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John Stewart Williamson (born April 29, 1908), who writes as Jack Williamson but has occasionally used the pseudonym Will Stewart, is considered the "Dean of Science fiction". In search of better pastures when Williamson was young, his family migrated from bordering states to rural New Mexico in a covered wagon. The farming was unsuccessful and the family continued a poverty-stricken existence.
As a young man, Williamson discovered the magazine Amazing Stories and strove to write his own fiction, selling his first story at 20. He first sold a story to an American pulp magazine in 1928. 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,congratulating him on his first published story and saying "welcome to the ranks". Thereafter, he was a regular contributor to the pulp magazines, though not reaching financial success until many years later. He has published many collaborations with the SF author Frederik Pohl. He continues to write as a nonagenarian.
An unfavorable review of one of his books, which compared the 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", loosely based on his novel Seetee Ship for several years until the paper dropped all comics.
Williamson's most famous story is arguably "With Folded Hands", a cautionary tale of life made too easy. This story introduced the humanoid robots, dubbed simply humanoids which figure in several of Williamson's novels as the premise established in "With Folded Hands" plays out across the galaxy.
Novels:
- The Legion of Space, 1934 (serialized)
- Darker Than You Think, 1948
- The Humanoids, 1949
- Undersea Quest, 1954 (with Fred Pohl)
- Undersea Fleet, 1955 (with Fred Pohl)
- Undersea City, 1958 (with Fred Pohl)
- The Humanoid Touch, 1980
- Terraforming Earth, 2001
- The Stonehenge Gate, 2005 (forthcoming)
incomplete
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