First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster

First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster contains 24 stories covering the full spectrum of Leinster's career. Included are such classic early works as "Proxima Centauri," "First Contact," and one of the earliest alternate timeline stories, "Sidewise in Time." Included are "Keyhole," "De Profundis," and a story written in 1945 that anticipated the Internet, "A Logic Named Joe." The Hugo Award-winning "Exploration Team" was the inspiration for our full-color cover art by Hannibal King. Also, here for the first time are "The Great Catastrophe," his lost pulp epic, and the inspiring "To All Fat Policemen." There is a four-page introduction by renowned author Hal Clement. Table of Contents Will by Hal Clement Editor's Introduction by Joe Rico A Logic Named Joe If You Was a Globulin The Ethical Equations Keyhole Doomsday Deferred First Contact Nobody Saw the Ship Pipeline to Pluto The Lonely Planet De Profundis The Power The Castaway The Strange Case of John Kingman Proxima Centauri The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator Sam, This Is You Sidewise in Time Scrimshaw Symbiosis Cure for a Ylith Plague on Kryder II Exploration Team Introduction to the Unpublished Stories by Joe Rico The Great Catastrophe To All Fat Policemen

Born William Fitzgerald Jenkins in 1896, near Norfolk, Virginia, Murray Leinster worked almost exclusively as a writer of science fiction and mystery literature. He did take time out for the two World Wars and to invent the back-projector special effect for motion pictures, perhaps the earliest virtual reality device. As befits one of the few authors who wrote for both the early pulps and modem science fiction magazines, Leinster won both a Hugo (for "Exploration Team") and a RetroHugo for "First Contact".