The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy
Page 57
“It is now or never, Crewman!” Brong’s giant voice drummed. “Cyra says her monopole can hold the Zone, and they won’t care much for the rockrust outside it. With aid from our Leleyo friends, we can hold out forever. Before Summersend, your girl should be back to visit the Zone.”
“But—can’t—”
His tongue toiled and stalled, but he felt Brong hauling, saw the gold hand flashing, turning him toward Malili. It was low and pale and gibbous, nearly lost beyond those glowing pylons and the five shining divers—
“Close to the top.” The slow words crashed. “Midway between the limb and the sunrise line. A bare slope of broken stone—so watch your feet!” He wanted to watch the quick stark beauty of the playful divers.
“Lean a little.” The golden hooks hurt his arm.
“Fix your mind on those rocks and hold your image of a window through the interface. Rhodo or whatever, the word doesn’t matter. Intend to be beyond the window. I’ll count us down and do all I can. “Three. Two. One. Now—” Nearer thunder cracked. A frigid wind whipped him. A heavy pressure crushed his chest. Loose rocks slid beneath his unshod feet. Cruelly burdened, he fought to stay erect.
“All right, Crewman?” To his ringing ears, Brong’s eager shout seemed far-off and faint. “Here we are!”
He got his breath and found his balance. Beneath them, shattered rock sloped sharply toward the zigzag of a long concrete wall. Slim towers stood spaced along it, and the violet shimmer between them hurt his eyes. Beyond the wall, rockrust blues and greens slanted on into jungle reds and yellows and a far gray-blue sea of cloud that reached out and out to lemon-green horizons beneath a high and tiny silver crescent.
Kai!
The glimpse of it washed him with healing peace. If that silver shard was Kai, this was—this had to be Malili, where no humanoid could follow.
“Good jump, Crewman, but you had me sweating.” Brong swung to lead him up the slope. “Let’s look for Cyra and your father.”
Still giddy from the feyolin, hardly feeling the icy stones beneath his naked feet, he staggered after Brong toward the inner perimeter wall and the low brown roofs of the human town. ■
John Stewart Williamson (April 29, 1908 – November 10, 2006), who wrote as Jack Williamson, was an American science fiction writer, often called the “Dean of Science Fiction” after the death of Robert Heinlein in 1988. Early in his career he sometimes used the pseudonyms Will Stewart and Nils O. Sonderlund.
Born in Bisbee, Arizona Territory, 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 in 1915. The farming was difficult there and the family turned to ranching, which they continue to this day. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II as a weather forecaster.
As a child Williamson enjoyed storytelling to his brother and two sisters. As a young man, he discovered the magazine Amazing Stories, established in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback, after answering an ad for one free issue. He strove to write his own fiction and sold his first story to Gernsback at age 20: “The Metal Man” was published in the December 1928 issue of Amazing. During the next year Gernsback published three more of his stories in the new pulp magazines Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories, and separately published “The Girl from Mars” by Miles J. Breuer and Williamson as Science Fiction Series #1. His work during this early period was heavily influenced by A. Merritt, author of The Metal Monster (1920) and other fantasy serials. Noting the Merritt influence, Algis Budrys described “The Metal Man” as “a story full of memorable images”.
Early on, Williamson became impressed by the works of Miles J. Breuer and struck up a correspondence with him. A doctor who wrote science fiction in his spare time, Breuer had a strong talent and turned Williamson away from dreamlike fantasies towards more rigorous plotting and stronger narrative. Under Breuer’s tutelage, Williamson would send outlines and drafts for review. Their first work together was the novel Birth of a New Republic in which Moon colonies were undergoing something like the American Revolution—a theme later taken up by many other SF writers, particularly in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
Wracked by emotional storms and believing many of his physical ailments to be psychosomatic, Williamson underwent psychiatric evaluation in 1933 at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, in which he began to learn to resolve the conflict between his reason and his emotion. From this period, his stories take on a grittier, more realistic tone.
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, which congratulated him on his first published story and offered “welcome to the ranks”. Williamson remained a regular contributor to the pulp magazines but did not achieve financial success as a writer until many years later.
An unfavorable review of one of his books, which compared his 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 (1952–55), loosely based on his novel Seetee Ship, until the paper dropped all comics.
Beginning 1954 and continuing into the 1990s, Williamson and Frederick Pohl wrote more than a dozen science fiction novels together, including the series Jim Eden, Starchild, and Cuckoo. Williamson continued to write as a nonagenarian and won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards during the last decade of his life, by far the oldest writer to win those awards.
Jack Williamson received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in English in the 1950s from Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU) in Portales (near the Texas panhandle), joining the faculty of that university in 1960. He remained affiliated with the school for the rest of his life. In the late 1990s, he established a permanent trust to fund the publication of El Portal, ENMU’s journal of literature and art. In the 1980s, he made a sizable donation of books and original manuscripts to ENMU’s library, which resulted in the formation of a Special Collections department; the library now is home to the Jack Williamson Science Fiction Library, which ENMU’s website describes as “one of the top science fiction collections in the world”. In addition, Williamson hosted the Jack Williamson Lectureship Series, an annual panel discussion in which two science fiction authors were invited to speak to attendees on a set topic. The Jack Williamson Liberal Arts building houses the Mathematics, Art, and Languages & Literature Departments of the university.
Williamson completed his Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder, focused on H.G. Wells’ earlier works, demonstrating that Wells was not the naive optimist that many believed him to be. In the field of science, Jack Williamson coined the word terraforming in a science-fiction story published in 1942 in Astounding Science Fiction.
The Science Fiction Writers of America named Williamson its second Grand Master of Science Fiction after Robert Heinlein, presented 1976.
After retiring from teaching full-time in 1977, Williamson spent some time concentrating on his writing, but after being named Professor Emeritus by ENMU, he was coaxed back to co-teach two evening classes, “Creative Writing” and “Fantasy and Science Fiction” (he pioneered the latter at ENMU during his full-time professorship days). Williamson continued to co-teach these two classes into the 21st century. After he made a large donation of original manuscripts and rare books from his personal collection to the ENMU library, a special collections area was created to house these and it was named the “Jack Williamson Special Collection”.
In 1994 Williamson received a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Williamson in 1996, its inaugural class of two deceased and two living persons.
The Horror Writers Association conferred its Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1998 and the World Horror Convention elected him Grand Master in 2004.
In Nov
ember 2006, Williamson died at his home in Portales, New Mexico at age 98. Despite his age, he had made an appearance at the Spring 2006 Jack Williamson Lectureship and published a 320-page novel, The Stonehenge Gate, in 2005.