Talents, Incorporated
by Murray Leinster
  

Avon: New York, 1962, 159 pages

collected in —
The First Murray Leinster Megapack
Murray Leinster:
  The Ultimate Sci-Fi & Fantasy Collection

Talents, Incorporated is a warm and beguiling science fiction novel. Murray Leinster clearly enjoys telling this tale. As often with Leinster, true artistry and assured mastery give us a smooth story with living, believable people; and perhaps especially here, they are striving within a fascinating and unpredictable plot.

The novel is quite a mixture. Its driving force is an extremely nasty interstellar dictatorship conquering peaceful planets, one after another. It has a large fleet capable of smashing local planetary fleets. Worlds which resist in space battle, or too stubbornly oppose ruthless occupation, are threatened with planetary burn-off. The empire has demonstrated horrifyingly that it is capable and willing to do this.

The leaders of this world, the announced next victim, mostly divide into two camps: the hopelessly defiant and the simply hopeless. So into this imminent crisis comes Talents, Incorporated. What they offer is impossible and outrageous, but after a few simple proofs, some of the hopelessly defiant are willing to give them a try. What do they have to lose, anyway? — except perhaps getting their world burnt-off.

Talents, Incorporated, has gathered a surprisingly effective combination of people with exotic abilities. These are "wild talents". The scatterplot of mental abilities collected by Charles Fort suggests the possibilities. Leinster in fairly brief portrayals brings to life a wonderful team of otherwise quite ordinary people, each with some exotic facet. These people, these Talents, struggled to fit into recognized social parameters: unrecognized, misunderstood, deemed weird, misfits, likely dangerous to society, maybe arrested and prosecuted. If you know the details of some crime, you must be in on it, right?

Morgan, the founder of Talents, Incorporated, discovered these one by one, recruited them to the team and brought them to live comfortably aboard the interstellar yacht Sylvia. In this they traveled looking for business from people or entire worlds with crises which only applying one or more exotic talents might solve. Of course, the long-shot offers were unbelievable — accepted only out of desperate need.
  

So far I've spoken only of the general situation as the novel opens. Let's throw in a few details.

Of course there is resolution in the face of adversity. This is one of Murray Leinster's landing grid stories, so that affects how spaceships operate. There is warfare in space, with experimental and risky technology. There is humor when we, and the characters, least expect it. And throughout, we have an unpredictable but perhaps predictable romance.
  

Captain Bors asked, "You're not telling me you know the future?"

Morgan waved a cigar. "Of course not! That's nonsense! If one knew the future, one could change it, and then it wouldn't be what one knew! You haven't had any prophecies from me! Prophecy's absurd! All we've told you is about events whose probability approaches unity."
  

I think you'll really enjoy Talents, Incorporated.

“That’s Talents, Incorporated, information. You can count on it!”

© 2024 Robert Wilfred Franson