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The Pirates of Ersatz Murray Leinster
Sometimes it seems nobody loves a benefactor ... particularly nobody on a well-heeled, self-satisfied planet. Grandpa always said Pirates were really benefactors, though.... Bron Hoddan runs away from his pirate world to the civilized planet of Walden, where he plans to work as an electrical engineer. But when he's arrested for developing a high efficiency power generation system, he begins to wonder if he made the right move. With the help of the ambassador from his home world, Bron escapes to the feudal planet Darth. This classic science fiction novel by Murray Leinster was serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in the February, March and April 1959 issues 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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