Dry Ice Factory

Black Dog Books published a thin volume in what they call the Signature Series with two science fiction novellas by Murray Leinster that were originally published in Thrill Book magazine in 1919. The two stories are related, featuring recurring characters: Teddy Gerrod, a young scientist; Evelyn Hawkins, his beloved who is also a scientist; and Richard Davis, a military pilot. The second story introduces a love interest for Davis, Nita Morrison, an heiress.

These are both scientific puzzle stories, with lots of scientific exposition. "A Thousand Degrees Below Zero" is about a mad scientist with delusions of grandeur who invents a device that cools things close to absolute zero. He places the devices in harbors and reservoirs in an attempt to blackmail governments into making him world emperor. Our young scientists must figure out how his device works and how it can be destroyed. The evil genius has also invented a type of helicopter, and there are dogfights between it and the hottest new fighter biplane that the US government has developed, with extra added improvements by our genius heros.

The second story, "The Silver Menace", is about a strange phenomenon causing the Atlantic Ocean and adjacent rivers to turn into a fetid silver sludge. It turns out to be a microscopic animacule that rapidly reproduces and can even encroach on land. Once again the scientists must figure out a solution to the problem, which is rapidly engulfing the world. (Strangely, it turns out that the critters are allergic to "Indian Love Call".)

I didn't find these stories all that interesting. On the positive side is the crisp writing and tight ideation. Leinster is also notable for featuring female characters who are smart and who contribute to the problem-solving, even if they are still secondary to the males. He is perhaps like Howard Hawks in the way his women get to be one of the boys, sort of. Compared to Homer Eon Flint in the same era, for example, he handles the formulaic romantic aspects of the stories relatively smoothly. Despite these felicities, however, the stories *are* pretty formulaic and lacking in dramatic interest. Not really my cuppa, and nothing as good as Leinster's "The Runaway Skyscraper" (1919), "The Mad Planet" (1920), or "The Red Dust" (1921), which are all masterworks of early science fiction.

One thing I haven't been able to determine is whether this is the extent of Leinster's pre-Amazing science fiction. He wrote in a lot of other genres for the early pulps, and in looking at his story bibliography (Steven Silver maintains a very good one at the Murray Leinster Home Page), I'm not seeing anything else pre-1926 that screams out that it's science fiction. Anybody else know?

I'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.

This story by science fiction legend Murray Leinster was first published in The Argosy magazine in 1920. It feels like full-fledged, post-Gernsbackian SF, and in fact feels like something that could have appeared in Healy and McComas' famous anthology of Campbellian SF, Adventures in Time and Space. To some extent, it reminds me of the story in that anthology about the weakling caveman who uses his wits to invent the club and becomes chief of the tribe by using this tool to beat up stronger competitors.

"The Mad Planet" is set in the far future of Earth after the atmosphere has been filled with carbon dioxide (partly by human burning of coal and oil, in a strange foreshadowing of global warming) and most plant and animal life has died off, leaving monstrous fungus forests and giant insects and a meek, devolved shred of the human race. We follow Burl, a member of a human tribe, who wanders through a nightmare world of deadly spores, giant hunter spiders, killer crayfish, and foot-long army ants. Burl sporadically begins to think, and discovers the wonders of tools -- specifically, spears and clubs. This is classic stefnal conceptual breakthrough stuff, and thus it's easy to believe that this story and it's sequel, "The Red Dust," was considered pretty exciting by early fans. Gernsback reprinted both stories in Amazing in 1927, along with Poe, Verne, Wells, Serviss, and Burroughs. I read it in Sam Moskowitz's Under the Moons of Mars - A History and Anthology of "The Scientific Romance" in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920, in which Moskowitz lavishes great praise on it.

This is no longer the quaint Edwardian narrative of even Serviss or Burroughs. The prose and attitude is terse and tough and modern (and not courtly), but also heading towards that sentimental faith in human intelligence and rationality that typifies the stefnal, fannish mindset. The world of the story reminds me of Aldiss' Hothouse stories, which are set on a far future Earth that has stopped rotating and has an enormous jungle on the sunward face, full of strange monsters and a fearful remnant of humanity eking out a hazardous existence. Leinster later took "The Mad Planet," "The Red Dust," and a much later sequel, "Nightmare Planet" (published in 1953), and created a fix-up novel called The Forgotten Planet, which apparently changes the setting to an alien planet that has been seeded with life and then accidentally inhabited by humans who crashlanded in a spaceship.

By 1920, American SF was already evolving in ways that Gernsback would only poke and prod a few years later in Amazing. He certainly didn't invent this stuff. Leinster, Ray Cummings, Homer Eon Flint, and Abraham Merritt were leading the way in Munsey's magazines by 1918 and 1919. It's possible that space opera was invented in the pages of Amazing, but I'm not even sure about that at this point. Edmond Hamilton started writing for Weird Tales before Gernsback established Amazing. Doc Smith had been working on the first Skylark novel since 1915, although it wasn't published until 1928 in Amazing.