Vintage Treasures: The Best of Murray Leinster
I first encountered Murray Leinster… wow, I don’t even know when. Probably in The Hugo Winners, Isaac Asimov’s 1962 anthology collecting the first short stories to win science fiction’s coveted prize.
It featured Leinster’s 1956 novelette, “Exploration Team,” about a desperate rescue attempt on a distant planet — involving an illegal settler blackmailed into helping a lost colony, and his team of Kodiak bears. Lost colonies, deadly aliens, and even more deadly bears… that’s the kind of story that sticks in your mind when you’re twelve, believe me.
Leinster died in 1975; he published his last book, a novelization of the Land of the Giants TV series, in 1969. But he was a steady presence on bookstore shelves during my formative reading years for well over a decade after his death, with reprint titles like The Med Series (Ace, 1983) and The Forgotten Planet (Carroll & Graf, 1990).
The mass market reprints have tapered off over the last few years. The last were all from Baen, a trio of excellent collections all edited by Eric Flint and Guy Gordon: Med Ship (2002), Planets of Adventure (2003), and A Logic Named Joe (2005).
Since then, the wheels of publishing have ground on, as they do, abandoning Leinster by the side of the road. We did our part to keep his memory alive, of course. I reprinted one of Leinster’s earliest pulp tales, “The Fifth-Dimension Catapult,” from the January 1931 Astounding Stories of Super-Science, in Black Gate 9.
There have also been low-budget digital editions of his out-of-copyright pulp fiction, sure, but by and large the genre — as living genres should — has focused instead on new and emerging authors.
I used to think that was inevitable. Readers have long memories, but publishing industries don’t, and when an author has been out of print for over a decade, she’s likely to remain that way.
But the brilliant Lester del Rey, publisher of Del Rey Books, proved me wrong. In fact, he proved me wrong nearly four decades ago, with a fabulous line of top-selling paperbacks collecting the best short science fiction and fantasy from the writers of the Golden Age of SF — including The Best of Murray Leinster, a collection of some of the best short SF and fantasy of the 20th Century.
