"Murray Leinster - The Best of Murray Leinster (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

new kinds of stories. "Sidewise in Time," which opens this collection, is a
classic case in point. One of the most influential sf stories ever written, it
developed a concept of "parallel worlds"-worlds that exist in the same time as
ours, but in which natural or human history has taken a different course. That
idea has since been drawn on by H. Beam Piper, Keith Laumer, and a host of
other writers. Some physicists are even reported to be taking the idea
seriously-not the specific details, of course, but the concept that our
universe may not be the only one in this space-time continuum. Leinster wasn't
a dour theoretician, by any means- he was a man who could have fun with ideas
and share that fun with his readers. "The Fourth-dimensional Demonstrator"
takes on the old dream of making money easily, but it never occurred to others
who wrote parables of greed that a device producing money out of thin air
would do the same for other things, including girl friends, or take "A Logic
Named Joe," one of his funniest stories and one of his most prophetic. Most
people weren't aware of computers back then, and nobody realized there might
one day be computer information terminais all over the place-with their
attendant problems. It's still fun (and sobering, on reflection) to read about
the people who order computer data on how to rob banks or cure their neighbors
of concupiscence, but it's also fun because we know Leinster thought out ideas
that hadn't even occurred to others.
 The same kind of disciplined imagination could be turned to a really
nasty story like "Pipeline to Pluto." It's an uncharacteristically gritty tale
of some unpleasant people who meet their comeuppance. But Leinster could
create a whole new kind of. comeuppance to satisfy morality and scientific
logic at' once, and he did.
Leinster's type of imagination was not a mere literary affectation, but
was a basic part of the man. When he wasn't writing, he was inventing. He had
a laboratory in his home, and some of his inventions seem the very stuff of
science fiction.
Jenkins Systems, widely used in television and the movies, is a device
that allows background scenes to be projected on a special screen, without
showing-up on' the actors standing in front of the screen. As described by its
inventor (under the double byline of Will F. Jenkins-Murray Leinster) in
"Applied Science Fiction," the system depends on a precise knowledge of the
different ways light can be reflected. But it also depends on a certain
psychology-the psychology of a man who can see how to make use of such natural
phenomena.
Invention is a matter of problem-solving, and one of Leinster's favorite
forms, especially in his later years, was what is usually called the
scientific problem story. "Critical Difference" is one of a series he wrote in
the 195 Os., and• his own experience in solving scientific problems is,
reflected in the manner in which his hero, comes to grips with a natural
crisis that threatens the existence of human life in the planetary system of
an unexpectedly variable star. The same kind of insighit was, however, shown
even early in his career with the story of Burl, the primitive who discovers
how to use his mind to cope with a savage environment in "The Mad Planet."
Leinster was a rationalist, a term which often seems to be in disfavor-
perhaps through association with the dismal utilitarianism of the Gradgrind
School in Dickens' Hard Times. Anything but a Grandgrind, Leinster saw reason
as a normal part of humanity, and his stories are always human dramas, not