Seekers of Tomorrow (13 page)

argosy had for decades been buying science fiction from such well-known writers as A. Merritt, Edgar Rice Bur-roughs, Otis Adelbert Kline, Ralph Milne Farley, and Ray Cummings. It was a prestige market and paid good rates on acceptance, so Williamson tried them.
The Legion of Space
was returned with a note stating only that it had been seriously considered. Frustrated, Williamson providentially received a letter from Desmond Hall, who had worked for the Clayton magazine chain, announcing that he was now assistant to F. Orlin Tremaine at Street & Smith, who were about to revive astounding stories. Payment would be 1 cent a word on acceptance and they desperately needed short stories. Williamson dashed out three shorts and a novelette, all of which they bought, then learned the magazine was altering its policy to run long novels. So he shipped out
The Legion of Space,
too.

The best of the short stories he sold astounding was
Dead Star Station
(November, 1933), a touching character study of a man who spends fifty years to perfect an antigravity screen and the heroic manner in which he justifies his effort. To accentuate character, Williamson had given his aged hero a lisp. Once before, in
The Second Shell,
he had attempted to individualize a character by presenting a scientist with a stutter. It was a very small thing, but in a field of writing in which some natural phenomenon was often the lead charac-ter, and all human beings were stereotypes, this was a tremendous, perhaps daring, advance in craftsmanship.

The Legion of Space
had many of the epic qualities that had made the space operas of Edward E. Smith or John W. Campbell so popular. Yet the impact it made as it rocketed along for six installments, commencing in astounding sto-ries for April, 1934, was predominantly due to a single character, Giles Habibula. An obese, lame, heavy-drinking, complaining old man with a sublime genius for opening locks, Habibula was characterized by a manner of speech distinctively his own:

"Bless my bones! We can't go there! 'Tis beyond the system—six light years and more! A mortal distance, when it takes a precious ray of light six blessed years to cross it! Ah, there're ten thousand mortal dangers, life knows! I'm a brave man—you all know old Giles is brave. But we can't do that. Of all the expeditions that ever went beyond the system, only one ever came back." The idea for
The Legion of Space
had come to Jack Williamson from a lecture by Dr. George St. Claire in a course in Great Books at the university at Albuquerque, where he learned the Polish novelist Henry Sienkiewicz had borrowed characters from Dumas'
Three Musketeers
and Shakespeare's bawdy old Sir John Falstaff for a great histori-cal trilogy. If it worked for Sienkiewicz, Williamson thought, it might work for him. So, quite literally, in
The Legion of Space,
the Three Musketeers of Space, John Star, Jay Ka-laam and Hal Samdu, accompanied by a rocket-age, lock-picking Falstaffian replica, set out to a rousing series of adventures to discover the secret of AKKA, the ultimate weapon. AKKA turns out to be little more than a ten-penny nail, but the fate of mankind depends upon it.

Like Sienkiewicz, Williamson developed a trilogy of nov-els, following
The Legion of Space
with
The
Cometeers
(astounding stories, May to August, 1936) and
One Against the Legion
(astounding science-fiction, April to June, 1939). The Cometeers are a seemingly immortal race of energy creatures who control a cosmic collection of sundry worlds collected in a green comet tail twelve million miles long. They propel this interstellar conglomeration through the galaxy, feeding on the life forces of creatures of the worlds they capture. (The term "Cometeers" was eventually to be adopted by science-fiction fans for special social and business groups.)

One Against the Legion,
the last of the trilogy, tells of the battle of the legionnaires to bring to terms one supercriminal and in the process ties up some loose ends of the series. All three novels were eventually put into hard covers by Fantasy Press and have become a permanent part of the nostalgia of the science-fiction world.

Through all this, Jack Williamson remained a lonely man, plagued by a variety of health problems, some of which he strongly suspected were psychosomatic. In hope of obtaining some answers he submitted himself to analysis at the Menninger Clinic, Topeka, Kansas, the spring of 1936. He contin-ued treatment sporadically at Topeka and at Los Angeles when he could afford it, until early 1941. "Although the results of this analysis were not dramatic or spectacular," Williamson noted, "I feel that it was one of the great turning points of my life.... It was not so much a matter of making a change in me, as in learning to accept myself more or less as I was.... I had seen life as a conflict between emotion and reason ... and I found a kind of compromise or recon-ciliation that ended much of the conflict." It is quite possible that Williamson's abrupt switch to realism in
Crucible of Power
(astounding science-fiction, February, 1939) and in portions of
Non-Stop to Mars
(argosy, February 25, 1939) was part of his coming to terms with himself. Realism was present in the characterization as well as in the plotting of these stories. Giles Habibula had been a milestone, but Garth Hammond, aptly labeled "a hero whose heart is purest brass," in
Crucible of Power,
was a giant step towards believability in science fiction. Hammond was the man who made the first trip to Mars and built a power station near the sun for sheer selfish, self-seeking gain. The end justified the means, and he was just as callous in romance as in business. There had never been anything as blunt as this in science fiction before.

Science fiction has never achieved much in human charac-terization, but what little progress it has made is as much due to Jack Williamson as any other author. After he showed the way, not-completely-sympathetic and more three-dimensional people began to appear: Granny in
Slan
by A. E. van Vogt, (1940) the uncouth title character of
Old Man Mulligan
(1940) by P. Schuyler Miller, the irascible tycoon in
Old Fireball
(1941) by Nat Schachner, and the "witch," Mother Jujy, in
Gather,
Darkness
(1943) by Fritz Leiber.

Selling to argosy was one of the great moments in Williamson's life, since so many of the old science-fiction "masters" had been identified with that magazine. Following
Non-Stop to Mars,
he sold them
Star Bright
(November 25, 1939), in which a harassed little bookkeeper, hit by a meteor particle, becomes capable of performing miracles in certain circumstances, and
Racketeers in the Sky
(October 12, 1940), in which a dishonest quack foils a conquest of the earth, but with no redemption in character. Williamson's practiced ability to portray something other than a cardboard hero had finally cracked argosy for him.

An early tendency in Williamson's work had been a drift toward fantasy and away from scientific logic as the plot unwound. Paradoxically, he began to move in the other direction as he matured and was one of the pioneers in fictional explanation of the supernatural and witchcraft in scientific terms. His most widely acclaimed work in this area was
Darker Than You Think
(unknown, December, 1940), which suggests that human beings have the blood strain of Homo lycanthropus and that occasionally there is a throw-back. Williamson had employed the idea once before in
Wolves of Darkness
(strange tales, January, 1932), wherein his werewolves are entities from another dimension who employ a human being as a host and are able to change into wolves at will. The limited circulation of strange tales, and the fact that it was read predominantly by lovers of the super-natural, prevented the story from having any great effect, but
Darker
Than You Think
exerted strong influence on Fritz Leiber, who established a reputation for translating the su-pernatural into logical terms, and in one specific story on James Blish in
There Shall Be No Darkness
(thrilling wonder stories, April, 1950), which meticulously explains even the conversion of fur into evening clothes and the reverse.

Early in 1942, Williamson suggested to John W. Campbell a series of stories on the engineering problems of making asteroids habitable. Campbell, who had been searching for "new" authors to replace the writers who were leaving as-tounding science-fiction for the armed services, countered with the suggestion that Williamson combine his notion with contraterrene matter and use a pen name. The name was Will Stewart, and the results were two novelettes,
Collision Orbit
(July, 1942) and
Minus Sign
(November, 1942), and one short novel,
Opposites
—
React
(January and February, 1943). No one guessed the identity of the

"new" author, the stories ranked high and have come to be considered the most outstanding expositions on the antimatter theme ever writ-ten.

Campbell clapped his hands in glee. Adding Will Stewart to Lawrence O'Donnell (C. L. Moore) and Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner), he was assembling an imposing list of "new" discoveries. Then, the unexpected. Jack Williamson, who had spent the past year in Los Angeles where he had participated in the informal Manana Literary Society which included Robert Heinlein, Cleve Cartmill, and Anthony Boucher, selected bullets over bull sessions and enlisted in the armed forces. He served three years as a weather forecaster in New Mexico, then in 1945 was shipped out to the Solo-mons. He flew through a number of Marine air missions unscathed, but a routine hernia repair after his release in 1946 resulted in an intestinal obstruction which came within hours of finishing him. It took a series of operations to straighten him out. Back to the task of making a living, Jack Williamson read the current output of science fiction, decided he was equal to it, and turned out
The Equalizer
(astounding science-fiction, March 1947), about an advance in technology that brings to an end the age of specialization. It was a strikingly modern and effective presentation of the technical factors that might eliminate cities, other than their destruction by atomic bombs.

If any further proof were required that Williamson was one of the most adaptable science-fiction writers alive,
"With Folded Hands
..." in astounding science-fiction for July, 1947, eliminated that need. In that story, robots are given the duty of seeing that human beings do not hurt themselves or each other. They are also dedicated to seeing that men are happy. How they go about it makes for one of the grimmest horror stories as well as one of the landmarks in modern science fiction.

The sequel was almost a command performance, and Williamson labored on a novel, ".. .
And
Searching Mind,"
in the isolation of the little shack he had built on his ranch.

"With Folded Hands
..." was almost entirely Williamson's own creation, but the new story incorporated elements of psi phenomena which Campbell had suggested as a means of defeating the robot guardians. The logical ending of benevo-lent enslavement had already been used on the first story, so Williamson had no alternative but to switch to a less convinc-ing human victory in the second. There were also crudities in the dialogue which made the writing uneven, but it won first place in readers' acclaim for each of three installments in the March, April, and May, 1948, issues of astounding science-fiction and was published in hard covers in 1949 by Simon & Schuster as
The Humanoids.

The forced close contact with other people in the army made a hermitlike existence more difficult for Williamson to sustain. Gordon K. Greaves, who had been a fellow student at Albuquerque, was editor of the portales (New Mexico) daily news, and he offered Williamson a job as wire editor. This was to be Williamson's first regular job, and he had a special motive for accepting. While on leave from the army he had visited Portales and found, running a children's cloth-ing store, Blanche Slaten, the girl who had broken his teen-age heart by marrying another boy before she had finished high school. She was divorced now, and bringing up two children. Approaching 40, Jack Williamson finally conquered the timidity which had hitherto blighted his life. A little over a month after their first date, the two were married on August 15, 1947. The newspaper job lasted only six months, Williamson returning to free-lance writing out of sheer boredom. His writing was beginning to receive recognition. Fantasy Press, Reading, Pennsylvania, turned out
The Legion of Space
in hard covers in 1948. They followed it with
The Cometeers
(incorporating
One
Against the Legion)
in 1949. The reissu-ing of
The Humanoids
as a $1 hard-cover reprint by Grosset & Dunlap in 1950 caused Simon & Schuster to snap up
Seetee Shock,
a novel in the contraterrene matter series which had been serialized in astounding science-fiction during 1949. It was the appearance of that book in 1950 that touched off the chain reaction that secured the
Beyond Mars
comic strip continuity with the new york Sunday news.

While the strip was still running in 1953, William-son had entered Eastern New Mexico University at Portales to get a better grounding in the sciences. The idea of aca-demic life so appealed to him that when the strip failed he pushed on toward the goal of getting a degree. He received his first teaching position in English and the short story in 1956 and gradually worked his way up to an associate pro-fessorship at Eastern New Mexico University.

Summers he spent working toward completing the require-ments for a Ph.D. in English literature. With great appro-priateness, his dissertation was called
H. G. Wells, Critic of Progress: A Study of the Early
Fiction
(and the early fiction is mostly science fiction). Williamson sets out to disprove the prevalent belief that Wells was "a nearsighted optimist," and underscores the fact that Wells knew that progress would be

"difficult and uncertain."

Teaching now became Jack Williamson's permanent ca-reer. He had not given up science fiction, and stories con-tinued to trickle out. One reason he did not quit science-fiction writing was that he had convinced the university to permit him to teach a course in the subject and continued sales were his best credentials.