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

informed, who imagine this attitude to have been developed only within the
last decade, usually by themselves.
Perhaps the most unusual of Leinster's contact stories, "The Strange
Case of John Kingman," never moves off the Earth at all. There is a subtle
irony to the story: the being in the mental hospital who has been classed as a
lunatic' for nearly two hundred years really is insane-but not for the reasons
human doctors have imagined.
In the 1930s, Leinster wrote several realistic stories of- future
warfare, like "Tanks" and "Politics." In "Symbiosis," he returned to the
future-war theme, but in a much subtler manner. Kantolia seems defenseless: no
planes, tanks, or heavy guns, no fanciful death rays. But it has a truly
deadly weapon-invaders are helpless against it. The fact that a man with a
troubled conscience must wield that weapon makes this, too, a very human
story.
"The Power" is a science-fiction story set in a period when science
fiction would have been impossible. Before you can have either science or
science fiction, you have to have the kind of imagination that makes both
possible. Poor Carolus-he sees, but cannot observe, still less understand!
One collection could not possibly include all the best stories of a man
who was a regular contributor to science-fiction markets for five decades-
there are even important types of fiction Leinster wrote, which could not be
represented, here because of space limitations. And there are, of course,
novels like The Forgotten Planet, based on "The Mad Planet" and its sequels.
Readers haven't always had a chance to see Leinster at his best. After
quitting an insurance company at age twenty-one--his boss wanted him to do
something unethical, so he told the boss that he could do with the job-
Leinster made his living as a writer, in other fields' as well as in science
fiction. Unfortunately, it seems that some publishers would rather reprint his
potboilers than his classics. Then too, some publishers couldn't tell the
difference between them even when he was alive.
One of his novels, serialized in a magazine, dealt with space piracy. An
old and hackneyed theme, but Leinster redeemed it with a climax in which the
hero uses his knowledge of the hijacked ship's communications system to drive
the pirates insane. When a paperback publisher picked up the novel, however,
virtually all the good stuff was cut out, without the author even being
informed.
In recent years, it has become fashionable to look down on the pioneers
of science fiction. One contemporary author pretentiously dismissed Leinster
with the comment that he wasn't a Dostoevski-a comment that means about as
much as saying Scott Joplin Wasn't a Beethoven.
Leinster himself, of course, never claimed to be a Dostoevski-or anyone
else so exalted. He took pride in doing what he could do well, but was never
pretentious. Yet it was he, and others like him, who created a new kind of
fiction with its own themes and traditions. Without them, there would be
nothing for today's science-fiction writers to turn into Literature-indeed,
today's science-fiction writers wouldn't be. Period.
A pioneer of the scientific imagination in fiction- Leinster was that.
But more than a pioneer; that would not be enough to make him worth reading
today. The history of any literary genre is littered with pioneering works
that are of interest only to scholars, and plenty of those can be found in the