Read Online Seekers of Tomorrow by Sam Moskowitz - Free Book Online

effort with enthusi-asm and one of the most fabulous writing careers in science-fiction history was launched. Forty-three years later, in 1962, Murray Leinster was voted one of the six favorite modern writers of science fiction; more of his stories had been anthol-ogized than any living science-fiction writer's, including clas-sics as First Contact, The Strange Case of John Kingman, Symbiosis, A Logic Named Joe, and The Lonely Planet.
    Other writers who started and achieved fame in the same period as Leinster—Ray Cummings, Garret Smith, Victor Rousseau, Francis Stevens, Homer Eon Flint, Austin Hall, J. U. Giesy—are dead and their work lives only in the nostalgic memories of a dwindling group of old-time readers. But their contemporary, Murray Leinster, is very much alive; his novelette Exploration Team received the Hugo* as the best story in its class in 1956, and in 1960 his novel Pirates of Ersatz was nominated for the best novel of the year.
    *The "Hugo" is the science fiction world's equivalent for the "Oscar," a cast metal spaceship awarded annually at the World Science Fiction Convention, to the field's outstanding contributors. William Fitzgerald Jenkins was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1896. His alter ego, Murray Leinster, would not come into being until Jenkins had passed his twenty-first birthday. His family tree has roots deep in colonial times; an ancestor eight generations back, was governor of North Carolina. Another of his roots lay in Leinster County, Ireland, inhabited by a people proud in the knowledge that the kings of Leinster were the last of that country to give up their indepen-dence.
    His education terminated abruptly after three months of the eighth grade, never to be resumed. Young Jenkins' burn-ing ambition was to be a scientist, and inquiry into the nature of things prompted him to buy materials to build a glider, which he successfully flew at Sandstorm Hill, Cape Henry, Virginia, in 1909, winning a prize from fly, the first aeronautical magazine, for his achievement. The same year, at the age of 13, he placed an essay about Robert E. Lee in the Virginian pilot, making that his first published work. Technically, it was also his first "paid" authorship, for an old Confederate veteran sent him five dollars upon reading it. To earn a living, he worked as an office boy, writing at night. Every day for a year he wrote 1,000 words and tore it up. At the age of 17 he began to place fillers and epigrams with smart set, the new yorker of pre-World War I days. Such fragments did not constitute a living ($5 for 12 epigrams) so Will Jenkins set his sights on the pulps, which were replacing the dime-novel as the reading matter of American youth. The editors of smart set, George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken who included one epigram in a book and paid a five-cent beer for royalties, perfectly straight-faced, suggested that he use a pen name for argosy or all-story so as not to hurt his reputation in the "big time." Jenkins thought this was Grade-A advice and together with a friend, Wynham Martyn, concocted Murray Leinster out of his family lineage.
    He had moved to Newark, New Jersey, to work as a bookkeeper for the Prudential Insurance Company, and that city later served as the locale of a number of his stories, most notably The Incredible Invasion. Clicking regularly at Munsey and other publishing houses, Leinster resigned his post with Prudential on his twenty-first birthday and, apart from a stint in the Office of War Information during World War II, has never held a salaried position since.
    In 1919, Street & Smith, watching the prosperity of Mun-sey's argosy and all-story magazines, with their heavy em-phasis on science-fiction, fantasy, supernatural, and off-trail stories, decided to bring out a magazine whose fiction would stress those elements. They called it thrill book and put it under the editorship of Eugene Clancy and Harold Hersey. Before the first issue appeared, dated March 1, 1919, the