Jack Williamson

At 98 years old, Jack Williamson physical status not available right now. We will update Jack Williamson's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

John Stewart Williamson (April 29, 1908-2005), also known as Jack Williamson, was an American science fiction writer who wrote as "Dean of Science Fiction" for many years.

(Especially after Robert Heinlein's death in 1988).

He has also been credited with one of the first uses of the word "Genetic Engineering."

He used the pseudonyms Will Stewart and Nils O. Sonderlund early in his career.

Early life

Williamson was born in Bisbee, Arizona Territory, on April 29, 1908. The first three years of his life on the Yaqui River in Sonora, Mexico, were spent on a ranch at the top of the Sierra Madre Mountains, according to his own account. He spent the majority of his childhood in western Texas. In 1915, his family moved to rural New Mexico in a horse-drawn covered wagon in search of better pastures. The farming was difficult there and the family returned to ranching, which they continued to do today near Pep. He served in World War II as a weather forecaster in the United States Army Air Corps.

Source

Writing career

As a boy, Williamson enjoyed storytelling to his brothers and two sisters. After answering an ad for one free issue as a young man, he discovered Amazing Stories, which was founded in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback. In the December 1928 issue of Amazing, he attempted to write his own fiction and sold his first story to Gernsback at age 20: "The Metal Man" was published. Gernsback's stories appeared in the forthcoming pulp magazines Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories, as well as Miles J. Breuer and Williamson's "The Girl from Mars" as the first volume of Science Fiction #2. A. Merritt, author of The Metal Monster (1920) and other fantasy serials, had a major influence on his work during this period. Algis Budrys referred to "The Metal Man" as "a tale full of memorable photos" despite Merritt's influence.

Williamson was initially captivated by Miles J. Breuer's work and began a correspondence with him. Breuer, a doctor who wrote science fiction in his spare time, was an excellent performer and led Williamson away from dreamlike fantasies to more detailed plotting and a more realistic storyline. Williamson would send outlines and drafts for review under Breuer's tutelage. Their first collaboration together was the novel Birth of a New Republic, in which Moon colonies were experiencing something like the American Revolution, which was later taken up by several other SF writers, particularly Robert A. Heinlein's "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress."

Williamson, who was shaken by emotional turmoil and believing many of his physical ailments were psychosomatic, underwent psychiatric examination at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, in which he learned to resolve the disconnect between his reason and emotion in 1933. His stories take on a gritty, more realistic tone from this period.

He was a well-known genre author by the 1930s, and teenage Isaac Asimov was thrilled to receive a letter from Williamson, whom he had adored, congratulating him on his first published article and saying, "welcome to the ranks." Williamson remained a regular contributor to the pulp magazines, but he didn't get any money back as a writer until many years later.

Williamson was brought to the attention of The New York Sunday News, which needed a science fiction writer for a new comic strip after an unfavorable review of one of his books, which likened his writing to that of a comic strip. Before the paper stopped all comics, Williamson wrote the strip Beyond Mars (1952–55), loosely based on his book Seetee Ship.

Williamson and Frederik Pohl wrote more than a dozen science fiction books together, including the series Jim Eden, Starchild, and Cuckoo, beginning 1954 and running into the 1990s. Williamson continued to write as a nonagenarian and received both the Hugo and Nebula Awards in the last decade of his life, by far the oldest writer to receive those awards.

He would also critique attempts to write "good" science fiction in his later years.

Academic career

Williamson received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degree in English in the 1950s from Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU) in Portales (near the Texas panhandle), and he joined the faculty of the university in 1960. He remained a student for the remainder of his life. He established a permanent trust in the late 1990s to finance the publication of El Portal, ENMU's journal of literature and art. He made a significant gift of books and original manuscripts to ENMU's library, which resulted in the establishment of a Special Collections branch; the library now houses the Jack Williamson Science Fiction Library, which ENMU's website describes as one of the world's best science fiction collections. In addition, Williamson sponsored the Jack Williamson Lectureship Series, an annual lectureship where Guests of Honor and other respected writers give lectures, read from their books, and participate in lively panel discussions on a variety of topics. Each year, ENMU's lectureship is still celebrated. The Jack Williamson Liberal Arts building houses the University's Languages & Literature, Mathematical Sciences, History, Religion, Politics, Sociology & Social Sciences, and Psychology & Political Science Departments as well as the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean's Office.

Williamson earned his PhD in English literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder, focusing on H.G. Wells' earlier publications, proving that Wells was not the naive optimist that many expected him to be. In a science-fiction novel published in 1942 in Astounding Science Fiction, Jack Williamson coined the term terraforming.

Source