A Logic Named Joe

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"Murray Leinster" was the pen-name William F. Jenkins (1896–1975) used for his science fiction; his was one of the longest and most honorable careers the genre offered. The breadth of that career is astonishing; his first science fiction story, The Runaway Skyscraper was published in Argosy magazine in 1919, seven years before the science fiction genre inaugurated in the 4/26 issue of Amazing Stories had been established. And the short novel, The Pirates of Zan, included in this volume, was one of the last serials to appear in Astounding Science Fiction (February through April 1959) before, in February 1960, just after its 30th anniversary, it changed its name to Analog. The January 1960 issue was the last one under the Astounding name, and Leinster was there with the short story Attention Saint Patrick, 30 years after his first appearance in the magazine.

This is a career and the career is only a part of Jenkins' contribution; he was also an inventor who obtained many patents. One of them, for the so-called "back-screen projector" used in movie theaters to this date, is that device which enables you or the annoying person in the row ahead of you at the Bijou to stand and leave the auditorium in mid-movie without casting a shadow on the screen. Jenkins who lived in Gloucester, Virginia, for most of his adult life, had four children, wrote much other than science fiction (appearing frequently in Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, other mass circulation magazine of the 1940's and 1950's) but it is clearly the science fiction by which he will be remembered.

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