Murray Leinster 1896—1975

Murray Leinster was a nom de plume of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an award-winning American writer of science fiction and alternate history. He wrote and published more than 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays. He began his career as a freelance writer before World War I but during and after he began appearing in pulp magazines, with his first science fiction story, The Runaway Skyscraper being published in Argosy.

Leinster is credited with the invention of parallel universe stories in his Sidewise in Time, in which his vision of extraordinary oscillations in time having had a long-term impact on other author’s and their writing, such as Isaac Asimov’s Living Space, The Red Queen’s Race, and The End of Eternity. Leinster’s novella First Contact is also credited as one of the first (if not the first) instances of a universal translator in science fiction.