Last issue, I mentioned a prophetic story by the pseudonymous “Murray Leinster” that had forecast in solid technical detail, back in the antediluvian year of 1931, the use of orbital space satellites to beam electrical power down to Earth. A discussion of that essay I had with Barry Malzberg the day after I wrote it put me in mind of an immensely more startling Leinster story, dating from 1946: “A Logic Named Joe,” in which, roughly fifty years before the fact, we are given a clear prediction of personal computers, the Internet, Google, Craig’s List, the loss of privacy in a cyberspace world, and even that bold speculative phenomenon that we call the Singularity. Science fiction is only occasionally a reliable vehicle for prophecy—nobody, for example, guessed that the age of manned exploration of space would begin and end in the same decade—but this is one of the prime examples of an absolute bull’s-eye hit.

“Murray Leinster’s” real name was Will F. Jenkins (1896-1975)—the pseudonym, which he made no attempt to conceal, derives from his family’s ancestral county in Ireland. He was a prolific pulp writer from his teenage days on, turning out westerns, mysteries, weird tales, and much else. Under his own name he wrote for slick magazines like Collier’s, Liberty, and the Saturday Evening Post, while as Murray Leinster he was a major figure in science fiction for almost fifty years, going back to a lively story called “The Runaway Skyscraper” that was published in Argosy in 1919, seven years before such things as science fiction magazines existed. He followed it with a rich, moody Leinster tale of the far future, “The Mad Planet,” in 1920, which, with several sequels, he expanded into a book decades later. When the first SF magazines were founded Murray Leinster was right there, with a story in the very first issue (January 1930) of the garish pulp Astounding Stories of Super-Science, which is still with us today as Analog Science Fiction. He would remain a steady contributor to Astounding and then Analog for the next thirty-six years, and among his dozens of contributions are some of the imperishable classics of our field—“Sidewise in Time” (1934), the first parallel-world story; “Proxima Centauri” (1935), the first generation-starship story; and, notably, 1945’s “First Contact,” one of the most successful tales of human/alien encounter in space ever written. And then there’s “A Logic Named Joe.”

Leinster/Jenkins was a serious gadgeteer—he invented and patented a system for rear-screen projection that was in use in movies and television for many years—and even the pulpiest of his stories has a solid technological underpinning that gives it special conviction. But “A Logic Named Joe” stands out among his work for the eerie accuracy of the technological extrapolations that allowed him to visualize the world of the Internet so far in advance.

It appeared in the March 1946 issue of Astounding, a short and presumably minor story placed near the back of the book. It didn’t even bear the familiar “Leinster” byline, because there was a Leinster story elsewhere in the issue, so editor Campbell stuck Will F. Jenkins’ real name, much less well known to SF readers, on it. But readers noticed right away that there was something special about the story, and in the popularity poll that Campbell regularly conducted they voted it #1 for that issue, ahead of some much longer stories by some very celebrated writers. During the years that followed it was reprinted in a good many anthologies. But it is for readers of the Internet age that the story is a real eye-opener.

There’s nothing noteworthy about its style. Will Jenkins never went in for literary flourishes, preferring to tell his stories in a simple, sometimes almost folksy, manner. And it is not until the second page that we learn that what he calls a “logic” is actually a sort of business machine with a keyboard and a television screen attached. You know what that is. But in 1946 no one did. Computers had already begun to figure in a few SF stories, but they were usually referred to as “thinking machines,” and they were always visualized as immense objects filling laboratories the size of warehouses. The desk-model personal computer that every child knows how to use was too fantastic a concept even for science fiction then—until “A Logic Named Joe.”

And what a useful computer the “logic” was! Everybody had one. “You know the logic setup,” Jenkins’s narrator tells us. “You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it’s got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It’s hooked to the tank, which has the Carson Circuit all fixed up with relays. Say you punch ‘Station SNAFU’ on your logic. Relays in the tank take over an’ whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecastin’ comes on your logic’s screen. Or you punch ‘Sally Hancock’s phone’ an’ the screen blinks an’ sputters an’ you’re hooked up with the logic in her house an’ if someone answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today’s race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin’ Garfield’s administration or what is PDQ and R sellin’ for today, that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin’ full of all the facts in creation an’ all the recorded telecasts that ever was made—no, it’s hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country—an’ anything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an’ you get it. Also it does math for you, and keeps books, an’ acts as consultin’ chemist, physician, astronomer, and tealeaf reader, with a ‘Advice to Lovelorn’ thrown in.”

Substitute “servers” for “tanks” and you have a pretty good description of the structure of the Internet. The “Carson Circuit” is the 1946 version of the magical algorithm by which Google provides the path to just about any information you might want in a fraction of a second. Where the particular logic that gets nicknamed “Joe” differs from other logics, though, and from the computers we all own today, is that it is miswired in some strange way that gives it the ability to assemble existing data into startling new combinations on its own initiative—plus a complete lack of inhibitions in making the new information available to its users.

So Joe’s screen suddenly declares, “Announcing new and improved service! Your logic is now equipped to give you not only consultive but directive service. If you want to do something and don’t know how to do it—ask your logic!”

Want to murder your wife and get away with it, for example? Joe will provide details of a way to mix green shoe polish and frozen pea soup to commit the perfect crime. Want to drink all you’d like and sober up five minutes later? Take a teaspoon of this detergent. Make foolproof counterfeit money? Like this, Joe says. Rob a bank? Turn base metal into gold? Build a perpetual-motion machine? Shift money from somebody else’s bank account to your own? Here’s the trick. All the information is in the tanks, somewhere. Joe will find it and connect it for you and serve it up without a second thought, or even a first one. And Joe is connected to all the logics in the world, so everybody can ask for anything in the privacy of his own home.

But it’s the end of privacy, of course. You give your logic your name and it will tell you your address, age, sex, your charge-account balance, your wife or husband’s name, your income, your traffic-ticket record, and all manner of other bits of personal data. You give the logic someone else’s name and it’ll provide the same information about that person, too. It’s every privacy advocate’s worst nightmare: nobody has any secrets. You don’t even need to do any hacking. Just turn on your logic and ask.

The logic technician who discovers Joe’s special capabilities tells his supervisor that the whole logic tank must be shut down at once before society collapses under Joe’s cheerful onslaught. But how? “Does it occur to you, fella, that the tank has been doin’ all the computin’ for every business office for years?” the supervisor asks. “It’s been handlin’ the distribution of 94 percent of all the telecast programs, has given out all the information on weather, plane schedules, special sales, employment opportunities and news; has handled all person-to-person contacts over wires and recorded every business conversation and agreement—Listen, fella! Logics changed civilization! Logics are civilization! If we shut off logics, we go back to a kind of civilization we have forgotten how to run!”

Exactly so. A totally connected world is a totally dependent world. Will F. Jenkins, writing back there just a few months after the end of World War II, saw the whole thing coming, even the phenomenon called the Singularity. (A concept offered by the British-born mathematician I.J. Good in 1965—“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.” It was Vernor Vinge, in 1983, who first applied the term “the Singularity” to that leap toward superhuman artificial intelligence. But Will F. Jenkins’s Joe had reached Singularity level back in that 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction

I didn’t know Will Jenkins well—he was almost forty years my senior, after all—but I did have one memorable encounter with him in March of 1956, exactly ten years after “A Logic Named Joe” was published. I was a senior in college, but I had already begun my career as a professional writer, and that day I brought my newest story to the office of the legendary editor John W. Campbell, who had dominated the SF world since before I was old enough to read. Will Jenkins happened to be in Campbell’s office that day. John introduced us, and I said something appropriately awe-stricken.

Then, to my horror, John proceeded to read my new story right in front of both of us. After about ten minutes he looked up and said, “There’s something wrong with this, but I’m not sure what it is. Will, would you mind taking a look?” And he handed my manuscript across the desk to Will Jenkins. I sat there squirming, aghast all over again, as the author of “First Contact” and “Sidewise in Time” read my story too. And at last he said, in that gentle Virginia-accented voice of his, “I think the problem is here, in the next-to-last paragraph.”

“That’s absolutely right,” Campbell said. “Get to work, Bob.” He pointed to a typewriter on a desk nearby. I revised that paragraph then and there, and sold the story on the spot. (Not one of my best, and it has never been reprinted. But what an experience for a twenty-one-year-old novice writer!)

And what a science fiction writer Will F. Jenkins was! Most of his work is out of print now, alas. But “A Logic Named Joe” is very easy to find. Just sit down in front of your logic and key the story’s name into the Google box, and any number of links will show its availability. You can have it in any of several collections of Leinster stories that are for sale in old-fashioned print format. Or, if you’d rather just download it from the Internet, simply ask. Your logic will get it for you in the twinkling of an eye.