The Runaway Skyscraper

Arthur Chamberlain has problems. His one-man engineering firm is faltering and his pretty secretary Estelle barely notices him. But these problems are put aside when his Manhattan office building falls into the fourth dimension. Madison Square is filled with wigwams and it's up to Arthur to engineer a way to make his building to fall back to the future.

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.

Arthur Chamberlain, an engineer who works in a midtown Manhattan office building called the Metropolitan Tower. When the sun suddenly begins moving backwards in the sky, setting rapidly in the east, he is the only one to realize what is actually happening: a flaw in the rock beneath the building has caused it to subside, but instead of moving in space, the building is falling backwards into the past. When the subsidence finally ends, the building is located several thousand years in the past, and its 2000-odd inhabitants find themselves stranded in pre-Columbian Manhattan!

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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."

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!

This etext was produced from the February 22, 1919 issue of Argosy magazine _We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.

Complementing Science-Fiction: The Early Years, which surveys science-fiction published in book form from its beginnings through 1930, the present volume covers all the science-fiction printed in the genre magazines--Amazing, Astounding, and Wonder, along with offshoots and minor magazines--from 1926 through 1936. This is the first time this historically important literary phenomenon, which stands behind the enormous modern development of science-fiction, has been studied thoroughly and accurately. The heart of the book is a series of descriptions of all 1,835 stories published during this period, plus bibliographic information. Supplementing this are many useful features: detailed histories of each of the magazines, an issue by issue roster of contents, a technical analysis of the art work, brief authors' biographies, poetry and letter indexes, a theme and motif index of approximately 30,0000 entries, and general indexes. Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years is not only indispensable for reference librarians, collectors, readers, and scholars interested in science-fiction, it is also of importance to the study of popular culture during the Great Depression in the United States. Most of its data, which are largely based on rare and almost unobtainable sources, are not available elsewhere.