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Passing of a giant
12/11/2006 . Source: Jessica Martin 
Science fiction author Jack Williamson, creator of the Legion of Space and the Legion of Time series, died today. He was 98 years old. Buy Jack Williamson in the USA - or Buy Jack Williamson in the UK  He was writing in the golden age for the pulps, and he continued publishing SFF right up until his death. What a guy. We have lost one of the great ones.
Here's his life in brief, courtesy of Wikipedia.
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.
Williamson discovered the local library and used it to educate himself. As a young man, he discovered the magazine Amazing Stories, after answering an ad for one free issue. He strove to write his own fiction, selling his first story at age 20: The Metal Man appeared in the Dec. 1928 issue of Amazing Stories. His work during this early period was heavily influenced by A. Merritt.
Early on, he 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 dream-like 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.
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, congratulating him on his first published story and saying "welcome to the ranks." Williamson remained a regular contributor to the pulp magazines, though not reaching financial success until many years later. He published many collaborations with the science fiction author Frederik Pohl. He 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.
Academic Career
Williamson received his BA and MA degrees in English in the 1950s from Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU), in the town of Portales, New Mexico (along the south-central New Mexico-Texas), joining the faculty of that university in 1960. He remained affiliated with the school for the rest of his life, actually co-teaching two classes, Creative Writing and Fantasy and Science Fiction, as recently as 2003. 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" [2]. 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 [3].
Williamson completed his doctorate (PhD) in English literature at the University of Colorado[1], 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 legitimate science, Jack Williamson coined the word terraforming in a science-fiction story published in 1942 in Astounding Science Fiction.
WORKS
The Legion of Space
While attending a Great Books course, Williamson learned that Henryk Sienkiewicz had created one of his works by taking the Three Musketeers of Alexandre Dumas and pairing them with John Falstaff of William Shakespeare. Williamson took this idea into science fiction with The Legion of Space.
At the time desperate for money, he searched for a quick source of income. While most pulps of the time were slow to pay, the recently re-started Astounding had a quick turnaround in Williamson's experience, but did not accept novels, so he submitted three short stories and a novelet. Learning that they were also accepting novels for serialization, he sent in The Legion of Space, which was published in six parts. It quickly became a genre favorite, and was quickly collected into a hardcover.
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The story takes place in an era when humans have colonized the Solar System but dare not go farther, as the first extra-solar expedition, to Barnard's Star, failed and the survivors came back as babbling, grotesque, diseased madmen. They spoke of a gigantic planet, populated by ferocious animals and the single city left of the evil "Medusae." The Medusae bear a vague resembance to jellyfish, but are actually elephant-sized, four-eyed, flying beings with hundreds of tentacles. The Medusae cannot speak and communicate with one another via a microwave code.
The Falstaff character is named Giles Habibula. He was once a criminal, and can open any lock ever made. In his youth he was called Giles The Ghost. Jay Kalam (Commander of The Legion) and Hal Samdu are the names of the other two warriors. In this story these warriors of the 30th Century battle the Medusae, the alien race from the lone planet of Barnard's Star. The Legion itself is the military and police force of the Solar System after the overthrow of an empire called the Purple Hall that once ruled all humans.
In this novel, renegade Purple pretenders ally themselves with the Medusae as a means to regain their empire. But the Medusae, who are totally unlike humans in all ways, turn on the Purples, seeking to destroy all humans and move to the Solar System, as their own world, far older than Earth, is finally spiraling back into Barnard's Star. One of the Purples, John Ulnar, supports the Legion from the start, and he is the fourth great warrior. His enemy is the Purple pretender Eric Ulnar, who sought the Medusae out in the first place, seeking to become the next Emperor of The Sun.
The Medusae conquered the Moon, set up their bases there, and went on to attempt conquest of the Solar System. The Medusae had for eons used a greenish, artificial greenhouse gas to keep their dying world from freezing. The Medusae learned from the first human expedition to their world that the gas rots human flesh, and the Medusae use it as a potent chemical weapon, attempting ecological destruction by means of projectiles fired from the Moon. Their vast spaceships also have very effective plasma weapons, very similar to those the Romulans had in a Star Trek episode called Balance of Terror.
The Legion works also featured a force field called AKKA which can erase from the Universe any matter, of any size, anywhere, even a star or a planet. AKKA was a weapon of mass destruction and the secret of it was entrusted to a series of women. AKKA was used in the past to overthrow the Purple tyranny. It was also used to wipe out most of the Medusae, though they had tried to steal the secret. When they were wiped out, the Moon where they had established their base was erased out of existence. At the end of the story, John Ulnar falls in love with the keeper of AKKA, Aladoree Anthar, and marries her. Aladoree Anthar is described as a young, blonde woman, beautiful as a goddess.
Williamson then wrote The Cometeers which takes place twenty years after the Legion of Space in which the same characters battle another alien race, this one of different origin.
In this second tale, they fight The Cometeers who are an alien race of energy beings controlling a "comet" which is really a giant force field containing a swarm of planets populated by their slaves. The slave races are of flesh and blood, but none are remotely similar to humans. The Cometeers cannot be destroyed by AKKA as they are incorporeal from the Universe's point of view and exist for the most part in an alternate reality. The ruling Cometeers feed on their slaves and literally absorb their souls, leaving disgusting, dying hulks in their wake. It is said that they do so as they were once fleshly entities themselves of various species. Hence the ruling Cometeers keep other intelligent beings as slaves and "cattle." They fear AKKA though as it can erase all their possessions.
They are defeated by the skills of Giles Habibula. Giles broke into a secret chamber guarded by complex locks and force fields that the incorporeal Cometeers could not penetrate. In it the ruler of the Cometeers had kept its own weapon of mass destruction, one that would cause the Cometeers to disintegrate. The ruling Cometeer kept this weapon to enforce its rule over the others of its kind. One the Cometeers were destroyed, their slaves were ordered by the Legion to take the comet and leave the Solar System, and never return.
Another novel, One Against the Legion tells of a Purple pretender who sets up a robotic base on a world over seventy light years from Earth, and tries to conquer the Solar System via matter transporter technology he has stolen. In this story robots are outlawed as they are in Dune. The story also features Jay Kalam lobbying to allow the New Cometeers to leave the Solar System in peace, as many people were demanding that AKKA be used to obliterate the departing swarm of planets once and for all.
In 1982, he published a final Legion novel, The Queen of the Legion. Giles Habibula reappears in this final novel, which is set after the disbanding of the Legion.
Contraterrene
An editor suggested that Williamson combine the ideas of contraterrene matter (antimatter) and asteroid mining. This brought about the Seetee (C-T) series of short stories.
Other media
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", loosely based on his novel Seetee Ship for several years (1952-55), until the paper dropped all comics.
Stories
His Legion of Time (1938) was the first story to feature alternative future civilizations sending agents back to the present day, to fight over actions that will decide their future existence. As such, it is a precursor to the Terminator series of films. Despite the word 'Legion' in the title, this story is not part of the Legion of Space series but an independent work.
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.
Bibliography
Novels:
The Alien Intelligence, 1929
The Girl from Mars, 1930 (with Miles J Breuer)
The Green Girl, 1930
The Stone from the Green Star, 1931
Golden Blood, 1933
Xandulu, 1934
The Blue Spot, 1935
Islands of the Sun, 1935
The Fortress of Utopia, 1939
Realm of Wizardry, 1940
With Folded Hands, 1947
Darker Than You Think, 1948
Seetee Shock, 1949
The Humanoids, 1949
Seetee Ship, 1950
Dragon's Island (aka The Not-Men), 1951
Star Bridge, 1955 (with James E Gunn)
The Dome Around America (aka Gateway to Paradise), 1955
Wolves of Darkness, 1958
The Trial of Terra, 1962
The Reign of Wizardry, 1964
Bright New Universe, 1967
Trapped in Space, 1968
Jamboree, 1969
The Moon Children, 1972
The Power of Blackness, 1975
Wall Around A Star, 1975
Brother to Demons, Brother to Gods, 1979
The Humanoid Touch, 1980
Manseed, 1982
The Queen of the Legion, 1982
Lifeburst, 1984
Firechild, 1986
Narabedla, Ltd., 1988 (with Frederik Pohl)
Land's End, 1988 (with Frederik Pohl)
Mazeway, 1990
The Singers of Time, 1991 (with Frederik Pohl)
Beachhead, 1992
Demon Moon, 1994
The Black Sun, 1997
The Silicon Dagger, 1999
Terraforming Earth, 2001
The Stonehenge Gate, 2005.
Autobiography
Wonder's Child: My Life in Science Fiction. Bluejay Books, New York, 1984.
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