The Runaway Skyscraper And Other Tales From The Pulps

This collection assembles eight of Leinster's classic pulp stories, ranging from science fiction to fantasy to mystery to adventure. Here are "The Runaway Skyscraper," "The Gallery Gods," "The Street of Magnificent Dreams," "Nerve," "Stories of the Hungry Country: The Case of the Dona Clotilde," "Morale," "Grooves," and "Footprints in the Snow."

The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction in Literature is a useful reference to the broad and burgeoning field of science fiction literature. Science fiction literature has gained immensely in critical respect and attention, while maintaining a broad readership. However, despite the fact that it is a rapidly changing field, contemporary science fiction literature also maintains a strong sense of its connections to science fiction of the past, which makes a historical reference of this sort particularly valuable as a tool for understanding science fiction literature as it now exists and as it has evolved over the years. The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction in Literature covers the history of science fiction in literature through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries including significant people; themes; critical issues; and the most significant genres that have formed science fiction literature. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about this subject.

Will F. Jenkins, known to science fiction fans by his penname Murray Leinster, was among the most prolific American writers of the 20th century. "The Dean of Science Fiction," as he was sometimes known, published more than 1,500 short stories and 100 books in a career spanning more than fifty years. This biography, written by his two youngest daughters, chronicles Murray Leinster's private and literary life from his first writings for The Smart Set and early pulp magazines such as Argosy, Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories, through the golden age of science fiction in the 1930s through the 1950s, to his death in 1975. Included as appendices are his famous 1946 story "A Logic Named Joe" and 1954 essay "To Build a Robot Brain."

Cityscapes of the Future: Urban Spaces in Science Fiction examines the central role played by urban spaces in science fictional narratives in diverse media from the literary to the ludic to cinematic.

Murray Leinster (1896-1975) was the pseudonym of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an award-winning American writer of science fiction and alternate history. He wrote and published over 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movies and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays. Leinster began his career as a free-lance writer before World War I; he was two months short of his 20th birthday when his first story, The Foreigner, appeared in the May 1916 issue of H. L. Mencken's literary magazine The Smart Set. Over the next three years, Leinster published ten more stories in the magazine. His first science fiction story, The Runaway Skyscraper, appeared in the 1919 issue of Argosy. In the 1930s, he published several science fiction stories and serials in Amazing and Astounding Stories and continued to appear frequently in other genre pulps. Leinster is credited with the invention of parallel universe stories. Sidewise in Time was published in the June 1934 issue of Astounding. This was probably the first time that the concept of alternate worlds appeared in modern science fiction.

"I don't know how I'm going to say it so you'll understand, but time is just as much a dimension as length and breadth." He frowned. He wanted to talk about Wells's Time Machine but he knew that'd be no use - these folks didn't read that sort of thing. "If the earth had settled down, we'd have been lower. If it had settled to one side, we'd have been moved one way or another, but as it's settled back in the Fourth Dimension, we're going back in time." "Then -" "We're in a runaway skyscraper, bound for some time back before the discovery of America!" Murray Leinster was a nom de plume of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an award-winning American writer of science fiction and alternate history. He wrote and published more than 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays. He began his career as a freelance writer before World War I but during and after he began appearing in pulp magazines, with his first science fiction story, The Runaway Skyscraper being published in Argosy. Leinster is credited with the invention of parallel universe stories in his Sidewise in Time, in which his vision of extraordinary oscillations in time having had a long-term impact on other author's and their writing, such as Isaac Asimov's Living Space, The Red Queen's Race, and The End of Eternity. Leinster's novella First Contact is also credited as one of the first (if not the first) instances of a universal translator in science fiction.

A highly interdisciplinary work, The Black Skyscraper reclaims the influence of race on modern architectural design as well as the less-well-understood effects these designs had on the experience and perception of race.

What impact did the new art of film have on the development of another new art, the emerging science fiction genre, during the pre- and early post-World War II era? Focusing on such popular pulp magazines as Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, and Wonder Stories, this book traces this early relationship between film and literature through four common features: stories that involve film or the film industry; film-related advertising; editorial matters and readers' letters commenting on film; and the magazines' heralded cover and story illustrations. By surveying these haunting traces of another medium in early science fiction discourse, we can begin to see the key role that a cinematic mindedness played in this formative era and to expand the early history of science fiction as a cultural idea beyond the usual boundaries that have been staked out by its literary manifestations and the genre's historians.