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Will F. Jenkins Day
Jun. 27th, 2009 08:33 amIf you're in Virginia, today is Will F. Jenkins Day. I'm not in Virginia, but I might as well mark it anyway. It makes a change from being bombarded with supposedly universal mourning for recently-deceased celebrities who - peace to their ashes and all, but who mean absolutely nothing to me.
Will F. Jenkins is to my ear both a nicer and more memorable name than Murray Leinster, but it's by that pseudonym that he's known to me, for the SF that he wrote under it over a long career from 1919 to at least the early 1960s (he died in 1975) is a landmark in the field. Leinster was one of the few SF authors active in the 20s and early 30s who survived the winnowing of the field that came after John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding in 1937, and in fact he wrote most of his best stories for Astounding in the 40s and 50s.
For some reason Leinster didn't loom large on my radar when I was first reading SF, though he was still alive and known as the Dean of Science Fiction (as the most senior living author of importance) at the time. I think it's because his two best known stories, "First Contact" and "Exploration Team", were not particular favorites of mine. I could tell, however, that even in the 40s he was writing in the cool, clear style I liked and which I associated with Asimov and de Camp, and with later authors like Poul Anderson, as opposed to the frenetic, choppy, old-time journalistic style that Heinlein and many others were using at the time and which I never much cared for.
I think that the story that made me aware of Leinster's quality as an SF writer was "The Power", a mock-document story written in what the brief frame letter describes as "a free translation" of 15th century Latin. There's no attempt to be genuinely period, of course, but how many other genre SF writers would have attempted this sort of pastiche in 1945, let alone one who'd been trained in the pulp markets of the 20s? (Only H. Beam Piper's "He Walked Around the Horses" rivals it as a mock-document of the time to my knowledge, and that evokes a different historical period.) Another story of the same year, "De Profundis", is told by an alien who affects a sort of mock-Biblical discourse. It's all 1940s newsstand magazine prose, of course, but it stands out as something different from the usual run.
I can't point to any Leinster stories that I've found as searingly memorable as those that some others produced, but I find that I still enjoy reading his fiction, which isn't true of other SF authors active pre-Campbell, who have fallen by the wayside in my tastes. As his days recede into the past, he's standing out more and more as a worthwhile survivor.
Will F. Jenkins is to my ear both a nicer and more memorable name than Murray Leinster, but it's by that pseudonym that he's known to me, for the SF that he wrote under it over a long career from 1919 to at least the early 1960s (he died in 1975) is a landmark in the field. Leinster was one of the few SF authors active in the 20s and early 30s who survived the winnowing of the field that came after John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding in 1937, and in fact he wrote most of his best stories for Astounding in the 40s and 50s.
For some reason Leinster didn't loom large on my radar when I was first reading SF, though he was still alive and known as the Dean of Science Fiction (as the most senior living author of importance) at the time. I think it's because his two best known stories, "First Contact" and "Exploration Team", were not particular favorites of mine. I could tell, however, that even in the 40s he was writing in the cool, clear style I liked and which I associated with Asimov and de Camp, and with later authors like Poul Anderson, as opposed to the frenetic, choppy, old-time journalistic style that Heinlein and many others were using at the time and which I never much cared for.
I think that the story that made me aware of Leinster's quality as an SF writer was "The Power", a mock-document story written in what the brief frame letter describes as "a free translation" of 15th century Latin. There's no attempt to be genuinely period, of course, but how many other genre SF writers would have attempted this sort of pastiche in 1945, let alone one who'd been trained in the pulp markets of the 20s? (Only H. Beam Piper's "He Walked Around the Horses" rivals it as a mock-document of the time to my knowledge, and that evokes a different historical period.) Another story of the same year, "De Profundis", is told by an alien who affects a sort of mock-Biblical discourse. It's all 1940s newsstand magazine prose, of course, but it stands out as something different from the usual run.
I can't point to any Leinster stories that I've found as searingly memorable as those that some others produced, but I find that I still enjoy reading his fiction, which isn't true of other SF authors active pre-Campbell, who have fallen by the wayside in my tastes. As his days recede into the past, he's standing out more and more as a worthwhile survivor.
