Murray Leinster Land of the Giants (1968)
I have no particular attachment to the sixties television show, but will buy a Murray Leinster on sight if I don't already have it. Land of the Giants was an Irwin Allen production wherein a sub orbital passenger flight - specifically a ship called the Spindrift - somehow ends up on a planet very much like Earth, except that the ship and its occupants are now mere inches high. I made the Aurora model kit of the Spindrift without having seen the show when I was a kid, and the one I watched on Netflix just last year may well be the first and only episode I've seen. The show - which seemed okay of its kind, but didn't really inspire me to watch further - is a mystery at least as much as it's science-fiction, prompting the viewer towards the idea that the Spindrift has simply been miniaturised and that they're all still on Earth; but I gather that as the series progresses, it is revealed that they're not on Earth, but a planet which just happens to have developed a society very much like that of America in the sixties, on a planet where evolution has somehow produced the same species as are found on Earth, but improbably larger.
Leinster expands on what we saw on the screen, even changing a few significant details, and emphasises the basic weirdness of the premise by waving science at it. Of course, Land of the Giants piled improbability upon improbability, so Leinster's science - which is necessarily speculative - merely accentuates the general loopiness of biologically impossible human beings over seventy-foot tall, amongst other things, presenting the intriguing prospect of Land of the Giants having been a precursor to Lost, or at least a distant cousin to The Prisoner.
Leinster had already written tie-in fiction for Allen's Time Tunnel, which after all drew heavily on his earlier, unrelated novel of the same name, so he understood the form. Nevertheless, Land of the Giants reads very much as though it may as well be entirely his own material. The Gollancz SF Masterworks reprints probably won't be happening any time soon, but Leinster shouldn't be dismissed as some hack. He wrote tight, entertaining prose, liberally speckled with startling images and big ideas, or at least absorbingly weird ideas, and it's a pleasure to see him craft something truly peculiar out of a fairly generic sixties telly product without subverting anything by application of the sort of ironic revisionism upon which Alan Moore and others have based entire careers. Even when serving up what may as well be a TV dinner, Murray Leinster's work nevertheless feels like a labour of love.
I have no particular attachment to the sixties television show, but will buy a Murray Leinster on sight if I don't already have it. Land of the Giants was an Irwin Allen production wherein a sub orbital passenger flight - specifically a ship called the Spindrift - somehow ends up on a planet very much like Earth, except that the ship and its occupants are now mere inches high. I made the Aurora model kit of the Spindrift without having seen the show when I was a kid, and the one I watched on Netflix just last year may well be the first and only episode I've seen. The show - which seemed okay of its kind, but didn't really inspire me to watch further - is a mystery at least as much as it's science-fiction, prompting the viewer towards the idea that the Spindrift has simply been miniaturised and that they're all still on Earth; but I gather that as the series progresses, it is revealed that they're not on Earth, but a planet which just happens to have developed a society very much like that of America in the sixties, on a planet where evolution has somehow produced the same species as are found on Earth, but improbably larger.
Leinster expands on what we saw on the screen, even changing a few significant details, and emphasises the basic weirdness of the premise by waving science at it. Of course, Land of the Giants piled improbability upon improbability, so Leinster's science - which is necessarily speculative - merely accentuates the general loopiness of biologically impossible human beings over seventy-foot tall, amongst other things, presenting the intriguing prospect of Land of the Giants having been a precursor to Lost, or at least a distant cousin to The Prisoner.
Leinster had already written tie-in fiction for Allen's Time Tunnel, which after all drew heavily on his earlier, unrelated novel of the same name, so he understood the form. Nevertheless, Land of the Giants reads very much as though it may as well be entirely his own material. The Gollancz SF Masterworks reprints probably won't be happening any time soon, but Leinster shouldn't be dismissed as some hack. He wrote tight, entertaining prose, liberally speckled with startling images and big ideas, or at least absorbingly weird ideas, and it's a pleasure to see him craft something truly peculiar out of a fairly generic sixties telly product without subverting anything by application of the sort of ironic revisionism upon which Alan Moore and others have based entire careers. Even when serving up what may as well be a TV dinner, Murray Leinster's work nevertheless feels like a labour of love.
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