Out of This World (Leinster book)

Out of This World is a collection of three related science fiction stories by Murray Leinster, published by Avalon Books in 1958. The stories, all featuring "hillbilly polymath" Bud Gregory,[1] originally appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories over a four-month span in 1947, and are sometimes characterized as a novel.[2] A fourth story in the Gregory sequence, "The Seven Temporary Moons", was published in TWS in 1948, but has never been collected. All the stories originally carried the "William Fitzgerald" byline (a derivative of Leinster's birthname, Will F. Jenkins).[3]

Out of This World
First edition dust jacket
AuthorMurray Leinster
Cover artistRic Binkley
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreScience fiction
PublisherAvalon Books
Publication date
1958
Media typePrint
Pages221

Contents
  • "The Deadly Dust" (as William Fitzgerald), Thrilling Wonder, August 1947
  • "The Gregory Circle" (as William Fitzgerald), Thrilling Wonder, April 1947
  • "The Nameless Something" (as William Fitzgerald), Thrilling Wonder, June 1947[4]

Reception

Damon Knight noted that "Leinster is ingenious in thinking up zany practical applications of slightly cockeyed principles," but concluded that "watching Gregory pull these things out of his hat one after another is wearisome; unlimited fantasy... is generally boring."[1] Floyd C. Gale called the book "a rampant spoof... staying just this side of slapstick. Nevertheless, it emerges more heavy-handed than most of his lighter works".[5]

gollark: I mean, I mentioned recursive descent parsing on APIONET beforehand, it's approximately in my overly-onelinery and bad-variable-namey style, it's a technically working lisp but weird and broken in a few ways (negative number parsing!), I think some of the comments are vaguely inaccurate or at least not how someone more experienced with lisps would describe things, and the thing ignored Python idioms a fair bit.
gollark: Thus, leave.
gollark: *May* be, I think.
gollark: Anyway, I'm kind of surprised that nobody got that my lisp interpreter was me, although maybe I'm sinthorionizing slightly.
gollark: It should be a program which hijacks your computer and uses it for bee deployment.

References
  1. "In The Balance", If, December 1958, p.112
  2. ISFDB listing
  3. ISFDB summary bibliography
  4. Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections
  5. Gale, Floyd C. (October 1958). "Galaxy's 5 Star Shelf". Galaxy Science Fiction. p. 133.
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