sword-and-sorcery tale, was written as a last-minute fill-in when a cover story by Arthur J. Burks proved unsatisfactory. Together with The Moon is Hell, a short novel of stark realism drawing a parallel between the survival problems of Antarctic and moon explorers, it made its appearance as a Fantasy Press book in 1951.
Fifteen years after he had quit writing for a living, Camp-bell still displayed excellent technique in The Idealists, a novelette written expressly for the hard-cover anthology, 9 Tales of Space and Time, edited by Raymond J. Healy for Henry Holt in 1954. Scientists aren't always "good guys," was the point he made, and a high degree of technical development does not necessarily carry with it maturity in dealing with different cultures.
But for all practical purposes, Campbell's writing career ended at the age of 28 with Who Goes There?
As one of the first of the modern science-fiction writers, he had a profound influence on the field. As editor of the leading, best-paying magazine, he taught, coerced, and cajoled his type of story. As a result, for the more than a quarter-century since he ceased writing, older readers have been haunted by half-remembered echoes in the plot structure of hundreds of stories and in the lines of scores of writers. It is not strange if sometimes readers shake the hypnotic wonder of the wheel-ing cosmos from their minds and demand:
"Who goes there?"
3 MURRAY LEINSTER
"The whole thing began when the clock on the Metropolitan Tower began to run backwards." That was the opening sentence of The Runaway Skyscraper in the February 22, 1919, issue of argosy and with those words Murray Leinster began his science-fiction writing career. Already a veteran with two years of steady magazine sales behind him, young Leinster had sold argosy a series of Happy Village stories and was fed up with predigested pablum. There would be no more in that series for a while, he wrote editor Matthew White, Jr., since he was working on a story opening with the lines, "The whole thing began when the clock on the Metro-politan Tower began to run backwards."
"By return mail," recalls Leinster, "I got a letter telling me to let him see it when I finished. So I had to write it or admit I was lying."
At the time the story was written, the tower of the home office of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was one of the tallest and most distinctive skyscrapers in New York topped by a clock that was a city landmark. Readers of argosy were enthralled to read of the building's remarkable journey in time back to a period hundreds of years before white men appeared on this continent. Some two thousand workers in the skyscraper thus find themselves confronted with the task of obtaining enough food to eat and suitable fuel to run the building's mammoth generators. Little help can be expected from the few thoroughly
"shaken" Indians that have witnessed this strange occurrence. The scientific "explanation," that the skyscraper has sunk back in time instead of down into a pool of water created by a spring beneath it, taxed one's credulity only slightly less than the unimpaired functioning of the entire elevator, telephone, and cooking systems of the building, even though outside sources of power were hundreds of years away. Leinster's characters poked around a bit, but since the author couldn't quite seem to figure out the solution of the sustenance problem, he had the hero reestablish the equilibrium of the structure in its own time by pouring soapsuds into the subsurface water. The building reappears at exactly the same moment it left, and no one believes the tale its occupants tell.
An argosy readership that was still completing Garret Smith's novel that whisked them into the future of After a Million Years and had accepted the revival of Aztec gods in the modern world as offered by Francis Stevens in Citadel of Fear only months earlier was not inclined to quibble over "details." They greeted Murray Leinster's
Fifteen years after he had quit writing for a living, Camp-bell still displayed excellent technique in The Idealists, a novelette written expressly for the hard-cover anthology, 9 Tales of Space and Time, edited by Raymond J. Healy for Henry Holt in 1954. Scientists aren't always "good guys," was the point he made, and a high degree of technical development does not necessarily carry with it maturity in dealing with different cultures.
But for all practical purposes, Campbell's writing career ended at the age of 28 with Who Goes There?
As one of the first of the modern science-fiction writers, he had a profound influence on the field. As editor of the leading, best-paying magazine, he taught, coerced, and cajoled his type of story. As a result, for the more than a quarter-century since he ceased writing, older readers have been haunted by half-remembered echoes in the plot structure of hundreds of stories and in the lines of scores of writers. It is not strange if sometimes readers shake the hypnotic wonder of the wheel-ing cosmos from their minds and demand:
"Who goes there?"
3 MURRAY LEINSTER
"The whole thing began when the clock on the Metropolitan Tower began to run backwards." That was the opening sentence of The Runaway Skyscraper in the February 22, 1919, issue of argosy and with those words Murray Leinster began his science-fiction writing career. Already a veteran with two years of steady magazine sales behind him, young Leinster had sold argosy a series of Happy Village stories and was fed up with predigested pablum. There would be no more in that series for a while, he wrote editor Matthew White, Jr., since he was working on a story opening with the lines, "The whole thing began when the clock on the Metro-politan Tower began to run backwards."
"By return mail," recalls Leinster, "I got a letter telling me to let him see it when I finished. So I had to write it or admit I was lying."
At the time the story was written, the tower of the home office of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was one of the tallest and most distinctive skyscrapers in New York topped by a clock that was a city landmark. Readers of argosy were enthralled to read of the building's remarkable journey in time back to a period hundreds of years before white men appeared on this continent. Some two thousand workers in the skyscraper thus find themselves confronted with the task of obtaining enough food to eat and suitable fuel to run the building's mammoth generators. Little help can be expected from the few thoroughly
"shaken" Indians that have witnessed this strange occurrence. The scientific "explanation," that the skyscraper has sunk back in time instead of down into a pool of water created by a spring beneath it, taxed one's credulity only slightly less than the unimpaired functioning of the entire elevator, telephone, and cooking systems of the building, even though outside sources of power were hundreds of years away. Leinster's characters poked around a bit, but since the author couldn't quite seem to figure out the solution of the sustenance problem, he had the hero reestablish the equilibrium of the structure in its own time by pouring soapsuds into the subsurface water. The building reappears at exactly the same moment it left, and no one believes the tale its occupants tell.
An argosy readership that was still completing Garret Smith's novel that whisked them into the future of After a Million Years and had accepted the revival of Aztec gods in the modern world as offered by Francis Stevens in Citadel of Fear only months earlier was not inclined to quibble over "details." They greeted Murray Leinster's
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