Customer Reviews

The Runaway Skyscraper

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

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.