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"Murray Leinster" was one of the writing names used by the late William Fitzgeraid Jenkins, who also wrote as "Will F. Jenkins" and employed another half-dozen pseudonyms. Although he wrote copiously in many other fields, turning out millions of words of pulp stories, little of it other than the science fiction work he produced as Murray Leinster is known today—and, in fact, little outside of his SF work gained much attention even during his lifetime. As Murray Leinster, though, Jenkins had a profound and lasting effect on the development of modern science fiction.

"Leinster" sold his first SF story to Argosy in 1919, had work published in Hugo Gernsback's Amazing during the '20s, and went on to be one of the mainstays of John W. Campbell's "Golden Age" Astounding in the '40s and '50s, where most of his best work appeared. Most of Leinster's novels are heavily dated and long forgotten—one of the few figures of the day who made his reputation almost entirely on his short fiction, he was somehow never able to make much of an impact with his novels, which were widely regarded as inferior to his short work even during his working lifetime—but the best of his short stories remain fresh and powerful today In his short work, Leinster more or less invented several subgenres still active today: for instance, he is credited with writing one of the first Alternate History stories, "Sideways In Time," and one of the earliest First Contact stories, the famous "First Contact," and both stories still hold up as among the best treatments of their subjects.

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