I had fond childhood memories of reading his work<br />
from the 1950s and early 1960s when it was not too difficult to find<br />
in the used bookstores of ten years later.</p>
<p>One of my sentimental favorites was the <cite>Med Service</cite><br />
series, tales of a doctor making interstellar house calls to solve<br />
ingeniously constructed medical puzzles.  I was delighted when Baen<br />
Books printed a Med Service omnibus a few months ago &mdash; but it is<br />
after reading <cite>Planets of Adventure</cite> that I am truly<br />
impressed with Leinster&#8217;s achievement.</p>
<p>The first story, <cite>The Forgotten Planet</cite> is a fixup<br />
novel assembled from three novellas, published respectively in 1920,<br />
1921, and 1953.  The rest of the stories were published in the decade<br />
after 1947, the last quite coincidentally in the year I was born.  In these<br />
stories we get a fine view in miniature both of SF&#8217;s pre-Campbellian past<br />
and the most fertile period of the Campbellian Golden Age.</p>
<p>The first section of <cite>The Forgotten Planet</cite>, written<br />
in 1920, is deeply primitive. It&#8217;s a dark thalamic adventure of<br />
regressed humans battling lethal fungi and giant insects in a fetid<br />
alien ecology.  The only touches we can recognize as SFnal are a<br />
framing story Leinster added after the fact, in the early 1950s, which<br />
make the humands descendents of a crashed starliner &mdash; in <a href='http://wondersmith.com/scifi/madplan.htm'>origin</a>, the story<br />
had been set on a far-future Earth.  One feature of the original<br />
repays notice; Leinster referred to climate change via a<br />
carbon-dioxide greenhouse effect caused by burning fossil fuels.  In<br />
1920!</p>
<p>The end of <cite>The Forgotten Planet</cite>, as rewritten at<br />
the beginning of the 1950s, reads very differently.  The stranded<br />
primitives, having struggled up on their own to barbarian status, are<br />
accidentally rediscovered by interstellar civilization.  This is not<br />
merely a different story than Leinster had begun to write thirty<br />
years earlier, it is written in a profoundly different way, suffused<br />
with plucky optimism and cool efficiency.  The protagonist, Burl,<br />
began the action as a a Joseph-Campbellian mythic hero; he ends<br />
it as the archetype of the John-Campbellian competent man, bestriding<br />
both his own world and that of his advanced galactic kindred with an<br />
ease that disconcerts the latter.</p>
<p>In the next section, <cite>The Planet Explorer</cite>, Leinster<br />
demonstrates a flawless command of the Campbellian idiom.  These<br />
stories, written in 1955-56, are classic planetary-puzzle pieces of<br />
the sort that filled the pages of <cite>Astounding</cite> magazine.<br />
The protagonist solves life-threatening problems posed by conditions<br />
on alien worlds.  These were intelligent stories when they were<br />
written and they&#8217;re still intelligent today.  One of them won a Hugo<br />
in 1956.  Aside from a slight stiffness in the language, they read<br />
remarkably well.</p>
<p>And we&#8217;re in for another surprise.  The next story,<br />
<cite>Anthropological Note</cite>, dates from 1957.  In it, Leinster<br />
captures perfectly the tone and style of the first post-Campbellian<br />
wave in SF, the social-science SF of the mid-to-late 1950s and<br />
pre-New-Wave 1960s.  Truly this story could have been written by Fred<br />
Pohl or C.M. Kornbluth.  The wry tone, the anthropologizing, and the<br />
not-so-subtle satirical edge are all there.</p>
<p>The story following that, <cite>Scrimshaw</cite>, is a creepy and<br />
dark little mood piece that manages to anticipate the New Wave of the<br />
mid-1960s by ten years.  The rest of the anthology (<cite>Assignment<br />
on Pasik</cite>, <cite>Regulations</cite> and <cite>The Skit-Tree<br />
Planet</cite>) is mostly filler, workmanlike enough stuff from the<br />
late 1940s obviously written to pay bills.  These stories are still<br />
readable, but of no special interest other than as a demonstration of<br />
consistent competence.</p>
<p>And there you have it.  In these stories Leinster manages, with so<br />
little effort that you won&#8217;t be aware of it unless you&#8217;re looking, to<br />
span four eras of SF and meet all their demands with unobtrusive<br />
efficiency. I am unable to think of anyone else in the history of the<br />
field who can quite match that.</p>
<p> This observation is more interesting because Leinster was<br />
essentially a hack writer.  Besides the SF, he churned out reams of<br />
pulp fiction &#8212; formulaic Westerns, hard-boiled detective stories,<br />
jungle adventures &mdash; during a career that begain in 1917 and<br />
ended only with his death in 1975.  It appears that the last thing he<br />
wrote was a <cite>Perry Rhodan</cite> novel which I have not read but<br />
which almost certainly stank to high heaven.</p>
<p>His SF, though, was not mere hack-work, or at least not<br />
<em>usually</em> mere hack-work.  He was a genuine innovator in the<br />
form who invented the parallel-world story in 1934 and the<br />
first-contact story in 1945.  It is impossible to read Leinster<br />
without sensing that to him, constructing Campbellian puzzle stories<br />
was a delight, and probably the closest approach to art for art&#8217;s sake<br />
that he ever allowed himself.  Certainly in <cite>Exploration<br />
Team</cite>, the story that won him the 1956 Hugo, one gets the sense<br />
that Leinster is using the story to think through some issues that are<br />
important to him &mdash; and they are not trivial issues, even<br />
today.</p>
<p>But for all that he helped invent some of SF&#8217;s central tropes,<br />
Leinster never quite became an SF writer of the first rank.  He was a<br />
solid midlist presence &mdash; the comparisons that leap to mind are<br />
his rough contemporaries James Schmitz and Ross Rocklynne.  His novels<br />
tended to be uninspired; his best work (including the genre-defining<br />
<cite>First Contact</cite> and the hilarious and rather prescient<br />
<cite>A Logic Named Joe</cite>) was in short-story form.</p>
<p>What Murray Leinster does show us is that SF was as liberating for him as<br />
for his readers &mdash; that even a hack writer could take from SF the<br />
challenge and the invitation to be intelligent, and give back<br />
something a bit better than he might have written otherwise.  I never<br />
got to ask him, but I strongly suspect that Wil F. Jenkins would be<br />
prefer to be remembered for the SF more than for anything else he<br />
wrote.</p>
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