Unknown Artist

Murray Leinster’s The Runaway Skyscraper

“The Runaway Skyscraper” is foundational. I saw proof just this week. Last week’s episode of Debris “Earthshine” (March 29, 2021) had the good guys (US and British investigators) chasing the super-villains known as INFLUX. The sinister plot was to place two pieces of “debris” (chunks of an intergalactic spaceship that broke up over the planet) on the iron supports of two Manhattan skyscrapers to create a wormhole. Earlier in the episode they had done this on a smaller scale, sending a bus through from New Jersey to Boston. There was only one survivor and the bad hats kill him. The good guys stop the wormhole scheme and we don’t get to see an entire block of the city transported through time and space.

Riann Steele and Jonathan Tucker in Debris (NBC)

What if they had succeeded? As a viewer, I am honest enough with myself to say, yes, I wanted to see that. I was a little disappointed when they didn’t. But it doesn’t matter because Murray Leinster (Will F. Jenkins) wrote that story back in 1919 (102 years ago). It was called “The Runaway Skyscraper” (Argosy and Railroad  Man’s Magazine, February 22, 1919) and it is a foundational piece of Science Fiction. The faintest traces of it exist in that Debris episode, though I doubt the writers had any knowledge of Leinster or his story. That’s what being foundational means.

“The Runaway Skyscraper” stars Arthur Chamberlain, an failing engineer who has his office in midtown Manhattan. Arthur notices the hands of the clock across from his building moving backwards. Other strange things happen, like the sun rising in the West. A flaw in the rock beneath the Metropolitan Tower has fallen in, but instead of collapsing in space, the building moves into the past. When the shift is over, the entire building and its inhabitants are millennia out of time. The two thousand or so people in the building find themselves in pre-Columbian Manhattan.

Chamberlain figures he can reverse the process but it will requite much effort on the part of the building dwellers. In the meantime, they need food and water. Chamberlain tells the president of a bank on the first floor, Van Deventer, that he can get them back but he needs help. The banker steps in, organizing hunting parties.

Art by Darrell K. Sweet

Two weeks later, Chamberlain unleashes his plan, By forcing soap into the geyser beneath the building, he creates enough pressure to send them home. (Of course, Arthur and his secretary, Estelle, find each other through the experience. Happy ending!) The idea of using soap for time travel sounds ludicrous today but back 1919, all you need is soap. The concept of “soaping a geyser” is an actual thing dating back to at least 1889. Leinster must have been familiar with the concept and used it as only a Science Fiction writer can.

What makes this story foundational is the use of time travel in a new way. The idea of traveling in time was first done by H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) but Leinster gets credit for the first use of the “timeslip” idea. (Mark Twain was before everyone including H. G. Wells. His A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) has a man travel back in time when struck on the head. The first timeslip of them all.) A timeslip, rather than a device that takes people back and forth, is usually an accident that results in a much larger area being forced through time. It was L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall (Unknown, December 1939) that coined the expression.

Leinster tells how he got the idea for “The Runaway Skyscraper” when he saw the hands of a large building clock rewinding when it was being repaired. He repeats this image at the beginning of the story, clearly placing himself in the hero’s place. Leinster makes his hero, Arthur, an engineer, indulging in a little bit of professional fantasy. Will F. Jenkins never finished high school but was a deft tinker all the same.

Hugo Gernsback reprinted the story in Amazing Stories (June 1926). Frank R. Paul illustrated the First Nations people as a skyscraper shows up in Manhattan of five centuries in the past. Imagine their surprise!

Art by Frank R. Paul

As this illustration begs, what about the local people? Do the building dwellers have to face off against the original tribesmen? Leinster sidesteps this for the most part. There is a suggestion of trading with them but Arthur dismisses this because they need a massive amount of food for two thousand people. The First Nations offer little more than this scene that Paul drew. Otherwise they aren’t really in the story. This seems like a lost opportunity to me.

Perhaps if Leinster had been writing a novel he might have written about the events that might arise. Would there be armed conflict? Would the natives want to explore the tower? How did they feel about all those people eating all their fish? (I doubt a novel of 1919 would have looked at the sins of Imperialism. To Leinster’s credit, the Manhattanites don’t pose as gods and use them as slave labor.) Could some of the people from the future fall in love with the people from the past and not want to go back to our time, etc. None of this is looked at.

In 1966, Irwin Allen would create the television show, The Time Tunnel. Murray Leinster was the obvious choice for the novelization and a sequel called Timeslip (1967). Leinster wrote his own novel, Time Tunnel in 1964, and the idea was used as the basis for the show. Unlike “The Runaway Skyscraper”, the tunnel in the TV show is a form of time machine, not a timeslip accident. The show ran for one season.

Murray Leinster has been called “The Dean of Science Fiction” and that title fits. He wrote his first SF tale in 1918 and his last major work fifty years later. Most writers who began before Science Fiction was even a term, before the first true SF magazine existed, fell by the wayside as the decades progressed. Not Leinster. He reinvented himself almost as often as he created real inventions (like front view projection for the movie industry). Or that time he wrote “A Logic named Joe” back in 1944 (Astounding Science-Fiction, March 1946) that accurately predicts personal computers and the Internet. Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, etc., etc. Not one of them did that. William Fitzgerald Jenkins and Murray Leinster are cornerstones to the genre of Science Fiction. Even if television doesn’t remember them.

NB. June 27, 2009 was Will F. Jenkins Day in Virginia. That’s what foundational gets you.

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