Reflections
The Man Who Saw the Future
by Robert Silverberg
Will F. Jenkins (1896–1975), who wrote under the pseudonym of “Murray Leinster” throughout his long career, would be on nobody’s list of the top ten science fiction writers today, but he was a considerable figure in his day, which lasted from the 1920s into the 1960s. He will always be remembered for one classic story, “First Contact,” the story that gave us the translating-machine concept and is still being reprinted regularly in anthologies. Among other once-famous stories of his that modern-day readers would find rewarding are such tales as “Sidewise in Time” (1934), which introduced the parallel-universe theme to science fiction, and “Proxima Centauri” of the same year, perhaps the first interstellar generation-ship story, but one hears little about them now.
In recent years, though, Jenkins/Leinster has won new fame for a story dating from 1946 that predicted the internet in startling detail—“A Logic Named Joe,” it’s called, “logic” being the term Leinster used for what we call computers today, and I devoted a column to it in 2008, with this to say:
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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, though they were usually referred to as “thinking machines,” but 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’ 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 the Lovelorn” thrown in.”
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That’s right. He invented the internet, from central servers down to Google, in just about every detail–in 1946! Long before that, Jenkins had the idea of generating electricity in space. His “Power Planet” appeared in the January 1931 issue of the pioneering SF magazine Amazing Stories.
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The Power Planet, of course” [Leinster writes], is that vast man-made disk of metal set spinning about the sun to supply the Earth with power. Everybody learns in his grammar-school textbooks of its construction just beyond the Moon and of its maneuvering to its present orbit by a vast expenditure of rocket fuel. Only forty million miles from the sun’s surface, its sunward side is raised nearly to red heat by the blazing radiation. And the shadow side, naturally, is down to the utter cold of space. There is a temperature drop of nearly seven hundred degrees between the two sides, and Williamson cells turn that heat-difference into electric current, with an efficiency of ninety-nine percent. Then the big Dugald tubes—they are twenty feet long on the Power Planet—transform it into the beam which is focused always on the Earth and delivers something over a billion horsepower to the various receivers that have been erected.
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He dreamed up the 3-D printer, too, in 1945’s “Things Pass By.” He called it a “constructor”:
“This constructor is both efficient and flexible. It feeds magnetronic plastics–the stuff they make houses and ships out of nowadays–into this moving arm. It makes drawings in the air following drawings it scans with photo-cells. But plastic comes out of the end of the drawing arm and hardens as it comes. . . .”
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How did he do it? Most science fiction writers regard themselves merely as storytellers, making no serious claim to having the gift of prophecy. But Will Jenkins, again and again, combined his storytelling knack with amazing insight into the technological future. I met him a few times in the early years of my career, and felt awed to be in his presence. He was a courtly, soft-spoken Virginian, who had hoped to become a scientist, but circumstances did not allow him to go beyond an eighth-grade education. Nevertheless, he pursued a lifelong interest in science and technology, building a glider that he successfully flew when he was thirteen, maintaining a home laboratory from which flowed scores of patentable inventions, among them the front-projection process that is still used for cinematic special effects, while at the same time carrying on a major career as a fiction writer under the “Leinster” pseudonym, with science fiction as one of his major specialties.
And I keep discovering examples of his—well, astounding, amazing—gift for portraying things to come. Just the other day I found myself looking at a couple of his earliest stories, “The Mad Planet” and “The Red Dust,” which were published in 1920 and 1921 in the weekly pulp magazine Argosy, long before the founding of the first science fiction magazine–two tales of the terrifying world of thirty thousand years from now, a steamy, tropical world inhabited by giant fungi and enormous insects, in which a small band of human beings struggles to maintain a precarious existence. And how did he think our present-day climate would get transformed into that of a new Carboniferous Period? This is what Murray Leinster tells us, writing more than a hundred years ago:
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Then, just when men were congratulating themselves that the Golden Age had come again, it was observed that the planet seemed ill at ease. Fissures opened slowly in the crust, and carbonic acid gas–the carbon dioxide of chemists–began to pour out into the atmosphere. That gas had long been known to be present in the air, and was considered necessary to plant life. Most of the plants took the gas and absorbed its carbon into themselves, releasing the oxygen for use again.
Scientists had calculated that a great deal of the earth’s increased fertility was due to the activities of man in burning coal and petroleum. Because of these views, no great alarm was caused by the continuous exhalation from the world’s interior.
Constantly, however, the volume increased. New fissures constantly opened, each one adding a new source of carbon dioxide, and each one pouring into the already laden atmosphere more of the gas–beneficent in small quantities, but as the world learned, deadly in large ones.
The percentage of the heavy, vapor-like gas increased. The whole body of the air became heavier through its admixture. It absorbed more moisture and became more humid. Rainfall increased. Climates grew warmer. Vegetation became more luxuriant–but the air gradually became less exhilarating.
Soon the health of mankind began to be affected. Accustomed through long ages to breathe air rich in oxygen and poor in carbon dioxide, men suffered. . . .”
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And then came the nightmare world of torrid heat and perpetual miasma, of toadstools as big as trees and spiders the size of oxen. Though Jenkins/Leinster, a century ago, didn’t regard the burning of fossil fuels as the primary cause of the change in climate, but attributed it to natural processes, he did create scenes of climate change powerful enough to horrify the most convinced of today’s anti-environmentalists. (The two stories are available now via Project Gutenberg. Modern readers will find that they move slowly, but their power remains inescapable.)
The career of Will F. Jenkins/Murray Leinster is a remarkable study in visionary anticipation. Other science fiction writers, of course, have now and then hit the mark with some accurate prediction. Karel Čapek gave us robots in 1920, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward foretold credit cards as far back as 1888, Stanley G. Weinbaum portrayed virtual reality in “Pygmalion’s Spectacles” of 1935, Robert A. Heinlein depicted the use of radioactive fallout in warfare in 1940’s “Solution Unsatisfactory,” and even Ray Bradbury, whose elegant science fiction was celebrated more for its fiction than its science, described ear-buds in Fahrenheit 451 in 1953.
But no one was better at seeing the future than Will F. Jenkins. The quiet man from Virginia was always ahead of the curve.
Copyright © 2024 Robert Silverberg