The long, extraordinary life of Jack Williamson came to a peaceful end last November, six months short of his ninety-ninth birthday, at his home in the small university town of Portales, New Mexico. His career as a science fiction writer had begun in the by now almost mythical days more than seventy-five years ago when the great pioneer Hugo Gernsback was publishing Amazing Stories, and continued on, decade after decade, until just last year, when his final novel, The Stonehenge Gate, appeared. Throughout all that time Williamson was a major figure in the field, constantly evolving and growing, with the astonishing result that he was able to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards in his nineties.

Nineteen years ago I wrote the column that follows, by way of paying tribute to Jack’s sixtieth anniversary as a published writer. I can think of no better tribute than to reprint it now:

 

This is the opening paragraph of a science fiction story that was published in 1928:

 

The Metal Man stands in a dark, dusty corner of the Tyburn College Museum. Just who is responsible for the figure being moved there, or why it was done, I do not know. To the casual eye it looks to be merely an ordinary life-size statue. The visitor who gives it a closer view marvels at the minute perfection of the detail of hair and skin; at the silent tragedy in the set, determined expression and poise; and at the remarkable greenish cast of the metal of which it is composed, but, most of all at the peculiar mark upon its chest. It is a six-sided blot, of a deep crimson hue, with the surface oddly granular and strange wavering lines radiating from it—lines of a lighter shade of red.

 

And this is the beginning of a story published in 1947:

 

Underhill was walking home from the office, because his wife had the car, the afternoon he first met the new mechanicals. His feet were following his usual diagonal path across a weedy vacant block—his wife usually had the car—and his preoccupied mind was rejecting various impossible ways to meet his notes at the Two Rivers bank, when a new wall stopped him.

The wall wasn’t any common brick or stone, but something sleek and bright and strange. Underhill stared up at a long new building. He felt vaguely annoyed and surprised at this glittering obstruction—it certainly hadn’t been here last week.

 

The third story, which appeared in 1978, starts like this:

The office intercom grunted.

“Olaf?” It was Sakuma, head of Northcape Engineers. “Clients for you. A couple of motherworlders, pretty fresh to Medea. Want a research station built. I told ’em you could do it.”

“Where?”

A silent second.

“Listen to ’em, anyhow,” Sakuma said. “They’re serious. Well funded. We’ve talked about the risks, and they’re still determined. They want to see Farside—”

 

Much of the stylistic history of modern science fiction is encapsulated in these three excerpts. The first (“The Metal Man,” Amazing Stories, December, 1928) starts in a clear, quiet way, undramatic but suggesting wonders to come: rather British in tone. The second (“With Folded Hands”) examplifies the slick, efficient style of the postwar Astounding Science Fiction, where it appeared in the July 1947 issue: strangeness dropped down in the commonplace world of bank loans and weedy lots. And the third (“Farside Station,” written for Harlan Ellison’s Medea anthology but first published in the November 1978 Asimov’s) is very much up-to-date in manner, fast-paced and clipped.

Different as they are from one another, these lead paragraphs have two things in common. One is that they all get their stories moving quickly and encourage the reader to want to know what happens next. The other is that they were all written—over a fifty-year period—by Jack Williamson. Who is still at it today, a decade after his superb Medea story appeared, and whose sixtieth anniversary as a science fiction writer we commemorate now.

Sixty years of first-class science fiction?

Consider that awhile. Calvin Coolidge was President of the United States when Williamson’s first story was published. Isaac Asimov was not quite nine years old. Robert Sheckley and Philip K. Dick had just been born. Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison, Algis Budrys, and Robert Silverberg were all some years in the future. Radio was new; television was science fiction; movies were silent. And Jack Williamson—born in Arizona, not yet a state of the Union in 1908—had just sold his first story.

Simply to plug away writing publishable fiction for sixty years would itself be an extraordinary record of persistence, even if the work were only mediocre. But when the Science Fiction Writers of America gave Jack Williamson its Grand Master trophy in 1975—the second such award to be given, Robert A. Heinlein having received the first—he was not being honored merely for endurance. Over the decades Williamson has created an astonishing body of classic science fiction. What reader has ever forgotten the rollicking Legion of Space, first published more than fifty years ago? The powerful, brooding werewolf story, Darker Than You Think, of 1940? The chilling masterpiece of the robot takeover, “With Folded Hands,” and its 1948 sequel, The Humanoids?

And so much more. The Seetee series, science fiction’s first exploration of antimatter. The soaring, visionary Starchild books, written in collaboration with Frederik Pohl. The great adventure story Golden Blood. And then, too, The Reign of Wizardry, The Power of Blackness, Manseed, Lifeburst—on and on and on. All of it written with vigor, power, constantly renewed inventiveness, and insight. His writing has grown with the years. His work is always fresh, always new, always at the forefront of the field. No one could possibly guess that the stories he will publish this year are the work of an eighty-year-old. In the late 1970s, at a time when most SF writers half his age were still clinging to their typewriters, Jack Williamson had already switched over to a word processor. He is the youngest sixty-year veteran anyone could imagine.

He doesn’t look young, this tall, shy, gangling man who has spent his life under the Southwestern sun. You can see his years in the stoop of his shoulders now, and in the folds and creases of his skin. But you need only spend ten minutes talking with Jack Williamson to feel the youthful openness of his restless, inquiring mind and the resilience of his indomitable spirit. And you need only read a few lines of any of his sixty years of science fiction to know that you are in the presence of one of the world’s great storytellers. It’s been a privilege to know him and a delight to read him. He honors us by his presence in our midst.

 

I wrote the preceding paragraphs in 1988. They have to be put into past tense now, but except for the need for updating, everything still applies. Jack Williamson, a writer, critic, and teacher and a warm-hearted, loving, and beloved human being, who lived on with unending creativity and unimpaired intellect from the early years of the twentieth century to the early years of the twenty-first, seemingly as ageless as a sequoia, has turned out to be mortal after all. But the books and stories that he wrote will survive far into the future that he depicted with such splendid fertility of imagination.