| Out of This World | |
| Author: | Murray Leinster |
| Cover Artist: | Ric Binkley |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Science fiction |
| Publisher: | Avalon Books |
| Pub Date: | 1958 |
| Media Type: | |
| Pages: | 221 |
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, William Fitzgerald Jenkins).[3]
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." 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]