Jack Williamson- "Science Fiction" Master

Jack Williamson, who died Friday at 98, deserves to be remembered as one of the fathers of science fiction and had a role in inspiring Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, both of whom read his stories when they were still kids.

In 1928, the year his first short story, "The Metal Man," was published in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories, the cutting edge in technology was Charles Lindbergh's solo flight to Paris from New York.

Williamson's last published work, the novel "The Stonehenge Gate," appeared in 2005. The world was immeasurably different, and many of the fantasies he and those who followed him had dreamed of had become reality, from robots to rocket ships. Yet Williamson's themes remained strikingly constant over eight decades - the interaction of man and machine, and the possibility of dystopia.

His 1949 novel "The Humanoids," his first to garner serious critical attention, concerned a group of humans who rebel against their animatronic guardians and zoom around the galaxy via teleportation, which one character mastered "with the greatest of ease." "The story bogs down into complete illogic," complained a Hartford Courant reviewer, who nevertheless enjoyed the descriptions of people re-creating consumer society on dead planets chilled to absolute zero.

"‘The Humanoids' marked a turning point in science fiction and in Jack's career," Williamson's longtime editor, James Frenkel, told the Los Angeles Times."Before that, science fiction had been a cheerleader for science and technology and really had not, for the most part, focused on the potential dangers of science and technology."

In "Dragon's Island" (1951), Williamson chronicled the creation by biologists of a race of supermen who are forced into hiding by an organization bent on hunting them down and killing them. The book was not, as has been reported, the first to use the term "genetic engineering."

However, the Oxford English Dictionary does give Williamson credit for coining "terraforming" - the wholesale resurfacing of a planet. He used the concept to great effect in a late novel, "Terraforming Earth," that won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science fiction novel of 2001.

Other concepts he came up with or at least was among the first to use in fiction included in vitro insemination ("The Girl From Mars," 1929), artificial gravity ("The Prince of Space," 1931), organ transplants ("The Reefs of Space," 1964, with Frederick Pohl), and antimatter ("Seetee Ship," 1951).

"When I got into the game, I was one of very few players," he told Science Fiction Weekly in 2002. "Every idea seemed to be worth a new story. Nowadays, fresh ideas are harder to find."

As a faculty member at Eastern New Mexico University in the 1960s, Williamson launched one of the nation's first college courses on science fiction and fantasy writing, helping legitimize science fiction as a field worthy of academic attention.

Williamson was born April 29, 1908, in Bisbee, Ariz., a place about as far from his high-tech adventures as can be imagined. When his family moved to eastern New Mexico in 1915, they did so in a covered wagon.Williamson credited a childhood spent on desolate farms and ranches with developing his creative powers."Life would have been absolutely empty without imagination," he told Publishers Weekly in 1986.

In 1926, he discovered the early pulp magazine Amazing Stories, and within two years had landed "The Metal Man" on its cover. From there he became a prolific contributor to the pulps, writing multiple connected stories that were later collected into books including "The Cometeers" (1936) and "The Legion of Space" (1947).

"Jack Williamson was one of the great science-fiction writers," Mr. Bradbury told the Los Angeles Times recently. "He did a series of novels which affected me as a young writer with dreams. I met him at 19, and he became my best friend and teacher."

The New York Sun
15th Nov 2006