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Operation: Outer Space Murray Leinster
Television produce Jed Cochrane and his secretary Babs Deane are sent to the moon to make a documentary about a scientific discovery that allows faster-than-light communications. But as they discuss the discovery with the scientist, they realize the breakthrough will also allow faster-than-light travel. This classic science fiction novel by Murray Leinster was published by Fantasy Press in 1954. Murray Leinster was a nom de plume of William Fitzgerald Jenkins (1896-1975), an award-winning American writer of science fiction and alternate history. He wrote and published over 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays. Leinster is credited with the invention of parallel universe stories. Four years before Jack Williamson's The Legion of Time came out, Leinster published his "Sidewise in Time" in the June 1934 issue of Astounding. This was probably the first time that the concept of alternative worlds appeared in modern science fiction. Leinster's 1946 short story "A Logic Named Joe" contains one of the first descriptions of a computer (called a "logic") in fiction. In the story, Leinster was decades ahead of his time in imagining the Internet. He envisioned logics in every home, linked through a distributed system of servers (called "tanks"), to provide communications, entertainment, data access, and commerce; one character says that "logics are civilization." Jenkins was also an inventor, best known for the front projection process used in special effects.
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