Amazing Stories Volume 149, Classics To Go

Jack Williamson

Jack Williamson was the working name of US author John Stewart Williamson (1908-2006), which he used from the beginning of his career in 1928, though his Seetee stories were originally signed Will Stewart. Williamson was born in Arizona and raised (after stints in Mexico and Texas) on an isolated New Mexico homestead, and spent his last decades as well in New Mexico; he described his early upbringing and his first encounter with sf in the 1920s in his introduction and notes to The Early Williamson (1975), which assembles some of the rough but vigorous stories he published 1928-1933; and amplified this autobiographical material in Wonder's Child: My Life in Science Fiction (1984), which won a 1985 Hugo. These reminiscences reconfirm the explosively liberating effect early Pulp-magazine sf had on its first young audiences, especially those who like Williamson grew up in small towns or farms across an America hurtling out of its rural past.