The Runaway Skyscraper [Hardcover]

Murray Leinster (Author), William Fitzgerald Jenkins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2007

"I don't know how I'm going to say it so you'll understand, but time is just as much a dimension as length and breadth." He frowned. He wanted to talk about Wells's Time Machine but he knew that'd be no use -- these folks didn't read that sort of thing. "If the earth had settled down, we'd have been lower. If it had settled to one side, we'd have been moved one way or another, but as it's settled back in the Fourth Dimension, we're going back in time."

"Then --"

"We're in a runaway skyscraper, bound for some time back before the discovery of America!"

Product Details

• Hardcover: 108 pages
• Publisher: Aegypan (January 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1603129804
• ISBN-13: 978-1603129800
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Campy but fun, January 31, 2010

By 

Thomas Evans (Durham, NC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Runaway Skyscraper (Kindle Edition)

This is an old short story that it is impossible to take seriously, but that does not prevent it from being fun to read.

4.0 out of 5 stars Leinster's First SF Story, April 27, 2011

By 

Elliot (Irvine, CA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Runaway Skyscraper (Kindle Edition)

Murray Leinster had a long career in magazine science fiction, from the late 1910s well into the 1960s. He wrote two stories that are absolute classics of the genre-- "Sidewise in Time" (1934) and "First Contact" (1945)-- along with a lot of stories that haven't held up as well.

This novelette was Leinster's first piece of science fiction, originally published in Argosy magazine (a general-interest fiction magazine) in 1919, seven years before the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, came on the market. Amazing republished this story in one of its first issues, and Leinster was a staple of the SF pulps for the next 40 years.

Given its age, this is still a fun read-- a Manhattan skyscraper is transported back in time to pre-Columbian New York; the workers in the building struggle to survive by hunting, fishing and trading with the Indians while the protagonist, a young engineer, figures out how to transport the building back to the 20th century. The science is of course laughable: an earth tremor knocks the building into the "fourth dimension" causing it to move backwards in time; though the single building is the only piece of modern Manhattan to travel back in time, the electricity and gas still work. But the story is entertainingly told, and the plot outline-- unexpected scientific event puts people in danger; plucky scientist solves the problem-- became the basic pattern of pulp magazine science fiction for decades to come. Some of the scenes (modern New Yorkers bartering with ancient Indians) seem to be the seeds of Leinster's later masterpiece, "Sidewise in Time," in which different historical eras are jumbled.

This story is a free download for the Kindle, so reading it it will cost you nothing but a little of your time. If you have any interest in the history of science fiction, that will be time well spent.