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Jack Williamson

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John Stewart Williamson (born April 29, 1908), who writes as Jack Williamson (and occasionally under the pseudonym Will Stewart) is a U.S. writer considered by many the "Dean of Science Fiction".

Contents

Life

Williamson spent his early childhood in western Texas. In search of better pastures, his family migrated to rural New Mexico in a horse-drawn covered wagon in 1915. The farming was difficult there and the family turned to ranching, which they continue to this day.

Williamson discovered the local library and used it to educate himself. As a young man, he discovered the magazine Amazing Stories, after answering an ad for one free issue. He strove to write his own fiction, selling his first story at age 20. He first sold a story to an American pulp magazine in 1928. The work during this early period was heavily influenced by A. Merritt.

Early on, he became impressed by the works of Miles J. Breuer and struck up a correspondence with him. A doctor who wrote science fiction in his spare time, Breuer had a strong talent and turned Williamson away from dream-like fantasies towards more rigorous plotting and stronger narrative. Under Breuer's tutelage, Williamson would send outlines and drafts for review. Their first work together was a series of vignettes in which moon colonies were undergoing something like the American Revolution.

Wracked by emotional storms and believing many of his physical ailments to be psychosomatic, Williamson underwent psychiatric evaluation in 1933 at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, in which he began to learn to resolve the conflict between his reason and his emotion. From this period, his stories take on a grittier, more realistic tone.

By the 1930s he was an established genre author, and the teenaged Isaac Asimov was thrilled to receive a postcard from Williamson, whom he had idolized, congratulating him on his first published story and saying "welcome to the ranks." Thereafter, he was a regular contributor to the pulp magazines, though not reaching financial success until many years later. He has published many collaborations with the science fiction author Frederik Pohl. He continues to write as a nonagenarian.

Academic Career

Williamson received his BA and MA degrees in English from Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU), in the town of Portales, New Mexico in the 1950s, joining the faculty of the university in 1960. He has remained affiliated with the school ever since, actually co-teaching two classes, Creative Writing and Fantasy and Science Fiction, as recently as 2003. In the late 1990s, he established a permanent trust to fund the publication of El Portal, ENMU's journal of literature and art. In the 1980s, he made a sizable donation of books and original manuscripts to ENMU's library, which resulted in the formation of a Special Collections department. In addition, he hosts the Williamson Lectureship, an annual panel discussion in which two science fiction authors are invited to speak to attendees on a set topic.

Williamson's doctorate in English literature, which he completed at University of ColoradoSee [Jack Williamson and ENMU], focused on H.G. Wells' earlier works, demonstrating that Wells was not the naive optimist that many believed him to be.

In the field of legitimate science, Jack Williamson coined the word terraforming in a science-fiction story published in 1942 in Astounding Science Fiction.

Works

The Legion of Space

While attending a Great Books course, Williamson learned that Henryk Sienkiewicz had created one of his works by taking the Three Musketeers of Alexander Dumas and pairing them with John Falstaff of William Shakespeare. Williamson took this idea into science fiction with The Legion of Space.

At the time desperate for money, he searched for a quick source of income. While most pulps of the time were slow to pay, the recently re-started Astounding had a quick turnaround in Williamson's experience, but did not accept novels, so he submitted three short stories and a novelet. Learning that they were also accepting novels for serialization, he sent in The Legion of Space, which was published in six parts. It quickly became a genre favorite, and was quickly collected into a hardcover.

The story takes place in an era when humans have colonized the Solar System but dare not go farther, as the first extra-solar expedition, to Barnard's Star, failed and the survivors came back as babbling, diseased madmen. They spoke of a gigantic planet, populated by ferocious animals and the single city left of the evil "Medusae." The Medusae bear a vague resembance to jellyfish, but are actually elephant-sized, four-eyed, flying beings with hundreds of tentacles. The Medusae cannot speak and communicate with one another via a microwave code.

The Falstaff character is named Giles Habibula. He was once a criminal, and can open any lock ever made. In his youth he was called Giles The Ghost. Jay Kalam (Commander of The Legion) and Hal Samdu are the names of the other two warriors. In this story these warriors of the 30th Century battle the Medusae, the alien race from the lone planet of Barnard's Star. The Legion itself is the military and police force of the Solar System after the overthrow of an empire called the Purple Hall that once ruled all humans. In this novel, the Purple pretenders ally themselves with the Medusae as a means to regain their empire. But the Medusae, who are totally unlike humans in all ways, turn on the Purples and want to destroy all humans and move to the Solar System, as their own world, far older than Earth, is finally spiraling back into their own sun. One of the Purples, John Ulnar, supports the Legion from the start.

He then wrote The Cometeers which takes place twenty years after the Legion of Space in which the same characters battle another alien race, this one of different origin.

The Legion works also featured a force field called AKKA which can erase from the Universe any matter, of any size, anywhere, even a star or a planet. AKKA was a weapon of mass destruction and the secret of it was entrusted to a series of women. AKKA was used to overthrow the Purple tyranny. It was also used to wipe out most of the Medusae, though they had tried to steal the secret. When they were wiped out, the Moon where they had established a base was also erased out of existence.

The same characters in The Legion of Space are brought together 20 years after the first novel to fight The Cometeers who are an alien race of energy beings controlling a "comet" which is really a giant force field containing a swarm of planets populated by their slaves. The Cometeers cannot be destroyed by AKKA as they are incorporeal from the Universe's point of view and exist for the most part in an alternate reality. They fear AKKA though as it can erase all their possessions.

Another novel, One Against the Legion tells of a Purple pretender who sets up a robotic base on a world over eighty light years from Earth, and tries to conquer the Solar System via matter transporter technology he has stolen. In this story robots are outlawed as they are in Dune.

In 1982, he published a final Legion novel, The Queen of the Legion. Giles Habibula reappears in this final novel, which is set after the disbanding of the Legion.

Contraterrene

An editor suggested that Williamson combine the ideas of contraterrene matter (antimatter) and asteroid mining. This brought about the Seetee (C-T) series of short stories.

Other media

An unfavorable review of one of his books, which compared the writing to that of a comic strip, brought Williamson to the attention of The New York Sunday News, which needed a science fiction writer for a new comic strip. Williamson wrote the strip "Beyond Mars", loosely based on his novel Seetee Ship for several years until the paper dropped all comics.

Stories

His Legion of Time (1938) was the first story to feature alternative future civilizations sending agents back to the present day to fight over the action which will decide which of them will even be in existence. Hence it is the precursor to the Terminator series of films. Despite the word 'Legion' in the title, this story is not part of the Legion of Space series but an independent work.

Williamson's most famous story is arguably "With Folded Hands", a cautionary tale of life made too easy. This story introduced the humanoid robots, dubbed simply humanoids which figure in several of Williamson's novels as the premise established in "With Folded Hands" plays out across the galaxy.

Bibliography

Novels:

See also

External links

Notes

References

 

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