Author Jack Williamson Interviewed

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Chart-topping Science Fiction Author, Jack Williamson Interviewed

What a coup, the last of the Great Ones, Jack Williamson - one of the creators of science fiction - is interviewed by the 'Nest. He's outlasted all his compatriots and is still writing novels when most people his age are being wheeled around a Pensioners home.

Interviewing them was Stephen Hunt, author of For The Crown and The Dragon, the WH Smith New Talent Award novel that kicked off the flintlock fantasy genre in the early '90s. He's a lot younger than Jack.

Could you give any of www.sfcrowsnest.com's readers who might not be familiar with your work a potted history of your writing career?

JW: I was born in Bisbee, Arizona Territory, in 1908, lived in Mexico and Texas, moved with the family to New Mexico by covered wagon the year I was seven, grew up on an isolated ranch, living in my imagination.

I was just out of a country high school, with no money or job, nowhere to go, when Hugo Gernsback launched Amazing stories in 1926.

Immediately fascinated, I started writing "scientific'lon." He bought my first story in 1928, the year before he invented the term "science fiction."

I've been writing it ever since, with time out to serve for three years as a weather forecaster in World War ll, and to earn a Ph.D. in English literature and teach for twenty years.

Never a best seller, but it has been a great life, with occasional rewards. I received the second grand master nebula and two or three life achievement awards, but the best part has been simply the freedom to work at something I loved, the many friends I've made, the opportunities to learn and travel.

Did you ever want to be anything apart from an author?

JW: I've enjoyed the teaching, my colleagues and students and the chance to keep on learning.

ENMU is a small university, and I was allowed to teach nearly anything I could interest students in. Everything from James Joyce and the Russian novel to modern linguistics and film production.

Too, of course, my share of freshman comp. I still teach a course every year with Dr. Patrice Caldwell, alternating between science fiction and writing the short story.

If you were given the chance to relive you life, would you choose the author route a second time, or embark on another career?

JW: With the mind and the opportunity, I'd have loved being an astrophysicist.

But given what I had, I'm happy with the live I've had.

Are you planning to do another Legion of Space story, and if so, what direction would you like to take the LOS universe?

JW: Stephen Haffner has spoken of a possible TALES OF THE LEGION anthology. That might be an interesting project, but I wouldn't want to contribute.

I'm no longer the person who wrote the stories, so long ago.

What would you say was your most interesting piece of fan mail? I once got one for my novel 'For The Crown And The Dragon' from a disabled boy in Germany who had hardly ever been out of the house. He wrote that fantasy and science fiction was his only escape from a very poor reality. I remember that moved me terribly.

JW: I'm always delighted when a reader or a student recalls a story or a class from long ago, and maybe says it changed his life. James Oberg, when he asked me to write a foreword to a book about terraforming, recalled that he learned the word from my comic strip, "Beyond Mars," in the New York Sunday News.

Has anyone ever optioned one of your novels to be made into a film / TV series? I took a straw poll here at the Crowsnest, and we voted the Legion of Space series as your works we'd most like to get turned into a film. A lot of us thought an animated feature - done well - would be cracking.

JW: I wish. The Legion was optioned. I've always felt that something very like Star Wars might have been made out of it, but that didn't happen. Various others have been optioned.

Brian Aldiss once bought DARKER THAN YOU THINK for a BBC series that never got off the ground. Tom Scortia renewed his option on it several times. Star Trek once bought my novelette, "With Folded Hands." I wrote scripts for it. But there's many a slip between the dream and the screen.

What gave you the idea for your latest book, the Silicon Dagger ?

JW: The Oklahoma City bombing and the TV talk of the militant militia men. I have a very real interest in the information revolution and what the consequences might be.

The novel is an effort to discuss it in a fictional frame.

Do you write to a strict outline, or prefer the looser 'make it up as you go along' approach to novel writing ?

JW: In the beginning I wrote full outlines and usually followed them. Now I want to know the characters, the setting and the situation and the major story theme or problem, but I write each new chapter as a unit that leads to the next.

When the process works, I have more a sense of discovery than invention. The story reveals itself, and I can look forward as I hope the reader will to know what happens next.

How much research - if any - do you do before starting a novel?

JW: Only what I need. The material for The Silicon Dagger was already in my mind. When I wrote Beachhead, about the first manned expedition to Mars, I bought the NASA atlas of the planet and a small library about it.

I was able to attend most of the NASA press briefings when Voyager was flying out to explore the solar system. That was great research for Lifeburst and Mazeway.

When you write short fiction for magazines, what do you do differently from writing your novels ?

JW: The short story and the novel are very different forms. I think the short story is more demanding and harder to do well.

I try to write one when I'm teaching the short story class, just to see if I can. The idea for a short story comes as a whole: character, problem, conflict, resolution, maybe epiphany. It needs a single purpose, single effect, clear-cut meaning.

A single fault can kill it. The novel is looser. What might be a flaw in a short story can be built into the structure.

If by a quirk of fate you could select one of your own novels to be in the number one slot of New York Times best sellers list, what novel would ~ it be, and why?

JW: I'd love to see The Silicon Dagger on the bestseller list, because it is an attempt to talk about current problems in the real world. Sadly, that is not happening.

What changes have you seen in the science fiction and fantasy market since you started writing, and do you think things have evolved for the better?

JW: The fantasy market when I began was limited to the old Weird Tales, edited by Farnsworth Wright who was making a heroic battle against Parkinson's disease.

I loved him and the magazine. The market was created by John Campbell's Unknown and the reprints of Tolkein. American SF began with Gernsback's reprints of H.G Wells and other classics.

It soon became a pulp category, aimed at a limited circle of readers, most of them technophiles and dreamers. It has diversified enormously. In the beginning, we could read it all and know nearly all the other writers. Now that would be impossible.

Do you read any SF works from authors currently publishing, or do you keep your own reading focused on other genres ... mystery, westerns, etc ?

JW. I don't read much current SF, though I do read reviews and a lot of the non-fiction in the magazines, and such magazines as Science, Science News, Scienfic American, Discovery, and Astronomy.

Most of the fiction I do read is mystery and suspense, to for pleasure and to study technique.

If you were to create your own personal pantheon of ten all-time great sf and fantasy authors, who would you put in there?

JW: HG Wells at the top; he was the chief creator of modern SF. Heinlein was the great figure in modern American sf. John Campbell, not so much for his own signed work but for all his silent collaborations Asimov and Clarke.

For the rest, the choice is hard. When we teach sf, we always read Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness and Pohl's Gateway. Year by year, we read Gibson's Neuromancer and its sequels.

We read Connie Willis' Doomsday book, a really great novel.

Do you think your SF work has been good at predicting events and trends - for instance, The Humanoids might be said to be prescient to current political trends ?

JW: I like to say that sf tries to explore possibilities, not to predict. We can hope that sometimes sf can serve as a warning of possible evil and help prevent it.

Accurate predications are accidental, but I think I was first with the term "genetic engineering," in Dragon's Island. Fred Pohl and I, in Reefs of Space, wrote about organ transplants before the first heart transplant.

Do you fall into the 25% of US households that are online at home?

JW: I am on line at home, but spend very little time on the net.

As SF becomes science fact with technologies such as cloning etc becoming reality, do you think science fiction will continue to have a place in the world? It does seems a bit odd to me that here I am in 1999 conducting an interview by email, that is going to be broadcast in cyberspace, writing it on a PC more powerful than the computer that landed the Apollo Mission - all the while doing it under a framed original of an Amazing cover featuring E. Doc. Smith's Lensman series.

JW: I like to say that hard sf always works best when set in the time period between the idea and the hardware.

As knowledge expands, there is always a frontier of speculation just beyond it. That should be open so long as knowledge does expand.

Have you ever been tempted to write a SF screenplay for film, TV or theatre?

JW: Beside the unproduced Star Trek script (which was good enough for Roddenberry and Coon to approve) I was once tempted to write a screen play by a would-be producer who I'm afraid knew no more about the game than I did. The result is well forgotten.

Which of your many popular novels has done best in terms of sales?

JW: The Humanoids has had the most reprints and translation--into Chinese, just this year. Generally I've never been fully informed about sales. The Starchild Trilogy (with Fred Pohl) may hold the sales record. Pocket Books and then Jim Baen sold a quarter million copies after Ballantine released the separate novels.

Has your work ever been translated for other countries, and if so, do you know how it was received?

JW: There have been translations into I think sixteen languages. Nearly everything has appeared in Italian; I think I'm now better known there than in America.

If a TV producer came to you tomorrow and asked you to write a script for an existing TV series of your choice, what would it be: Star Trek, Voyager, DS9, Babylon 5, Xena, or something else entirely?

JW: I no longer follow the shows well enough to try a script for any of them. After doing the comic strip, a sort of collaboration with editor and artist, I'm content enough to write fiction of my own, where I have more creative control.

In Silicon Dagger you have part of the country using a force-field to become an independent state, what kind of future would you predict for the USA?

JW: I don't try to predict, I just speculate.

Any reason why you set Silicon Dagger in the near future rather than the far future?

JW: Silicon Dagger is set in the near future because is wanted to explore what might happen tomorrow.

Have you ever been tempted to write outside the grenre, romance etc?

JW: Not seriously. I have a mind set for sf. Anything I want to write about seems to fit naturally into the sf pattern.

What is your next novel going to be about?

JW: About terraforming and resettling Earth after the devastating impact of a large asteroid. Two parts of it have sold to SF Age.

FINI

The latest Jack Williamson Books

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