118 lines
8.0 KiB
Plaintext
118 lines
8.0 KiB
Plaintext
Planets of Adventure
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<p>Bless Jim Baen, who at times seems determined to reprint the entire<br />
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Golden Age midlist of SF. for he has given us a good thick anthology of<br />
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some of the best stories of Murray Leinster — a writer once counted<br />
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among science-fiction’s reliable best, but since unfairly forgotten.</p>
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<p>I come away from <cite>Planets of Adventure</cite> (pb, Baen 2002,<br />
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ISBN 0-7434-7162-8) with a renewed appreciation of something I have<br />
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long known. When John W. Campbell and Robert Heinlein invented modern<br />
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SF after 1938, Campbell perforce had to train a new crop of writers to<br />
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produce it. Very few writers with established careers were able to<br />
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meet Campbell’s standards.</p>
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<p>Murray Leinster (born Wil F. Jenkins) was one of a very few<br />
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exceptions — and one of only two (with Jack Williamson) who<br />
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actually managed to produce better work after Campbell than before<br />
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him, rather than merely imitating previous pulp successes on a grander<br />
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scale (as did, for example, the now-unreadable Edmond Hamilton and the<br />
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still-enjoyable E.E. “Doc” Smith).</p>
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<p>For this alone Leinster deserves more attention from the historians<br />
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and critics of SF than he usually gets. I, personally, was ready to<br />
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rediscover him because I had fond childhood memories of reading his work<br />
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from the 1950s and early 1960s when it was not too difficult to find<br />
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in the used bookstores of ten years later.</p>
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<p>One of my sentimental favorites was the <cite>Med Service</cite><br />
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series, tales of a doctor making interstellar house calls to solve<br />
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ingeniously constructed medical puzzles. I was delighted when Baen<br />
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Books printed a Med Service omnibus a few months ago — but it is<br />
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after reading <cite>Planets of Adventure</cite> that I am truly<br />
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impressed with Leinster’s achievement.</p>
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<p>The first story, <cite>The Forgotten Planet</cite> is a fixup<br />
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novel assembled from three novellas, published respectively in 1920,<br />
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1921, and 1953. The rest of the stories were published in the decade<br />
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after 1947, the last quite coincidentally in the year I was born. In these<br />
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stories we get a fine view in miniature both of SF’s pre-Campbellian past<br />
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and the most fertile period of the Campbellian Golden Age.</p>
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<p>The first section of <cite>The Forgotten Planet</cite>, written<br />
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in 1920, is deeply primitive. It’s a dark thalamic adventure of<br />
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regressed humans battling lethal fungi and giant insects in a fetid<br />
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alien ecology. The only touches we can recognize as SFnal are a<br />
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framing story Leinster added after the fact, in the early 1950s, which<br />
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make the humands descendents of a crashed starliner — in <a href='http://wondersmith.com/scifi/madplan.htm'>origin</a>, the story<br />
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had been set on a far-future Earth. One feature of the original<br />
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repays notice; Leinster referred to climate change via a<br />
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carbon-dioxide greenhouse effect caused by burning fossil fuels. In<br />
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1920!</p>
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<p>The end of <cite>The Forgotten Planet</cite>, as rewritten at<br />
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the beginning of the 1950s, reads very differently. The stranded<br />
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primitives, having struggled up on their own to barbarian status, are<br />
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accidentally rediscovered by interstellar civilization. This is not<br />
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merely a different story than Leinster had begun to write thirty<br />
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years earlier, it is written in a profoundly different way, suffused<br />
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with plucky optimism and cool efficiency. The protagonist, Burl,<br />
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began the action as a a Joseph-Campbellian mythic hero; he ends<br />
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it as the archetype of the John-Campbellian competent man, bestriding<br />
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both his own world and that of his advanced galactic kindred with an<br />
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ease that disconcerts the latter.</p>
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<p>In the next section, <cite>The Planet Explorer</cite>, Leinster<br />
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demonstrates a flawless command of the Campbellian idiom. These<br />
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stories, written in 1955-56, are classic planetary-puzzle pieces of<br />
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the sort that filled the pages of <cite>Astounding</cite> magazine.<br />
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The protagonist solves life-threatening problems posed by conditions<br />
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on alien worlds. These were intelligent stories when they were<br />
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written and they’re still intelligent today. One of them won a Hugo<br />
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in 1956. Aside from a slight stiffness in the language, they read<br />
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remarkably well.</p>
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<p>And we’re in for another surprise. The next story,<br />
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<cite>Anthropological Note</cite>, dates from 1957. In it, Leinster<br />
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captures perfectly the tone and style of the first post-Campbellian<br />
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wave in SF, the social-science SF of the mid-to-late 1950s and<br />
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pre-New-Wave 1960s. Truly this story could have been written by Fred<br />
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Pohl or C.M. Kornbluth. The wry tone, the anthropologizing, and the<br />
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not-so-subtle satirical edge are all there.</p>
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<p>The story following that, <cite>Scrimshaw</cite>, is a creepy and<br />
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dark little mood piece that manages to anticipate the New Wave of the<br />
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mid-1960s by ten years. The rest of the anthology (<cite>Assignment<br />
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on Pasik</cite>, <cite>Regulations</cite> and <cite>The Skit-Tree<br />
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Planet</cite>) is mostly filler, workmanlike enough stuff from the<br />
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late 1940s obviously written to pay bills. These stories are still<br />
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readable, but of no special interest other than as a demonstration of<br />
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consistent competence.</p>
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<p>And there you have it. In these stories Leinster manages, with so<br />
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little effort that you won’t be aware of it unless you’re looking, to<br />
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span four eras of SF and meet all their demands with unobtrusive<br />
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efficiency. I am unable to think of anyone else in the history of the<br />
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field who can quite match that.</p>
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<p> This observation is more interesting because Leinster was<br />
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essentially a hack writer. Besides the SF, he churned out reams of<br />
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pulp fiction — formulaic Westerns, hard-boiled detective stories,<br />
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jungle adventures — during a career that begain in 1917 and<br />
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ended only with his death in 1975. It appears that the last thing he<br />
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wrote was a <cite>Perry Rhodan</cite> novel which I have not read but<br />
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which almost certainly stank to high heaven.</p>
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<p>His SF, though, was not mere hack-work, or at least not<br />
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<em>usually</em> mere hack-work. He was a genuine innovator in the<br />
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form who invented the parallel-world story in 1934 and the<br />
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first-contact story in 1945. It is impossible to read Leinster<br />
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without sensing that to him, constructing Campbellian puzzle stories<br />
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was a delight, and probably the closest approach to art for art’s sake<br />
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that he ever allowed himself. Certainly in <cite>Exploration<br />
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Team</cite>, the story that won him the 1956 Hugo, one gets the sense<br />
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that Leinster is using the story to think through some issues that are<br />
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important to him — and they are not trivial issues, even<br />
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today.</p>
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<p>But for all that he helped invent some of SF’s central tropes,<br />
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Leinster never quite became an SF writer of the first rank. He was a<br />
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solid midlist presence — the comparisons that leap to mind are<br />
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his rough contemporaries James Schmitz and Ross Rocklynne. His novels<br />
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tended to be uninspired; his best work (including the genre-defining<br />
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<cite>First Contact</cite> and the hilarious and rather prescient<br />
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<cite>A Logic Named Joe</cite>) was in short-story form.</p>
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<p>What Murray Leinster does show us is that SF was as liberating for him as<br />
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for his readers — that even a hack writer could take from SF the<br />
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challenge and the invitation to be intelligent, and give back<br />
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something a bit better than he might have written otherwise. I never<br />
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got to ask him, but I strongly suspect that Wil F. Jenkins would be<br />
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prefer to be remembered for the SF more than for anything else he<br />
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wrote.</p>
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<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&commentid=106642459750526846">Blogspot comments</a></p>
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