On 10/26/2025 5:30 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
[snip-snip]

Out of this World Hardcover - January 1, 1958
by Murray Leinster
https://amzn.to/481BpEy

There appears to be a surprising number of Leinster fans online. The
last time I came across a bunch (more than three even!) was just a few
days ago -- see the mini-review of _Creatures of the Abyss_ at https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1of049m/small_details_make_great_writers_the_case_of/
.

When asked for specific recommendations, I responded as follows:

The standard "Best of" Leinster collections are:

* The Best of Murray Leinster, Corgi, 1976
* The Best of Murray Leinster, Del Rey/Ballantine, 1978
* First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster, NESFA Press, 1998

My personal picks would be, roughly in the listed order:

* Exploration Team, 1956, Hugo winner. Part of a series, but works well
as a standalone.
* First Contact, 1945. A classic first contact story.
* De Profundis, 1945. A very alien (especially for its era) POV.
* The Power, 1945. A different kind of a very "alien" POV.
* A Logic Named Joe, 1946. Arguably the first description of the
internet in SF. Note that the protagonist is fairly typical for
Leinster's stories; some find them irritating.
* The Lonely Planet, 1949. The planet of the title is a single organism
whose evolution we follow through the centuries. The story reads more
like an outline for a novel, but the idea is lovely. It also elaborates
on one of Leinster's recurrent themes: humans, especially humans in
charge, are too nasty, brutish, paranoid and often plain stupid to make reasonable decisions, especially when dealing with aliens. See
"Castaway" (1953) for an extreme example.
* Sidewise in Time, 1934. The granddaddy of alternate history stories. Somewhat dated due to its use of a "mad scientist" subplot to facilitate exposition and other storytelling conventions of the pulp era. Doesn't
explore the premise as much as you might expect, but it would have
probably exceeded the story's "weirdness budget" in 1934.

These stories take place in a vanished America, which is nice to

visit. It was an odd era, in between the end of WWII and the start of
the Korean war, when we were still technically happy allies together
with the USSR, and there was still some thought that we might resume our historical status of having the 26th (or whatever it was) largest army
in the world. It was a time when the Federal government impinged very
little in people's lives, and a man could still send his 14 year old son
to drive into town and pick up beer & cigarettes for dad.

To quote Muriel R. Becker's addendum to Clifford D. Simak's interview in _Clifford D. Simak, a Primary and Secondary Bibliography_:

Clifford D(onald) Simak was born in 1904 near the confluence of the

Mississippi and Wisconsin Rivers ? that area of southwestern Wisconsin
which continues to be the setting for so many of his tales; yet, it is a country to which he rarely returns physically. "I'll tell you this," he
has explained, "The southwestern Wisconsin that I write about is a
complete and absolute fantasy. The valleys are not nearly as deep, the
hills are not nearly as big, the glens are not nearly as dark. What I'm
doing, I suppose, is expatriate writing. I don?t go back often because I
want to keep the analogue I have built up of it ? the vision of home
that I've had to leave to find."

--- PyGate Linux v1.5
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Ted Nolan wrote:

Ahasuerus wrote:

Ted Nolan wrote:

<Unsnip pertinent parts of the post.>

OK, this is way late and covers June, July & August, I think.
I was on vacation for a good bit of that, so it was a lot of
books, and took me half a dozen sit-downs to get through.
I've run a spell check, but am sick enough of it all now that
I'm not going to make another pass for missing words, second
thoughts or other brain-deadness.

Brian Niemeier offers a word of warning about too many second thoughts:

How to Revise Without Butchering Your Book
<http://archive.today/oOnCD>

Many new writers labor under the common misconception
that editing has to hurt.
You finish your first draft, take a deep breath,
and brace yourself for the cutting. You've heard the
slogans: "Kill your darlings," "tighten your prose,"
"less is more." And armed with that half-remembered
advice, you dig in.
And then you start hacking like Jack Torrance with a
red pen.
A few weeks later, you emerge from the wreckage and
realize that your story, which once had heart and rhythm,
now reads like a dishwasher installation manual.
Because unknown to you, you didn't edit. What you did
was perform surgery with a chainsaw.

(excerpt)

The Runaway Robot Paperback - January 1, 1965
by Lester Del Rey
https://amzn.to/463QfI8

This classic juvenile is credited to Del Rey, but is now pretty
universally acknowledged to be by Paul W. Fairman. (In fact, ISFDB
references Lawrence Watt-Evans writing here in RASFW on that).

The basic story is pretty simple. Paul, a young boy growing up on
Ganymede has a companion robot Rex, to watch over him and keep him
safe in the moon's hostile environment. Robots are complicated
pieces of equipment, with enough random factors that some are known
to be better at various tasks than others. They're not "intelligent"
though, so while it's normal that Paul is attached to Rex, when the
family is transferred back to Earth (Paul's father is an executive
and Ganymede is a bit of a hardship post) there's nothing untoward
about Paul's father selling Rex to save on shipping costs, especially
as Paul is now a teenager, and can be expected to look after himself.

Except we know this isn't quite the case as the book is narrated
by Rex, and he very clearly is a person, something Paul strongly
believes as well. It is actually Rex who has bought into the company
line and believes he is not a person, so after he is sold, he is
reluctant to go along with Paul's wild idea to run away. When he
finally does, the two are off on an ill-planned adventure that takes
them on a tramp freighter, to Mars and finally to a climax on Earth
itself.

I read this book dozens of times in the 60s, and not since, so there
were a number of things I had either forgotten, or didn't realize
at the time.

First, it's pretty obviously a slavery allegory, with Huck Finn
explicitly referenced once, and second, Rex's very dry, matter-of-fact
narration lets him get in a number of zingers, on the foibles of
teenagers, and a number of other subjects. For instance:

The Marspoint bubble doesn't cover the whole Point. It's a
comparatively small one over the ticket offices and restrooms
and eating places and such, with tunnels running out to the
boarding ports of the ships.

The place was filled with noise and color (which I wasn't
quite used to yet) and activity. There were people and
creatures from all over the System. The polite, green-shelled
Martians always seemed to be apologizing for being alive.
I saw three seven-foot, wall-eyed Venusians, their bodies
pure white, sitting together eating fish out of a basket.
Venusians live on a certain kind of fish they catch on their
own planet. The fish are all that they can eat, so they
always take their food with them in a basket wherever they
go. I do not like the Venusians. They are very ugly.

There was also a party of Mercurians -- maybe a dozen --
their bodies much different from those of the Venusians or
of any other of the System peoples. Small, dried-out,
fireproof bodies. You can hit a Mercurian with a blowtorch,
and if it was from the back he wouldn't even look around.

Most of the travelers were from Earth. Earthmen dominate
the System. They were the first and only ones to make
spaceships to go anywhere in the System.

Earthmen and Earthwomen are always self-confident and sure
of themselves, and aren't liked very well by the peoples
of the other planets and satellites. This always seemed
strange to me, because the Earth people have done so much
for everyone else. They made space travel possible and gave
a lot of the people on other planets a better way of life.
Therefore it would seem that the other peoples should be
grateful and like the Earth people. But they don't.

That is one of the things about human nature that never
made sense to me. But I'm only a robot, and robots aren't
supposed to understand such things.

I'll say one thing for the Earth people. They don't let not
being liked stop them. They go right on doing things for
the System as though they were loved and cherished clear
out into infinity.

Finally, what I took for a completely happy ending in the 1960s
looks less so on re-reading. Rex's initiative and wild scheming
have ended up with him recognized as a special robot and he will
get to stay with Paul, to some extent anyway, but as an adult I
come away realizing that his life is still not his own in a meaningful
way, and the question of how many other robots are play-acting to
cover interior lives is never addressed.

Viewing a classic juvenile through adult eyes is a great idea Ted!
You're likely on to something with the slavery angle. Also in the mix
may be Miltonic memes from PARADISE LOST.
The first couple of Science Fiction - Romanticists Mary Shelley and
Edgar Allan Poe - proffer perspicacity into the perfidious part of
publishing. In a ploy reminiscent of the many nyms of John Campbell,
under cover of a pseudonym, Poe published a review of his own stories.
[1]
Great Science Fiction writers, such as Francis Bacon, seem always
inclined test their audience's gullibility. Or perhaps they do it for
the pelf, in light of publishing's profitability paucity.

Note.

[1] EDGAR ALLAN POE, EUREKA, AND SCIENTIFIC IMAGINATION by David N
Stamos (excerpt)

Another consideration that lends itself to the hoax interpretation
of Eureka concerns a feature of Poe's literary theory that, unless
I am mistaken, has hitherto gone unnoticed. In Poe's anonymous
book review of his own Tales (1845), a collection of some of his
more popular fiction, he writes at the end that "A writer must have
the fullest belief in his statements, or must simulate that belief
perfectly, to produce an absorbing interest in the mind of his
reader. That power of simulation can only be possessed by a man of
high genius. It is the result of a peculiar combination of the
mental faculties. ... It is possessed by Mr. Poe, in its full
perfection."

[snip-snip]

Out of this World Hardcover - January 1, 1958
by Murray Leinster
https://amzn.to/481BpEy

There appears to be a surprising number of Leinster fans online. The
last time I came across a bunch (more than three even!) was just a few
days ago -- see the mini-review of _Creatures of the Abyss_ at >>https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1of049m/small_details_make_great_wri

ters_the_case_of/

.

When asked for specific recommendations, I responded as follows:

The standard "Best of" Leinster collections are:

* The Best of Murray Leinster, Corgi, 1976
* The Best of Murray Leinster, Del Rey/Ballantine, 1978
* First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster, NESFA Press, 1998

My personal picks would be, roughly in the listed order:

* Exploration Team, 1956, Hugo winner. Part of a series, but works well
as a standalone.
* First Contact, 1945. A classic first contact story.
* De Profundis, 1945. A very alien (especially for its era) POV.
* The Power, 1945. A different kind of a very "alien" POV.
* A Logic Named Joe, 1946. Arguably the first description of the
internet in SF. Note that the protagonist is fairly typical for
Leinster's stories; some find them irritating.
* The Lonely Planet, 1949. The planet of the title is a single organism >>whose evolution we follow through the centuries. The story reads more
like an outline for a novel, but the idea is lovely. It also elaborates
on one of Leinster's recurrent themes: humans, especially humans in
charge, are too nasty, brutish, paranoid and often plain stupid to make >>reasonable decisions, especially when dealing with aliens. See
"Castaway" (1953) for an extreme example.
* Sidewise in Time, 1934. The granddaddy of alternate history stories. >>Somewhat dated due to its use of a "mad scientist" subplot to facilitate >>exposition and other storytelling conventions of the pulp era. Doesn't >>explore the premise as much as you might expect, but it would have
probably exceeded the story's "weirdness budget" in 1934.

Thanks! I know some of those, of course, but others sound new to me.

Leinster protagonists did have a certain feel to them, but not one I mind.

These stories take place in a vanished America, which is nice to

visit. It was an odd era, in between the end of WWII and the start of
the Korean war, when we were still technically happy allies together
with the USSR, and there was still some thought that we might resume our >>historical status of having the 26th (or whatever it was) largest army
in the world. It was a time when the Federal government impinged very >>little in people's lives, and a man could still send his 14 year old son
to drive into town and pick up beer & cigarettes for dad.

To quote Muriel R. Becker's addendum to Clifford D. Simak's interview in >>_Clifford D. Simak, a Primary and Secondary Bibliography_:

Clifford D(onald) Simak was born in 1904 near the confluence of the >>Mississippi and Wisconsin Rivers ??? that area of southwestern Wisconsin >>which continues to be the setting for so many of his tales; yet, it is a >>country to which he rarely returns physically. "I'll tell you this," he

has explained, "The southwestern Wisconsin that I write about is a
complete and absolute fantasy. The valleys are not nearly as deep, the >>hills are not nearly as big, the glens are not nearly as dark. What I'm >>doing, I suppose, is expatriate writing. I don???t go back often because I >>want to keep the analogue I have built up of it ??? the vision of home
that I've had to leave to find."

That's the way it should have been, and if it wasn't, so what!

Thank you for your recommendations guys. This is shaping up to be
another Leinster Winter for me. Last Winter Leinster's Med Ship stories
played through my earbuds during dog walks and mountain spins.

--
Don.......My cat's )\._.,--....,'``. veritas _|_ telltale tall tail /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,. liberabit |
tells tall tales.. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' vos |


--- PyGate Linux v1.5
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)