Jack Williamson

John Stewart Williamson (born April 29, 1908), who writes as Jack Williamson but has occasionally used the pseudonym Will Stewart, is considered the "Dean of Science fiction".

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. The farming was unsuccessful there and the family continued a poverty stricken existence.

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. 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 SF author Frederik Pohl. He continues to write as a nonagenarian.

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.

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.

Novels:

• The Legion of Space, 1934 (serialized)
• Darker Than You Think, 1948
• The Humanoids, 1949
• Undersea Quest, 1954 (with Fred Pohl)
• Undersea Fleet, 1955 (with Fred Pohl)
• Undersea City, 1958 (with Fred Pohl)
• The Humanoid Touch, 1980
• Terraforming Earth, 2001
• The Stonehenge Gate, 2005

incomplete

External links

• A bibliography
• Scifi.com interview
• John Clute on Jack Williamson