{"id":42,"date":"2003-10-17T14:03:00","date_gmt":"2003-10-17T19:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=42"},"modified":"2003-10-17T14:03:00","modified_gmt":"2003-10-17T19:03:00","slug":"planets-of-adventure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=42","title":{"rendered":"Planets of Adventure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Bless Jim Baen, who at times seems determined to reprint the entire<br \/>\nGolden Age midlist of SF. for he has given us a good thick anthology of<br \/>\nsome of the best stories of Murray Leinster &mdash; a writer once counted<br \/>\namong science-fiction&#8217;s reliable best, but since unfairly forgotten.<\/p>\n<p>I come away from <cite>Planets of Adventure<\/cite> (pb, Baen 2002,<br \/>\nISBN 0-7434-7162-8) with a renewed appreciation of something I have<br \/>\nlong known.  When John W. Campbell and Robert Heinlein invented modern<br \/>\nSF after 1938, Campbell perforce had to train a new crop of writers to<br \/>\nproduce it.  Very few writers with established careers were able to<br \/>\nmeet Campbell&#8217;s standards.<\/p>\n<p>Murray Leinster (born Wil F. Jenkins) was one of a very few<br \/>\nexceptions &mdash; and one of only two (with Jack Williamson) who<br \/>\nactually managed to produce better work after Campbell than before<br \/>\nhim, rather than merely imitating previous pulp successes on a grander<br \/>\nscale (as did, for example, the now-unreadable Edmond Hamilton and the<br \/>\nstill-enjoyable E.E. &#8220;Doc&#8221; Smith).<\/p>\n<p>For this alone Leinster deserves more attention from the historians<br \/>\nand critics of SF than he usually gets.  I, personally, was ready to<br \/>\nrediscover him because I had fond childhood memories of reading his work<br \/>\nfrom the 1950s and early 1960s when it was not too difficult to find<br \/>\nin the used bookstores of ten years later.<\/p>\n<p>One of my sentimental favorites was the <cite>Med Service<\/cite><br \/>\nseries, tales of a doctor making interstellar house calls to solve<br \/>\ningeniously constructed medical puzzles.  I was delighted when Baen<br \/>\nBooks printed a Med Service omnibus a few months ago &mdash; but it is<br \/>\nafter reading <cite>Planets of Adventure<\/cite> that I am truly<br \/>\nimpressed with Leinster&#8217;s achievement.<\/p>\n<p>The first story, <cite>The Forgotten Planet<\/cite> is a fixup<br \/>\nnovel assembled from three novellas, published respectively in 1920,<br \/>\n1921, and 1953.  The rest of the stories were published in the decade<br \/>\nafter 1947, the last quite coincidentally in the year I was born.  In these<br \/>\nstories we get a fine view in miniature both of SF&#8217;s pre-Campbellian past<br \/>\nand the most fertile period of the Campbellian Golden Age.<\/p>\n<p>The first section of <cite>The Forgotten Planet<\/cite>, written<br \/>\nin 1920, is deeply primitive. It&#8217;s a dark thalamic adventure of<br \/>\nregressed humans battling lethal fungi and giant insects in a fetid<br \/>\nalien ecology.  The only touches we can recognize as SFnal are a<br \/>\nframing story Leinster added after the fact, in the early 1950s, which<br \/>\nmake the humands descendents of a crashed starliner &mdash; in <a href='http:\/\/wondersmith.com\/scifi\/madplan.htm'>origin<\/a>, the story<br \/>\nhad been set on a far-future Earth.  One feature of the original<br \/>\nrepays notice; Leinster referred to climate change via a<br \/>\ncarbon-dioxide greenhouse effect caused by burning fossil fuels.  In<br \/>\n1920!<\/p>\n<p>The end of <cite>The Forgotten Planet<\/cite>, as rewritten at<br \/>\nthe beginning of the 1950s, reads very differently.  The stranded<br \/>\nprimitives, having struggled up on their own to barbarian status, are<br \/>\naccidentally rediscovered by interstellar civilization.  This is not<br \/>\nmerely a different story than Leinster had begun to write thirty<br \/>\nyears earlier, it is written in a profoundly different way, suffused<br \/>\nwith plucky optimism and cool efficiency.  The protagonist, Burl,<br \/>\nbegan the action as a a Joseph-Campbellian mythic hero; he ends<br \/>\nit as the archetype of the John-Campbellian competent man, bestriding<br \/>\nboth his own world and that of his advanced galactic kindred with an<br \/>\nease that disconcerts the latter.<\/p>\n<p>In the next section, <cite>The Planet Explorer<\/cite>, Leinster<br \/>\ndemonstrates a flawless command of the Campbellian idiom.  These<br \/>\nstories, written in 1955-56, are classic planetary-puzzle pieces of<br \/>\nthe sort that filled the pages of <cite>Astounding<\/cite> magazine.<br \/>\nThe protagonist solves life-threatening problems posed by conditions<br \/>\non alien worlds.  These were intelligent stories when they were<br \/>\nwritten and they&#8217;re still intelligent today.  One of them won a Hugo<br \/>\nin 1956.  Aside from a slight stiffness in the language, they read<br \/>\nremarkably well.<\/p>\n<p>And we&#8217;re in for another surprise.  The next story,<br \/>\n<cite>Anthropological Note<\/cite>, dates from 1957.  In it, Leinster<br \/>\ncaptures perfectly the tone and style of the first post-Campbellian<br \/>\nwave in SF, the social-science SF of the mid-to-late 1950s and<br \/>\npre-New-Wave 1960s.  Truly this story could have been written by Fred<br \/>\nPohl or C.M. Kornbluth.  The wry tone, the anthropologizing, and the<br \/>\nnot-so-subtle satirical edge are all there.<\/p>\n<p>The story following that, <cite>Scrimshaw<\/cite>, is a creepy and<br \/>\ndark little mood piece that manages to anticipate the New Wave of the<br \/>\nmid-1960s by ten years.  The rest of the anthology (<cite>Assignment<br \/>\non Pasik<\/cite>, <cite>Regulations<\/cite> and <cite>The Skit-Tree<br \/>\nPlanet<\/cite>) is mostly filler, workmanlike enough stuff from the<br \/>\nlate 1940s obviously written to pay bills.  These stories are still<br \/>\nreadable, but of no special interest other than as a demonstration of<br \/>\nconsistent competence.<\/p>\n<p>And there you have it.  In these stories Leinster manages, with so<br \/>\nlittle effort that you won&#8217;t be aware of it unless you&#8217;re looking, to<br \/>\nspan four eras of SF and meet all their demands with unobtrusive<br \/>\nefficiency. I am unable to think of anyone else in the history of the<br \/>\nfield who can quite match that.<\/p>\n<p> This observation is more interesting because Leinster was<br \/>\nessentially a hack writer.  Besides the SF, he churned out reams of<br \/>\npulp fiction &#8212; formulaic Westerns, hard-boiled detective stories,<br \/>\njungle adventures &mdash; during a career that begain in 1917 and<br \/>\nended only with his death in 1975.  It appears that the last thing he<br \/>\nwrote was a <cite>Perry Rhodan<\/cite> novel which I have not read but<br \/>\nwhich almost certainly stank to high heaven.<\/p>\n<p>His SF, though, was not mere hack-work, or at least not<br \/>\n<em>usually<\/em> mere hack-work.  He was a genuine innovator in the<br \/>\nform who invented the parallel-world story in 1934 and the<br \/>\nfirst-contact story in 1945.  It is impossible to read Leinster<br \/>\nwithout sensing that to him, constructing Campbellian puzzle stories<br \/>\nwas a delight, and probably the closest approach to art for art&#8217;s sake<br \/>\nthat he ever allowed himself.  Certainly in <cite>Exploration<br \/>\nTeam<\/cite>, the story that won him the 1956 Hugo, one gets the sense<br \/>\nthat Leinster is using the story to think through some issues that are<br \/>\nimportant to him &mdash; and they are not trivial issues, even<br \/>\ntoday.<\/p>\n<p>But for all that he helped invent some of SF&#8217;s central tropes,<br \/>\nLeinster never quite became an SF writer of the first rank.  He was a<br \/>\nsolid midlist presence &mdash; the comparisons that leap to mind are<br \/>\nhis rough contemporaries James Schmitz and Ross Rocklynne.  His novels<br \/>\ntended to be uninspired; his best work (including the genre-defining<br \/>\n<cite>First Contact<\/cite> and the hilarious and rather prescient<br \/>\n<cite>A Logic Named Joe<\/cite>) was in short-story form.<\/p>\n<p>What Murray Leinster does show us is that SF was as liberating for him as<br \/>\nfor his readers &mdash; that even a hack writer could take from SF the<br \/>\nchallenge and the invitation to be intelligent, and give back<br \/>\nsomething a bit better than he might have written otherwise.  I never<br \/>\ngot to ask him, but I strongly suspect that Wil F. Jenkins would be<br \/>\nprefer to be remembered for the SF more than for anything else he<br \/>\nwrote.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/enetation.co.uk\/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=106642459750526846\">Blogspot comments<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bless Jim Baen, who at times seems determined to reprint the entire Golden Age midlist of SF. for he has given us a good thick anthology of some of the best stories of Murray Leinster &mdash; a writer once counted among science-fiction&#8217;s reliable best, but since unfairly forgotten. I come away from Planets of Adventure&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=42\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Planets of Adventure<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}