Imagine a world, a time, a history so entirely unlike ours that -- It's August 19, 2037. The United Nations is just fifty years old. Televisors are still black-and-white. The Nidics have just won the World Series in Prague. Com-Pub observatories are publishing elaborate figures on moving specks in space which they consider to be Martian spaceships on their way to Earth, but which United Nations astronomers cannot discover at all. Women are using gilt lipsticks this year. Heat-induction motors were still considered efficient prime movers.
Thorn Hard is a high-level flier for the Pacific Watch. Bathyletis is the most prominent of nationally advertised diseases, and was to be cured by RO-17, "The Foundation of Personal Charm." Somebody named Nirdlinger was President of the United Nations, and somebody else named Krassin was Commissar of Commissars for the Com-Pubs.
Author Biography
Murray Leinster (1896 - 1975) was a nom de plume of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an American writer of science fiction and alternate history literature. 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; 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. During World War I, Leinster served with the Committee of Public Information and the United States Army (1917-1918). During and after the war, he began appearing in pulp magazines like Argosy, Snappy Stories and Breezy Stories. He continued to appear regularly in Argosy into the 1950s. When the pulp magazines began to diversify into particular genres in the 1920s, Leinster followed suit, selling jungle stories to Danger Trails, westerns to West and Cowboy Stories, detective stories to Black Mask and Mystery Stories, horror stories to Weird Tales and even romance stories to Love Story Magazine under the pen name Louisa Carter Lee.
