War with the Gizmos

by Murray Leinster

The first battles began in the wilderness. The animals in the forests and glades struggled furiously for life and often fought with splendid courage. But they never won; they were always killed. And now it was man's turn.

Genres: Science Fiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

About the author

see also:
Will F. Jenkins
William Fitzgerald Jenkins

Murray Leinster was a nom de plume of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an award-winning American writer of science fiction and alternate history. He wrote and published over 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays.

An author whose career spanned the first six decades of the 20th Century. From mystery and adventure stories in the earliest years to science fiction in his later years, he worked steadily and at a highly professional level of craftsmanship longer than most writers of his generation. He won a Hugo Award in 1956 for his novelet “Exploration Team,” and in 1995 the Sidewise Award for Alternate History took its name from his classic story, “Sidewise in Time.” His last original work appeared in 1967.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

War with the Gizmos is a good science fiction novel about an invisible menace threatening life on Earth that our stalwart protagonists are aware of but face great difficulty in getting anyone to believe them. Picture the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) or Steve McQueen in The Blob (also from 1958, just like this book). The general populace thinks they're facing a pandemic (and it's neat to compare how that looks in 1958 as opposed to, oh say 2021 (to just pick a random year...) There are several scenes of animal death that are a little excruciating by current standards; there was no such concept as "trigger warning" in 1958. One thing that was unusual for the time was the inclusion of female characters that were both intelligent and competent. There's a tone of menace much more of the horror genre than typical genre science fiction. Once the threat is identified and recognized, Leinster wraps up the actual "war" in just a few pages, highlighting the point that the real threat is ignorance, not the titular gizmos. One point that I think is interesting is that the novel appeared in the April 1958 issue of a digest-sized magazine called Satellite Science Fiction, which means it would have been on the newsstands in March, and they published it with the (rather pedestrian) title of The Strange Invasion. The first edition paperback, with the current cool title, was released by Fawcett under their Gold Medal imprint with a copyright date of March 1958, which means that the same new novel by Leinster was at the newsstands with two different titles at exactly the same time. (Who else remembers newsstands?) Both editions had a cover price of only thirty-five cents, but I'll bet there were a lot of readers who bought both, perhaps at the same time, and were annoyed and disappointed when they discovered the duplication.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing style and characterization here reminded me most closely of a Nancy Drew novel. Lucky Nancy never had to deal with a carnivorous swarm of will o' the wisps, though. And the head honcho Nancy character is played by a guy. Do note that women play important secondary starring roles, with eccentric Professor Warren as the eager but clueless scientist and Carol her niece as the wide-eyed cute one who Has Good Ideas! also.

It was interesting to read this book during the COVID 19 period. Under the attack of the Gizmos, the country-at-large thought they were dealing with a plague, and beleaguered towns sought to quarantine themselves as we are now. In their case the situation was complicated by the fact that it was actually Gizmos causing deaths, not a virus, so simply washing your hands a lot and staying home didn't necessarily work.

The big conflict in this plot as in many other sci-fi yarns is that nobody will believe what the main characters have figured out and thereby start taking the proper precautions. Preemptive measures against a Gizmo attack are pretty easy to deploy, if anyone will listen: #bringapillowcase, #startsmoking!, #flamethrowersrule, #weargarlicnow.

The main characters deduce the nature of their opposition pretty fast, so then the main thrust of the story becomes "getting the truth into the right hands" in time. I like the concept of the Gizmos--sure, they are interesting and sciency enough!--but they don't provide a meaty-enough storyline on their own to carry the book. It becomes a sequence of scenes of animal/human carnage in expanding areas of the country paired with scenes of our heros trying to drive to the University in New Jersey (under plague shutdown conditions) where their message will surely be heard and trumpeted authoritatively. (Thank god our male Nancy is a stellar driver.)

So that to and fro is a little tiresome. Also Murray Leinster really wants to describe the agony and suffering inflicted by the Gizmos, and thus lets himself loose on the descriptions of their attacks on cows, bears, chickens, pets, rabbits, etc. etc. Humans are not exempt, but their death throes aren't quite as floridly described. Animal lovers beware.

Pacing overall is troubled in this book. Not only is the nature of the enemy discovered quickly, the grand denouement is disposed of in a mere 6 pages at the very end. But sure, it was all simplistically entertaining. Given all the above, I allow three stars.

[Timothy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Near-perfect retro-to-Silver Age/Golden Age science fiction adventure. A well thought-out premise run through an excellent thriller mill. Taut, fun. Not great literature — there is no pretense of that. But it is well done, written to induce no complaints.

Caution, of course: there is no character development. The figures are almost stock: an intelligent adventurer, a frumpy (if female) professor, and an ingenue, her niece. And when I wrote, above, “written to induce no complaints,” I meant on the sentence level, accepting the general conventions of the genre form at that time.

I wonder if it would make a good movie. Not as good as the first-rate Bird Box, which also had invisible killer entities, but better than The Silence, whose nasty xenoterrestrials we could see. Perhaps the basic plot could be tweaked, and good actors selected, and a more “apocalyptic” catastrophe depicted. The fact of the Internet, today, would change a lot, but ... that could also make it work as a movie, too, if you went a particular direction.

Anyway, I am really glad I read this. Leinster is usually forgotten in the popular sf memory. He shouldn’t be. We are not talking Heinlein/Clarke/Asimov here, but above Milton Lesser.

[Jason Thompson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Murray Leinster's stories tend to have interesting ideas but inept executions, on top of the "gosh-gee-golly" 1912 writing style where everyone, including Leinster, talks in lectures. A scientist investigating strange animal deaths in the woods discovers that the problem is a plague of "Gizmos" (apparently an old word for mysterious blips on radar), small, invisible gas beings that kill by suffocation and live off the odors of decaying flesh. Though some people suspect they're space aliens, the protagonists eventually conclude they're a hitherto undiscovered Earth life form. As the stalwart scientist and his friends drive from town to town killing Gizmos and warning people of the danger, Leinster cuts to similar incidents around the world in omnipotent-narrator, breathless-newscaster style. There are glimpses of clever concepts here -- Gizmos as the origin of myths of djinn and spirits, clouds of Gizmos sweeping up massive dust storms that appear to have 'veins' and 'arteries' -- but the ominous images of mass asphyxiation can't overcome the unintentionally ludicrous image that these deadly threats can be killed by a cigarette lighter or captured in a pillowcase. (Of course, also, this being 1950s sci-fi, there's no attempt to communicate with the beings, just to kill them although to be fair to our heroes, the Gizmos never demonstrate more than animal intelligence.) Stretched thin even at 156 pages, the main characters drive and drive and talk and talk and Gizmos kill more and more people until they're stopped but the book lacks any real revelation or surprise in the 2nd half, though it's amusing that one way the heroes fight the Gizmos is by smoking -- the fire keeps Gizmos from asphyxiating you. Another slightly interesting point is the book's crude, 1958-era fumbles at ecological consciousness; wild animals are the Gizmos' first enemy, and are driven out of their habitats as the Gizmos swarm and multiply.

[Deb Omnivorous Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a fantastic little surprise and discovery.
I knew nothing about the author and had not read any of their work, I freely admit that I probably bought the book for the cover or on a recommendation (obviously not the goodreads cover, mine is the Fawcet publications 1959 edition). This book completely exceeded expectations though.

Set in around the time it was written, a hunting and fishing journalist in America starts looking into the reports of dead animals. He comes across a phenomena of being choked by apparently invisible beings with no physical substance. He teams up with a woman scientist - Professor Warren is a legend - her pretty daughter, and a redneck in a desperate cross country trip to stay ahead of the Gizmoes and get to somewhere where they can prove and validate their finding and same humanity! Or, at least, the rest of America. Not sure about the rest of the world.

This was a delightful little classic SF, way ahead of my expectations and I hope to read more by this apparently forgotten author. I also review this on youtube.
youtube.com/watch?v=eI9lyyChyMA&f...

[Tex-49 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Piacevole lettura!

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite dated sci-fi written in the late 50's but entertaining. If it were a film from back then the lady professor would've been a nice looking blone that graduated from the Playboy school of biology.

[Ashley Vaughan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dated and of its time, but I liked aspects of this book. The notion of Gizmos was interesting and seemed, to my largely unscientific mind, to be plausible if a little over-egged. These are some kind of invisible, sentient ionised gas that feeds on the fetid aroma of death, ominously killing animals and humans alike by choking them; remorseless and indiscriminate in their vindictive assault on American towns and cities. It seems nobody and nowhere is safe, unless, that is, you happen to be a smoker, are travelling in a car at more than 33 mph or have a conveniently-placed pillow case to hand (in the absence of said pillowcase, the feathered wings of a live chicken, or a pile of dry leaves will also suffice).

The protagonist drives around the United States in a random and haphazard fashion ostensibly trying to warn people about the Gizmos, understanding as he does that the knowledge obtained by him and his associated motley pair of Scooby Doo heroines and the hapless conspiracy theorist owner of the vehicle, will not be believed by the public, who seem to have ascribed the mounting death toll to some kind of contagion. Some pretty astute observations - especially for the 1950s - about people’s fondness for confirmation bias over actual facts, have parallels with today’s post-truth culture, and of course, all ends well with the sudden introduction late in the day of a mutual acquaintance with a platform sufficient to mete out the eventual destruction of the nefarious foe by luring them to airports across the country whereupon to chop them up with propellers, as you do.

This feels like a short story writer’s attempt at a full-length novel, but it is really just a drawn-out short story with no real depth to speak of and a plot with more holes than a crate of Emmental. That said, I feel it isn’t totally in earnest and I quite like it for that. It’s a quick and enjoyable read, but classic literature it is not.

[Martyn Rhys Vaughan · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting take on the long-established trope of invisible invaders. The difference here is that the Gizmos are not from Outer Space or another Dimension and are not even sentient but a life-form native to Earth.
The clever part is that normally the Gizmos do no harm, by feeding on decaying animal matter but one group has discovered it can open up new feeding opportunities by actively bringing about the animal's death - including humans of course.
The tension is maintained throughout the novella, being only slightly let down by the simplicity of the solution of how to defeat them.

[KHLOARIS · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dick Lane, an eager-beaver reporter for a popular hunting magazine shows up in the backwoods of Anytown, USA to investigate a mysterious invisible phenomenon. Something is silently sucking the life out of the local wild animal population. Within the first few pages he convieniently teams up with a smartypants wildlife biologist, Professor Warren and Carol, her beautiful of-age daughter. We soon find out that these unlikely heros constitue the USA’s front line of defence in what amounts to full-scale alien invasion. Intangible gas-monsters are slowly advancing on the nation’s Capitol at the inexplicable speed of 30mph. Silent but deadly.

Whether intentionally funny or not, this book feels like a never ending Saturday Night Live skit about an army of semi-sentient farts. The gag is that they sheeplishly groan whenever they fail to kill their intended victim. And although thats frequently the case, we do also get some morbid descriptions of the successfull kills - many human, but more often animal. SPOILER ALERT: after 187 pages our heroes do find salvation by way of an ordinary electric fan. Its rotating blades prove to be the ultimate weapon - far more efficient than the other technique they’ve been using for most of the story which involves bagging the unsuspecting gas invader inside a pillow-case & then hitting it with a hammer until the groaning stops. I shit you not.

Leinster’s uncomplicated prose makes for a breezy read, and the outdoorsy setting is befitting of a Hardy Boys mystery. The feeling of danger and tension comes mostly from a worry that on the next page the author won’t be able to maintain such a silly plot with a striaght face.

[Nicola Strangis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ancora una volta, un Urania classico mi regala una grande delusione.

[Mikael Klasson · Rating 2 out of 5]

A short horror novel about a invisible death that crawls up from the ocean. Not a fantastic reading.

[Federico Mangano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Romanzetto carino per passare u paio di pomeriggi nella più classica fantascienza, non accade nulla di sorprendente ma si fa leggere

[Rick Claypool · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fun, fast-paced read. Mysterious gaseous creatures that live off of vapors of decay are attacking animals and people, and only a writer for a hunting magazine and a professor and her niece know how to stop them. Very 1950s pulp in many ways, but the premise is so much weirder than the typical page turner of that era. Reminded me of John Wyndam a bit. Also got a kick out of the fact that one of the best ways for someone to save his or her life from the gas things is by smoking a cigar or cigarette.

[Zalman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was originally published by Fawcett Books in 1958. I don't remember too much about it any more, but I believe I enjoyed it as a 12-13 year old addicted to Science Fiction and Fantasy stories. I remember Murray Leinster (a pen name of William Fitzgerald Jenkins) as one of many prolific SF authors whose stories I read frequently in my youth.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

No pretense of literary merit, just a really, really fun read. Murray Leinster (Will Jenkins) is one of the fathers of modern Science Fiction. If you want a fun, easy read, this is a good choice, if you can find it.