"I'm not sure I'll be remembered at all [a century from now]. I pioneered some of the science fictional themes such as anti-matter. I invented the term "terraforming," which seems to have gotten into the language -- at least into the dictionary. I was the first person to use the term "genetic engineering" so far as Webster's Collegiate Dictionary knows. I sent them tear sheets from Dragon's Island, and they agreed to date the first use back to 1951. Of course, in 100 years I don't know what will be remembered." -- Jack Williamson, 1999

Jack Williamson died on this date in 2006. He started out his career being praised by the likes of A. Merritt and Isaac Asimov. By the time his life ended, Williamson was known as the 'Dean of Science Fiction' with Hugos and Nebulas on his wall. His works of science fiction and fantasy remain classics to this day.

Jack was born in 1908 in what was then the Arizona Territory. The Williamsons wandered about a bit during those final days of the American Frontier. They finally settled in New Mexico, arriving there in a covered wagon. Here's how Jack recalled things in 1999:

"My dad homesteaded in Eastern New Mexico in 1916 after the good land had been claimed. We were living below the poverty line, struggling for survival. (...) In 1918, when I was 10 years old, it didn't rain. My dad had a few cattle, and we drove them around eastern New Mexico and into Texas looking for grass for them. I went along and drove the chuck wagon. I remember at the end of summer we shipped them to Kansas City. My dad went along and I remember waving him good-bye and wondering if I would ever see him again. He sold the cattle and sent the money back to the bank. He worked in the harvest to make money for railway fare to Arizona. He worked there in a copper mine to make money to keep the family alive. That was how we survived."

As America's outlands were filling up, Jack looked to outlands beyond the sky. He might’ve arrived in New Mexico by way of a covered wagon, but his mind was hurtling to the farthest star in a spaceship. Hugo Gernsback's seminal SF magazine, Amazing Stories, began publication in 1926. Williamson sold Gernsback his first story in 1928. As Jack later reminisced:

*Amazing Stories*, December 1928. Jack’s first sale.

"I know most of my dealings with Gernsback were financial. I met him only once and that was for about 15 minutes when he came out of his office to shake hands with me. All told, he bought perhaps a quarter million words of my fiction, and he paid for it rather reluctantly. After he paid for the first few stories at half a cent a word (sometimes less), he stopped paying me altogether. Finally, I got an attorney associated with the American Fiction Guild to force Gernsback to send me payment. I gather other writers had similar experiences with him. (...) My understanding is that most of his actual editorial work was done by subordinates. So although he published and finally paid for the stories he accepted, he never made any suggestions about how to make them better."

Williamson wasn't the only one to get shafted by Gernsback. Clark Ashton Smith and Donald A. Wollheim--to name just two authors--also had to resort to legal recourse.

Jack's second tale for Gernsback elicited the praise of Williamson's biggest idol:

"[A.] Merritt's fiction always seemed to be a perfect escape that plunged you into very vivid, strangely evocative worlds that were dazzling, completely different. His short story "The People of the Pit" was in one of the first Amazing Stories issues I saw, and it seemed to have the strong emotional impact that Poe says a short story should be able to deliver. (...) I was drawn in by the colorful style, the drama, romance, his depiction of struggles between things that symbolized good and evil. My very first story, "The Metal Man" [1928], obviously is imitative of Merritt, and so are several other of my earliest works. It's difficult to describe how excited I was when Merritt actually wrote to me after the initial section of my second story, "The Alien Intelligence," [1929] ran as a serial. He said he liked it so much he'd like to see a carbon copy of the rest of it so he wouldn't have to wait for the next issue.
I was so overwhelmed by his request that I immediately sat down and asked his permission to write a sequel to his novelette, "The Face in the Abyss," which, it turned out, he had already completed on his own. He did agree to collaborate with me on a new project, which we tentatively called The Purple Mountain; and in the fall of 1930, I actually wrote an opening of something like 20,000 words; but that was as far as we got. He never returned the manuscript which, I'm sure, must have been pretty awful stuff. By today's standards the kind of style Merritt was creating seems excessive, florid and adjective laden, but I'm sure his books had a very positive influence on my own work simply in their emphasis on color, wonder, the magic of sheer imagination. Those things have always been part of SF. And always will be, I hope."

By that time, Merritt was running the show at The Atlantic Weekly and his writing time was severely constrained. It's too bad that nothing came of the project--but still--just imagine how excited Williamson must have been. That kind of encouragement can make a huge difference to a struggling author.

Williamson wasn't just selling to the SF pulps. Harry Bates at Strange Tales bought Jack's Merrittesque 'Wolves of Darkness'. Karl Edward Wagner thought enough of it to reprint it in Echoes of Valor III.

Around this time, Jack made contact with another young Merritt fanatic who also wrote for the pulps: Edmond Hamilton. The two would remain best friends until Ed’s death in 1977. They decided to take an epic journey on a budget. In the summer of 1932, they started down the Mississippi River in an open boat equipped with an outboard motor. Their intent was to meet E. Hoffman Price--Williamson was a big fan--in New Orleans. Disaster struck before they reached their destination, but the trip provided grist for Jack's first Weird Tales story:

“Another novelette was ‘The Wand of Doom,’ a horror story with local color I had picked up along the Mississippi. Revised after rejection by Strange Tales, it became my first sale to Weird Tales, published in the October issue, 1932…. I recall Farnsworth Wright, its longtime editor, with a special fondness… He told me ‘The Wand of Doom’ was the most popular story he had run in two years…”

However, Williamson had a bigger project afoot for Wright and WT:

“But my chief project, that winter, was the novel Golden Blood. That was before I built my own small cabin on the ranch, and I remember working till dawn, night after night, by a kerosene lamp in the family living room, after everyone else was in bed.
The setting was the Arabian desert, which I had never seen. My interest in the oriental had been excited by the Weird Tales writers, especially by E. Hoffman Price. I culled details from travel books and sprinkled the narrative a bit too freely with phrases of third hand Arabic.
In a serious effort to break into Argosy, I constructed the story as a six part serial, with a dramatic break at the end of each 10,000-word installment. After a good deal of cutting and revising, I re-typed the whole manuscript. This was the first time I had ever spent so much time on a story, and I mailed it out with high hopes. As usual, however, Argosy returned it, even though the editors liked ‘the nice color.’ I sent it to Wright. He accepted it promptly and ran it in Weird Tales for the months of April through September 1933. The first two parts had stunning covers by J. Allen St. John, the great Burroughs illustrator, and the readers applauded it.”

Despite Williamson's shout-outs to EHP, Golden Blood is pure Merritt-style exotic adventure. Considering that the most popular story ever published in Weird Tales was Merritt's "The Woman of the Wood", Wright was probably more than happy to publish Jack’s novel and the readers were happy to read it.

Williamson sold numerous stories to WT in the 1930s. A thorough analysis of those tales can be found here.

Meanwhile, Jack was selling his 'Legion of Space' tales--a classic example of early space opera--to Astounding Stories. I might as well point out here that the three main pioneers of space opera--Williamson, Hamilton and Doc Smith--were all huge Merritt fans, making ol' Abe one of the forefathers of the genre.

When World War Two broke out, Williamson enlisted, becoming a weather forecaster for the U.S. Army Air Force. Jack saw active service in the Pacific and flew on bombing raids over Bougainville and Rabaul.

When he demobilized, Williamson found that the SF field had shifted somewhat, but he improvised and overcame. Two of his SF novels from that period, The Humanoids and The Legion of Time, are still considered minor classics.

Jack would attend college in the mid-1950s and early 1960s—earning a Phd.—only to return and write more SF. He would continue to produce relevant science fiction practically up to his dying day. During his lifetime, his world went from covered wagons to international space stations. Williamson’s mind-boggling bibliography can be found here.

There are two more novels by Williamson that should be mentioned, both of which had their genesis in the days right before WWII. The Reign of Wizardry appeared in the spring issues of John W. Campbell’s Unknown in 1940. It was Jack’s Merrittesque retelling of the Theseus myth. A rollicking, adventurous romp. The novel would be republished in 1964 sporting a very early Frazetta cover.

A short story by Jack titled ‘Darker Than You Think’ would appear in the December, 1940 issue of Unknown. A tale of shapeshifters dwelling unsuspected alongside humanity, Williamson would rework it into a novel when he got back from the Pacific. Darker Than You Think was published in hardcover in 1948. In some ways, DTYT can be looked upon as a precursor of everything from White Wolf’s “World of Darkness” setting to the Harry Dresden and Twilight series. It remains his most highly regarded fantasy novel.

In referring to his fantasy fiction, Williamson had this to say:

“In my own fantasy fiction, like Darker Than You Think [1948], there is, of course, a link with reality in that I am using these fantasy elements as a way of describing real human emotions, motivations, and feelings, though these have been transferred to this fantasy setting. For me, there always has to be an element of human reality to any work of literature or it would be worthless—or at least impossible to read with admiration. I had actually written many fantasy type stories even before the late '30s (my Golden Blood was published in Weird Tales in 1933), so I wouldn't say my fiction really suddenly became fantasy oriented later on. At any rate, even when I write fantasy stories, I always try to make an appeal to scientific possibility.”

Jack became more interested in the literary criticism side of SFF as the decades marched on. He didn’t like everything he saw out there, as he stated in his autobiography, Wonder’s Child:

“I can’t help a certain wariness toward criticism in general, an attitude more emotional than rational and hard to clarify… I like the kind of criticism that can help the reader find and read new work. The criticism I suspect is the sort that takes the work apart in search of items the critic wants to use in some new construction of his own, with no intention to illuminate it, though his purpose may be consistent with the ideas of Freud or Marx or some other high authority.”

Williamson was an insightful man.

Here is something he noted in one of his final interviews:

“The wonderful thing about science fiction has always been that there were no taboos. You could say anything you wanted to say, so long as you embodied it in an entertaining story.”

In some ways, Jack always remained that boy who loved reading A. Merritt.