Seekers of Tomorrow

by Sam Moskowitz

  Hamilton, asked to do the stories, wrote all but three of the 21 novels and novelettes in the series to a hard-and-fast formula. Thus, during a period when a new type of science fiction was coming into vogue and creating reputations for Heinlein, van Vogt, Sturgeon, and Asimov, Hamilton found himself labeled a specialist in blood-and-thunder juveniles.

  Even when two Hamilton pulp novels (The Star Kings, 1949, and City at the World's End, 1951), were published in hard covers by Frederick Fell and got surprisingly favorable reviews, including the new york times, it was all dismissed as an inexplicable occurrence by hard-core scientifictionists who could not keep from thinking of Captain Future when they read the name Edmond Hamilton. Most of them were not aware that a collection of Hamilton's short stories from weird tales and the science-fiction magazines had gone into book form as The Horror on the Asteroid and Other Tales of Planetary Horror as far back as 1936, a period when such distinction was rare.

  Throughout the fifties, Hamilton continued to turn out a variety of science fiction for thrilling wonder stories, startling stories, imagination, universe science fiction and other titles, primarily action stories written with an originality and care atypical of the type. Since the action story in science fiction was going out of vogue, there was little comment re Hamilton until the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club began to make his inclusion a habit, his full-length titles began to appear in paperback, and his new work for amazing stories received top reader endorse-ment.

  The invitations to Hamilton and Brackett to appear as guests of honor at the regional Metropolitan Science Fiction Conference in New York in 1954 were extended more out of affection than as tokens of literary achievement. The reverse was true when the two were offered and accepted the same role at the 1964 World Science Fiction convention held in Oakland, California.

  In these modern times, men in the arts and the industries are honored for many unusual achievements. Few can claim to have been eulogized, as Edmond Hamilton was at the 1964 World Convention, for precedents as striking as "pio-neering the concept of interstellar adventure, the notion of a galactic empire and galactic police force, the use of complete darkness as a weapon, employing a time machine to recruit an army from the past, and introducing Fortean themes."

  5 JACK WILLIAMSON

  It is a pity that the quality of Stewart's writing is such that this "space opera" ranks only slightly above that of a comic strip adventure.

  That section of a review of Seetee Ship by Will Stewart was brought to the attention of the editors of the new york sunday news. The review, by Villiers Gerson, appeared in the Sunday book-review supplement of the new york times in September, 1951. The management of the news had been seriously worried about the effect of television on circulation and advertising revenue and were exploring various means to offset this probability. One possible solution was to feature an exclusive, nonsyndicated comic strip, but they wanted a writ-er a cut above average to handle the continuity. In Portales, New Mexico, Jack Williamson's telephone rang. It was Ama Barker of the news. The editors had decided, on the basis of the review, that he was just the man to write their new comic strip. They had discovered that Will Stewart was his pen name and called long distance to see if he would work for them.

  Williamson gasped, but at last, in a leisurely Southwestern drawl, he managed to choke out his agreement.

  He flew to New York where it was decided that a Sunday page to be called Beyond Mars would be constructed from the background of his books Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock, adventures in the mining and utilization of contraterrene matter (substances repelled by ordinary matter) in the as-teroid belt. The cartoonist, Lee Elias, had previously worked with Milt Caniff on Terry and the Pirates, and he now employed the same style for Beyond Mars. Three times annually Jack Williamson would arrive in New York and work out the story line with the editors and the artist. Each week he would receive a handsome check.

  The editors of the news must have checked and been aware that they were employing the services of one of the most distinguished names in science fiction. In Williamson they were getting an author who had earned a half-dozen reputations for outstanding performance in various aspects of science fiction and who had powerfully influenced several major trends. And this, the most lucrative assignment of his life, had come not on the basis of accomplishment, but as the result of hostile criticism. John Stewart Williamson (the origin of the pen name Will Stewart is obvious) was born in Bisbee, Arizona Territory, April 29, 1908. His mother, Lucy Betty Hunt, was the daughter of a slaveholding aristocrat ruined by the Civil War. She was teaching school when she married Asa Lee Williamson, a graduate of the University of Texas, a descen-dant of Revolutionary War stock, who was then also teaching.

  The land lured Asa Williamson and he quit teaching short-ly after his marriage to take up ranching with two of his wife's brothers in Mexico. The ranch was located in such forbidding terrain on the headwaters of the Rio Yaqui in Sonora that the closest wagons could come was a day's travel away. Though Apaches raided the ranch, mountain lions preyed on the pigs, and scorpions made foot travel uneasy, it took the uncertainties of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 to send the Williamsons scurrying back across the border. Failing to make an irrigated farm in Pecos pay, Asa Williamson packed the family belongings into a covered wag-on in 1915 and, with the livestock straggling along behind, headed for the Llano Estacado, in eastern New Mexico. They were latecomers, the best land had already been taken, and life for the family became an endless bout with poverty. The crops, if not destroyed by drought, were subject to choking sand and hail. Animals died from eating poisonous vegeta-tion. During desperate periods Asa Williamson would take up teaching for a time or even turn to mining to see him through.

  In due course, Jack had the company of a brother and two younger sisters. They milked cows, cared for chickens and turkeys, drew water, and worked in the fields. The grim contest with nature pulled the family into a tightly knit unit. Most of the children's early learning was given them by the parents at home. Daydreaming became Jack's only escape from unromantic Southwestern reality. As he became older, he verbally imparted his daydreams in a nonstop and endless radio-soap-opera-routine to his brothers and sisters.

  Regular schooling for Jack began in 1920 in the seventh grade. So long removed from contact with others than his own family, he was extraordinarily shy and introverted through high school. Though smitten with the charm of an athletic blonde, Blanche Slaten, he never gained the courage to talk to her and sadly watched her marry another boy the Christmas before his graduation in 1925. Tall and gangling, he was as ineffective at athletics as at romance and so retreated to books.

  The twenties might have been roaring for others, but when Jack left school, helping out on the farm seemed his only future. One of his friends was Edlie Walker, who had become a lawyer though confined to a wheel chair. Walker, a radio ham, subscribed to Hugo Gernsback's radio news. Soon after amazing stories was started, he received the March, 1927, issue as a sample and turned it over to Jack. That issue featured The Green Splotches, a tale of an atomic-powered space rocket by T. S. Stribling, but what really hypnotized young Jack Williamson was the poetic and Poesque descrip-tion of a civilization of nonhuman intelligences discovered in the bottom of an extinct Alaskan volcano, in A. Merritt's story The People of the Pit.

  Appealing to his sister for aid, he scraped together enough funds to secure amazing stories regularly. His subscription started with the June, 1927, issue which contained the second installment of Merritt's The Moon Pool. The images that poured from The Moon Pool —The Shining One; Lakla, the handmaiden; The Silent Ones; Yolara, priestess of the Dweller; Olaf, the Norseman; the AKKA, batrachian-like race; the Green Dwarf; and the Ancient Ones—induced euphoria in most, but Jack Williamson they fired with a crusading fervor. There was now but one god, A. Merritt, and his prophet was Jack Williamson. Stories began to pour out of a typewriter with a chronical-ly pale, purple ribbon: The Flying Flowers, The Abyss of the Scarlet
Spheres, The Alien Plane, Under the Cavern's Roof, The Castle of the Seven Gates, A Prince of Atlantis and Via the Vacuum Tube. Most were never finished, others were sent to amazing stories and returned. Of that early output only an unconvincing attempt to handle a theme of physical transmutation and horror in the setting of a lost jungle city, Crystal of Death, has seen publication, and that in the Au-gust, 1940, issue of William L. Hamling's semiprofessional magazine, stardust. Some encouragement came from winning an honorary mention for an ending submitted to an unfinished story in American boy. This, the idea of an undersea world, William-son would soon use in a short novel, The Green Girl.

  The first intimation that he had finally made the grade as a professional writer came without notice shortly after he en-rolled at West Texas State Teachers College the fall of 1928 when he received the December, 1928, amazing stories. The cover, by Frank R. Paul, depicted a scene from William-son's story The Metal Man. The editor clearly recognized Williamson's literary deity in his blurb: "Not since we pub-lished 'The Moon Pool' has such a story as this been pub-lished by us." The Metal Man concerned radioactive emanations from a form of intelligent crystalline life which turn all objects into metal. While the story was a good first effort, the enthusiasm with which it was received ran far beyond its conceptual or literary qualities. However, in trying to capture something of Merritt in his writing, Jack Williamson had undoubtedly struck the right chord.

  Despite the fact that he was offered a scholarship in chemistry at the end of his second year and consistently scored "A's" in his other subjects, the sale of The Metal Man caused Williamson to lose interest in academic pursuits. The entire Christmas vacation of 1928 was spent writing a short novel, The Alien Intelligence, which he sold to Hugo Gernsback's newly formed science wonder stories (July and August, 1929). It was a very competent writing job, dealing with a bizarre hidden valley in Australia. The editors appeared most impressed with Williamson's concept of a mysterious insect race whose brains had grown so large that they were sustained and transported in metal bodies. The belief that intelligence could evolve in the most alien forms was to become a trademark of Williamson's stories. Williamson decided that education was an impediment to his drive to become a writer, particularly since he was devoting as much time to reading H. G. Wells as to his studies. He left school at the end of his second year and plunged whole-heartedly into fiction. The Green Girl, published as a two-part novel in the March and April, 1930, issues of amazing stories, was a success. His opening sentence—"At high noon on May 4, 1999 the sun went out!"—is frequently quoted by the school of writing that believes you should get right into your story. The story takes place in a strange world under the sea, where the roof of water is suspended in delicate balance by a gas made up of antimatter. "You know that science has held for a long time that there is no reason, per se, to doubt the existence of substances that would repel instead of attracting one another," one of Williamson's char-acters explains, and there, early in Williamson's writing career, is the seed of the contraterrence matter stories writ-ten under the Will Stewart name. The Green Girl has atomic energy weapons, intelligent flying plants that can be trained to fight or wash dishes, with the action and colorful backdrop of the old scientific ro-mances. Actually, Jack Williamson was to become the author bridging the gulf between the school exemplifying pure escape in the tradition of A. Merritt, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Otis Adelbert Kline, and Ralph Milne Farley, and the group then currently focusing on ideas which Hugo Gernsback strove to include in his magazine.

  The influence of Merritt and, to a lesser degree, the S. Fowler Wright of The World Below, was to pervade most of Williamson's writing for the next three years. Yet his ability to come up with a spectacular story device, if not a new idea, gained for him the title of "The Cover Copper" in the early science-fiction fan magazines, since the subject matter of his stories provided a constant source of provocative illustrative material. Of his first 21 stories, published between 1928 and 1932, 13 gained a cover. Typical of Williamson's ideas are the following: the notion of the Heaviside layer supporting forms of life (The Second Shell, air wonder stories, November, 1929); a girl who is permitted to remain alive by a civilized race of Antarctic crustaceans because they like her singing (The Lake of Light, astounding stories, April, 1931), a tiny artificial planet kept suspended in a laboratory (The Pygmy Planet, astounding stories, February, 1932), a beautiful lady flying around in space asking entry into a spaceship (The Lady of Light, amazing stories, September, 1932). Williamson was never without some new idea or novel situation. Stock devices, too, were repeated in Williamson stories. The airplane was his favorite means of carrying his charac-ters into action, beginning with his first story, The Metal Man, then later on the cover of wonder stories, May, 1931, in Through the Purple Cloud, and on to the ultimate extreme in Non-Stop to Mars (argosy, February 25, 1939), in which he contrives a semilogical means of flying an air-plane to the Red Planet.

  Jack Williamson loved jewels and they are the catalyst to the fourth dimension in Through the Purple Cloud; the key to eternal life in The Stone from the Green Star (amazing stories, October and November, 1931), a superscience epic of the far galaxies related in symbols of The Moon Pool; a pathway to a primeval planet in the lusty adventure In the Scarlet Star (amazing stories, March, 1933). The jewels, like the vortices of light, the outre cities inside volcanoes, hidden valleys, other dimensions, the monsterlike aliens with an aspect of benevolence, are all of obvious derivation.

  Perhaps Williamson's devotion to Merritt might not have lasted so long if he had not received encouragement from that author in the form of a letter praising The Alien Intelligence. On a tour east with his correspondent and friend Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson was cordially received by Merritt at the American weekly, where he was Morrill Goddard's right-hand man, and they discussed science fiction. Williamson enthusiastically suggested collaborating on a se-quel to The Face in the Abyss, but Merritt had already completed one (The Snake Mother) and turned it over to argosy. Merritt finally did agree to work with Williamson on a novel to be called The Purple Mountain. Some 20,000 words were actually written by Williamson and mailed to Merritt in 1930. The manuscript was acknowledged but nev-er returned. The crown jewel of this phase of Williamson's writing was undoubtedly The Moon Era (wonder stories, February, 1932). The protagonist, falling away from the earth in a spaceship, finds himself moving back in time and lands on the moon when that satellite is still a young world possessing water, air, and life. There he allies himself with The Mother, the last of a race of Lunarians trying to escape to the sea, with the seeds of her young in her. She is pursued by The Eternal Ones, a civilization of brains in gigantic robot bodies, who originally were an off-shoot of her race. The physical and mental qualities of The Mother are sketched with such delicacy, the symbols employed to convey the desired mood so unerring, that the unfolding of the story achieves a com-plete suspension of disbelief in the reader, and it builds to a climax of such stirring poignancy that the reading becomes a memorable experience.

  The man who would play the biggest initial role in direct-ing Williamson away from Merritt would be Miles J. Breuer, M.D. Breuer was a successful practicing physician in Lincoln, Nebraska, who wrote science fiction for the love of it He was no stylist, but for off-beat ideas handled with a degree of depth and maturity he ranked high. His remarkable novel Paradise and Iron (amazing stories quarterly, Summer, 1930), portraying the ultimate in automation dominated by thinking machines, belongs with the very best stories on the subject.

  Williamson greatly admired Breuer's originality and wrote him when he saw his name listed as a member of The Science Correspondence Club, of which he too was a mem-ber. Williamson was eager to learn more about the writing craft and Breuer was willing to help. Breuer suggested a novel paralleling the American Revolution but with the locale in the future and on the moon. The result was The Birth of a New Republic which appeared complete in the Winter, 1931, amazing stories quarterly. Williamson did virtuall
y all of the writing, but under the strictest discipline, submitting the outline of every chapter to Breuer for approval. The result was a highly ingenious detailing of a future civilization but not a novel in any true sense, since the entire story was a blow-by-blow description of a future revolution with virtually no other story line at all.

  The Cosmic Express (amazing stories, November, 1930), a spoof on interplanetary stories, was heavily influenced by Breuer and is notable for its use of matter transmitters for space travel and the brilliant prediction that westerns would dominate television.

  "Breuer was an antidote to my own tendency toward unrestrained fantasy," Williamson acknowledges.

  "He insisted upon solid plot construction, upon the importance of real human values in character, and upon the element of theme."

  Despite his reader acclaim and steady sales record, Williamson found that a writing career had failed to bring him complete satisfaction. He felt the trouble rested in his own personality. Shy, sensitive, and withdrawn, he made few friends and had neither the courage nor flourish to approach a member of the opposite sex.

  He seriously considered taking up psychiatry as a profes-sion, but was discouraged when David H. Keller, M.D., practicing in that field, and his friend Miles J. Breuer, M.D., both told him of the time and money required. He briefly flirted with the idea of becoming an astronomer, then settled for a philosophy major at the University of New Mexico, rolling into Albuquerque in the fall of 1932 on a freight car, as the finale to a summer of riding the rods.