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The Runaway Skyscraper Murray Leinster
Arthur Chamberlain is dictating a letter to his secretary, Estelle Woodward, when the clocks begin to run backwards. Then time reverses and begins moving forward at an ever increasing speed. That's when Arthur realizes that they're in a runaway skyscraper. And only Arthur can save them. This classic science fiction short story by Murray Leinster first appeared in Argosy in the February 22, 1919 issue. 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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