Author Description

Murray Leinster (1896-1975) was the pseudonym of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an award-winning American writer of science fiction and alternate history. He wrote and published over 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movies and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays. Leinster began his career as a free-lance writer before World War I; he was two months short of his 20th birthday when his first story, The Foreigner, appeared in the May 1916 issue of H. L. Mencken's literary magazine The Smart Set. Over the next three years, Leinster published ten more stories in the magazine. His first science fiction story, The Runaway Skyscraper, appeared in the 1919 issue of Argosy. In the 1930s, he published several science fiction stories and serials in Amazing and Astounding Stories and continued to appear frequently in other genre pulps. Leinster is credited with the invention of parallel universe stories. Sidewise in Time was published in the June 1934 issue of Astounding. This was probably the first time that the concept of alternate worlds appeared in modern science fiction.