Murray Leinster, "The Runaway Skyscraper"
Jun. 15th, 2009 02:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersI've finally gotten back to Leinster. When I first started delving seriously into the classics of science fiction as a teenager, Leinster was known as the Dean of Science Fiction, but I couldn't figure out why. None of his books seemed to be a part of the canon. Over time I think I read a couple of his short stories here and there, but he still seemed like a fairly minor figure to me. (Checks. Ah right, "First Contact" was his. I read that in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1 -- one of my first introductions to Golden Age SF.) Then a couple of years ago, I read his 1920 short story "The Mad Planet" and its sequel, "The Red Dust". These are terrific stories that seemed very Campbellian to me, and Hugo Gernsback was impressed enough with them to reprint them in early issues of Amazing as part of his effort to indicate to writers the type of scientifiction story he wanted to publish. I began to see how Leinster had gained his moniker.
"The Runaway Skyscraper" was his first science fiction story and was published in 1919 in the pulp magazine Argosy. The premise is fairly ridiculous: due to a brief burst of hand-waving, a Manhattan skyscraper and all the people working in it are plunged a few thousand years into the past. Uh-oh! Now, a writer of scientific romance might have used this scenario to examine the fragility of civilization, but while Leinster flirts with this theme, one of the ways that he is proto-Campbellian is that he's more interested in engineering problems and the can-do attitude. His engineer protagonist and Girl Friday (a no-nonsense, can-do gal who wouldn't be out of place in a Howard Hawks movie) get to work organizing the denizens of the transplanted building to feed themselves and to find a way to get back to the future. The engineer has a theory, you see ...
Leinster is a facile writer as well. His description of what the protagonists see as the building hurtles backwards in time is reminiscent of Hodgson's description of fast-forwarding through time in The House on the Borderland. Whereas I wasn't sure if Hodgson had actually seen any timelapse photography, Leinster makes an explicit comparison to the cinema: "There was hardly any distinguishing between the times the sun was up and the times it was below now, as the darkness and light followed each other so swiftly the effect was the same as one of the old flickering motion pictures." At the end of the story as they move forward in time again, he throws off a description that foreshadows the scene in Norstrilia (I think it was -- something by Cordwainer Smith anyway) where the hero and heroine live a subjective thousand years together in flash: "While he kissed her, so swiftly did the days and years fly by, three generations were born, grew and begot children, and died again!"
This is another impressive early story by Leinster. I'm curious why these stories from the Munsey magazines seem to have fallen out of consciousness in terms of his best-of collections, including the relatively recent collection from NESFA, First Contacts, which doesn't include anything earlier than "Proxima Centauri" from 1935. I read "The Runaway Skyscraper" in a new collection called The Runaway Skyscraper and Other Tales from the Pulps, which includes several other stories from Munsey magazines of the '20s and one from a 1931 issue of Astounding. Aside from the latter, the other stories are non-SF and in fact range all over the place in genre. Perhaps the most striking is "Stories of the Hungry Country: The Case of the Dona Clotilde," which is about a Ruritanian Portugese colony in the Caribbean that has slaves. The take on the European attitude toward slavery is quite barbed. The Astounding story is called "Morale" and is a future war or future weapon story that is more than a little reminiscent of H.G. Wells' "The Land Ironclads" in tone and approach, although again with a less sociological than tactical interest.
I'd like to read more of Leinster's science fiction from the '20s. There's a collection out called The Silver Menace and a Thousand Degrees Below Zero that's from that era. I'll probably check that out next.
"The Runaway Skyscraper" was his first science fiction story and was published in 1919 in the pulp magazine Argosy. The premise is fairly ridiculous: due to a brief burst of hand-waving, a Manhattan skyscraper and all the people working in it are plunged a few thousand years into the past. Uh-oh! Now, a writer of scientific romance might have used this scenario to examine the fragility of civilization, but while Leinster flirts with this theme, one of the ways that he is proto-Campbellian is that he's more interested in engineering problems and the can-do attitude. His engineer protagonist and Girl Friday (a no-nonsense, can-do gal who wouldn't be out of place in a Howard Hawks movie) get to work organizing the denizens of the transplanted building to feed themselves and to find a way to get back to the future. The engineer has a theory, you see ...
Leinster is a facile writer as well. His description of what the protagonists see as the building hurtles backwards in time is reminiscent of Hodgson's description of fast-forwarding through time in The House on the Borderland. Whereas I wasn't sure if Hodgson had actually seen any timelapse photography, Leinster makes an explicit comparison to the cinema: "There was hardly any distinguishing between the times the sun was up and the times it was below now, as the darkness and light followed each other so swiftly the effect was the same as one of the old flickering motion pictures." At the end of the story as they move forward in time again, he throws off a description that foreshadows the scene in Norstrilia (I think it was -- something by Cordwainer Smith anyway) where the hero and heroine live a subjective thousand years together in flash: "While he kissed her, so swiftly did the days and years fly by, three generations were born, grew and begot children, and died again!"
This is another impressive early story by Leinster. I'm curious why these stories from the Munsey magazines seem to have fallen out of consciousness in terms of his best-of collections, including the relatively recent collection from NESFA, First Contacts, which doesn't include anything earlier than "Proxima Centauri" from 1935. I read "The Runaway Skyscraper" in a new collection called The Runaway Skyscraper and Other Tales from the Pulps, which includes several other stories from Munsey magazines of the '20s and one from a 1931 issue of Astounding. Aside from the latter, the other stories are non-SF and in fact range all over the place in genre. Perhaps the most striking is "Stories of the Hungry Country: The Case of the Dona Clotilde," which is about a Ruritanian Portugese colony in the Caribbean that has slaves. The take on the European attitude toward slavery is quite barbed. The Astounding story is called "Morale" and is a future war or future weapon story that is more than a little reminiscent of H.G. Wells' "The Land Ironclads" in tone and approach, although again with a less sociological than tactical interest.
I'd like to read more of Leinster's science fiction from the '20s. There's a collection out called The Silver Menace and a Thousand Degrees Below Zero that's from that era. I'll probably check that out next.
