Sat 14 May 2011
A Sci-Fi Review by Dan Stumpf: MURRAY LEINSTER – Operation Terror.
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Science Fiction & Fantasy[7] Comments
MURRAY LEINSTER – Operation Terror. Berkley F694, paperback original, 1962. Cover art: Richard Powers.
Next up, Operation Terror by that veteran boshmeister Murray Leinster. It’s easy to dismiss Leinster as a competent hack from the 60s, but there were all too few who could hack words so proficiently.
Operation starts off as Earth (or more precisely, Boulder Lake) is invaded by beings from another world, complete with flying saucer and paralyzer-beam, monitored helplessly by one of those competent, thoughtful, quick-thinking scientific type that we readers of sci-fi all imagined ourselves to be.
But as our hero sets about rescuing a distressed damsel and escaping the aliens, the invasion starts to seem more and more hokey, a development that steps up the suspense as he tries to counteract the alien rays, get to safety, warn the authorities, protect the girl and save the planet, all in the space of about a hundred-sixty tightly-packed pages.
These days when Sci-Fi has been replaced by multi-volumed tomes of “speculative fiction” we can but look back and admire the terse economy of writing like this.
May 14th, 2011 at 10:43 pm
Leinster a hack? Well, if you define as someone who wrote to his market, yes. Leinster was a consummate professional who made solid contributions to the sf field: “First Contact”, “Sideways in Time”, “The Mad Planet”, “A Logic Named Joe”, and “Exploration Team” — classics all. He wrote in a number of fields: mystery, science fiction, western, adventure, romance, and horror. I’ve read about fifty of his books and enjoyed them all and I look forward to tracking down other of his books.
Even at his most pulpish, Leinster’s stories followed a rigorous logic and made for a thrilling read.
May 15th, 2011 at 12:50 am
I’ve been a fan of Leinster’s science fiction ever since I bought my first SF magazine, the February 1959 issue of ASTOUNDING.
Illustrated on the cover was the serial that started in that issue, “The Pirates of Ersatz,” by Murray Leinster. I’m not sure, but the cover that attracted my attention was probably by Kelly Freas.
The story was published later as part of an Ace Double, as THE PIRATES OF ZAN. When I read it again not so very long ago, It wasn’t quite as good as when I was 17, but almost!
May 16th, 2011 at 12:21 pm
You forgot the Med ship series which I reread recently. I liked Leinster – he was a great storyteller but not a good writer – like Clive Cussler (my guilty pleasure).
May 16th, 2011 at 3:58 pm
I agree. Those Med Ship books are quite good, there’s no doubt about it. George Kelley reviewed an omnibus volume of the stories a couple of years ago: http://georgekelley.org/?p=1721. There’s also no doubt that Leinster was a natural-born storyteller.
May 17th, 2011 at 6:14 am
Though Leinster has never been one of my favorite SF writers, I certainly managed to read alot of his work in the SF digests. So, I guess that makes him a good second rate writer, not on the first tier but still enjoyable.
Steve, I know we are about the same age, but how did you manage to not buy your first SF magazine until February 1959? I was captured three years earlier in Feb 1956.
May 17th, 2011 at 8:15 am
I guess I was a late bloomer. In 1959 I’d been reading paperback mysteries for some time, mostly Gold Medal’s, but Dell’s and Pocket’s too. But they were sold in the supermarket very close to where we lived, and Astounding (as far as I remember) was sold only at the downtown newsstand, which was a long bike ride away. It was also probably a choice between one magazine and two or three comic books, which I know I was still reading in 1956. I wonder what my allowance was back then. We didn’t have a lot of money.
But after I bought that first one, I don’t think I missed an issue of ASTOUNDING/ANALOG from that point on. Not that I have time to read it any more.
May 17th, 2011 at 11:03 am
I think I was getting an allowance of around $1.50 a week in 1956. I soon was buying about a dozen SF magazines but not all of them came out every month, so my monthly $6.00 enabled me to buy all them at like 25 or 35 cents each plus still have money for movies and paperbacks.
Boy where did I go wrong? Now instead of $6.00 a month, I spend over $1,000 each month on books, pulps, vintage paperbacks, dvds, original artwork. Like the famous saying says, “A Collector is a Collector, is a Collector”. Or maybe it was something about a rose?