Back in the 1960s, one of my favorite Science Fiction writers was Murray Leinster (aka, William Fitzgerald Jenkins). In those days, I read every Murray Leinster short story or novel I could get my hands on. Luckily, Leinster was a prolific SF writer so there was plenty to read.
FIRST CONTACTS: THE ESSENTIAL MURRAY LEINSTER edited by Joe Rico could easily be titled The Best of Murray Leinster. In his informative Introduction, fellow SF writer and friend Hal Clement writes about Murray Leinster’s long and successful career. Editor Jo Rico also describes the arc of Murray Leinster’s career and the changing interests of one of the SF genre’s best writers.
The first story in this collection is “A Logic Named Joe” from 1946 that pretty much describes what we consider today to be computer. I’m a big fan of Leinster’s “First Contact” which burst on the SF scene in 1945 and created a whole new sub-genre of human/alien interaction. “The Strange Case of John Kingman” will haunt you. “Proxima Centauri,” told from the aliens’ perspective, leaves you with a new sense of our place in the Universe.
My favorite story in FIRST CONTACTS: THE ESSENTIAL MURRAY LEINSTER is “Exploration Team.” “Exploration Team” is a science fiction novelette, originally published in the March 1956 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 1956. It predicts how planets might be explored. “Exploration Team” is one of the works in Leinster’s “Colonial Survey” series. It is also one of the four novelettes that were re-written and included in Leinster’s fix-up novel Colonial Survey, where it appears as a chapter titled “Combat Team”. When I first read “Exploration Team,” I was floored by the concepts and the writing. Later, when I read Colonial Survey I was floored again by Leinster’s attention to detail and his ability to make something as potentially routine as exploring a planet so exciting.
If you haven’t read Murray Leinster’s work, FIRST CONTACTS: THE ESSENTIAL MURRAY LEINSTER would be a great place to begin! GRADE: A
Table of Contents:
- Will by Hal Clement — 13
- Editor’s Introduction by Joe Rico — 17
- A Logic Named Joe — 19
- If You Was a Globulin — 33
- The Ethical Equations — 49
- Keyhole — 63
- Doomsday Deferred — 77
- First Contact — 85
- Nobody Saw the Ship — 109
- Pipeline to Pluto — 123
- The Lonely Planet — 133
- De Profundis — 157
- The Power — 167
- The Castaway — 181
- The Strange Case of John Kingman — 201
- Proxima Centauri — 213
- The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator — 251
- Sam, This Is You — 261
- Sidewise in Time — 277
- Scrimshaw — 315
- Symbiosis — 327
- Cure for a Ylith — 339
- Plague on Kryder II — 353
- Exploration Team — 385
- Introduction to the Unpublished Stories by Joe Rico — 419
- The Great Catastrophe — 421
- To All Fat Policemen — 461
