Comment: Before Smith there was Murray Leinster (Score 1) 1244
Murray Leinster (pen name of Will Jenkins) is probably the most overlooked hard science fiction writer of the 20th century. His stories featured both deeply human characters and hard technical edges. His stories seem pretty sexist by today's standards: women exist largely as motivations for the male heroes. But in his case I think that was more a product of the market than of his personal attitudes—he sold his first story in 1919, at the height of the pulps, the year before Doc Smith finished Skylark of Space. Unlike many early pulp writers, Leinster survived the advent of John W. Campbell, and thrived into the late Sixties. He did it by being incredibly imaginative, yet painstakingly realistic and technically accurate.
In Proxima Centauri, Leinster described an attack on a human ship by aliens. They used intense 30cm microwave beams to try kill the human crew; when that attack was unexpectedly blocked by the human ship's metal hull (the aliens used cellulose), they switched to heating the metal hull by hysteresis effects from focused radio waves. He vividly (and fairly accurately, as far as I can judge today) described the effects of a molten hull rupturing in vacuum from the pressure of heated air inside. The ship itself was powered by disintegration of matter into pure energy, and had traveled from Earth to Proxima Centauri by seven years of constant acceleration and deceleration at 1 gravity. Proxima Centauri was published in 1935, four years before Lise Meitner made the first correct analysis of nuclear fission—and four years before Robert Heinlein sold his first story.
I think it was in 1952's Space Ferry, a decade before the Mercury program, that one of Leinster's characters correctly forecast the image that the government would want for its astronauts: Big, heroic men. The character himself was a midget, who pointed out how midgets would make much more practical astronauts, because they required less space, consumed less food, water, and oxygen, and—most importantly—massed less and thus required less thrust to lift. NASA still hasn't taken the hint.
Operation: Outer Space was a semi-comic, semi-satirical novel in which the exploration of deep space is led by a television executive, because it's easier to pay the expense of space exploration if it sells a lot of advertising time. That one came out in 1954.
Leinster practically invented some of the sub-genres of SF. He wrote about alternate-history parallel time-lines in 1934, over a decade before H. Beam Piper. He wrote a benchmark first-contact story—named First Contact—in 1945: If you meet an alien in deep space, where neither of you knows the other's home planet, how can both of you get safely home without revealing where you came from? In A Logic Named Joe from 1946, one of the very few early computer stories that doesn't describe a massive computer running the entire world, he described something very like the modern internet for consumers—especially Wikipedia. He wrote a lengthy series of medical SF stories, a subgenre that he and Michael Crichton still have practically to themselves.
In short, Murray Leinster wrote a hell of a lot of entertaining and imaginative fiction, much of it years or even decades ahead of its time. He's worth digging up.
(By the way: If you want others, check out George Willick's Spacelight website, a listing of all the best dead SF authors.)
