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No Description Available Murray Leinster (June 16, 1896 - June 8, 1975) was the nom de plume of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an American science fiction and alternate history writer. He was born in Norfolk, Virginia. During World War I, he served with the Committee of Public Information and the United States Army (1917-1918). Following the war, Leinster became a free-lance writer. In 1921, he married Mary Mandola. They had four daughters. During World War II, he served in the Office of War Information. He won the Liberty Award in 1937 for "A Very Nice Family," the 1956 Hugo Award for Best Novelette for "Exploration Team," a retro-Hugo in 1996 for Best Novelette for "First Contact." Leinster was the Guest of Honor at the 21st Worldcon in 1963. In 1995, the Sidewise Award for Alternate History was established, named after Leinster's story "Sidewise in Time." Leinster wrote and published over 1,500 short stories and articles over the course of his career. He wrote 14 movie and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays, inspiring several series including "Land of the Giants" and "The Time Tunnel." Leinster first began appearing in the late 1910s in pulp magazines like Argosy and then sold to Astounding Stories in the 1930s on a regular basis. After World War II, when both his name and the pulps had achieved a wider acceptance, he would use either "William Fitzgerald" or "Will F. Jenkins" as names on stories when "Leinster" had already sold a piece to a particular issue. He was very prolific and successful in the fields of western, mystery, horror, and especially science fiction. His novel Miners in the Sky transfers the lawless atmosphere of the California Gold Rush, a common theme of Westerns, into an asteroid environment. He is credited with the invention of parallel universe stories. Four years before Jack Williamson's The Legion of Time came out, Leinster wrote his "Sidewise in Time," which was first published in Astounding in June 1934. This was probably the first time that the strange concept of alternate worlds appeared in modern science-fiction. In a sidewise path of time some cities never happened to be built. Leinster's vision of nature's extraordinary oscillations in time ('sidewise in time') had long-term effect on other authors, e.g., Isaac Asimov's "Living Space," "The Red Queen's Race," or his famous The End of Eternity. Murray Leinster's 1946 short story "A Logic Named Joe" describes Joe, a "logic," that is to say, a computer. This is one of the first descriptions of a computer in fiction. In this story Leinster was decades ahead of his time in imagining the Internet. He envisioned logics in every home, linked to provide communications, data access, and commerce. In fact, one character said that "logics are civilization."

Genre: Literary Collections / General (fancy, right?)