Seekers of Tomorrow (12 page)

In due course, Jack had the company of a brother and two younger sisters. They milked cows, cared for chickens and turkeys, drew water, and worked in the fields. The grim contest with nature pulled the family into a tightly knit unit. Most of the children's early learning was given them by the parents at home. Daydreaming became Jack's only escape from unromantic Southwestern reality. As he became older, he verbally imparted his daydreams in a nonstop and endless radio-soap-opera-routine to his brothers and sisters.

Regular schooling for Jack began in 1920 in the seventh grade. So long removed from contact with others than his own family, he was extraordinarily shy and introverted through high school. Though smitten with the charm of an athletic blonde, Blanche Slaten, he never gained the courage to talk to her and sadly watched her marry another boy the Christmas before his graduation in 1925. Tall and gangling, he was as ineffective at athletics as at romance and so retreated to books.

The twenties might have been roaring for others, but when Jack left school, helping out on the farm seemed his only future. One of his friends was Edlie Walker, who had become a lawyer though confined to a wheel chair. Walker, a radio ham, subscribed to Hugo Gernsback's radio news. Soon after amazing stories was started, he received the March, 1927, issue as a sample and turned it over to Jack. That issue featured
The Green Splotches,
a tale of an atomic-powered space rocket by T. S. Stribling, but what really hypnotized young Jack Williamson was the poetic and Poesque descrip-tion of a civilization of nonhuman intelligences discovered in the bottom of an extinct Alaskan volcano, in A. Merritt's story
The People of
the Pit.

Appealing to his sister for aid, he scraped together enough funds to secure amazing stories regularly. His subscription started with the June, 1927, issue which contained the second installment of Merritt's
The
Moon Pool.
The images that poured from
The Moon Pool
—The Shining One; Lakla, the handmaiden; The Silent Ones; Yolara, priestess of the Dweller; Olaf, the Norseman; the AKKA, batrachian-like race; the Green Dwarf; and the Ancient Ones—induced euphoria in most, but Jack Williamson they fired with a crusading fervor. There was now but one god, A. Merritt, and his prophet was Jack Williamson. Stories began to pour out of a typewriter with a chronical-ly pale, purple ribbon:
The Flying Flowers,
The Abyss of the Scarlet Spheres, The Alien Plane, Under the Cavern's Roof, The Castle of the Seven
Gates, A Prince of Atlantis
and
Via the Vacuum Tube.
Most were never finished, others were sent to amazing stories and returned. Of that early output only an unconvincing attempt to handle a theme of physical transmutation and horror in the setting of a lost jungle city,
Crystal of Death,
has seen publication, and that in the Au-gust, 1940, issue of William L. Hamling's semiprofessional magazine, stardust. Some encouragement came from winning an honorary mention for an ending submitted to an unfinished story in American boy. This, the idea of an undersea world, William-son would soon use in a short novel,
The Green Girl.

The first intimation that he had finally made the grade as a professional writer came without notice shortly after he en-rolled at West Texas State Teachers College the fall of 1928 when he received the December, 1928, amazing stories. The cover, by Frank R. Paul, depicted a scene from William-son's story
The Metal Man.
The editor clearly recognized Williamson's literary deity in his blurb: "Not since we pub-lished 'The Moon Pool' has such a story as this been pub-lished by us."
The Metal Man
concerned radioactive emanations from a form of intelligent crystalline life which turn all objects into metal. While the story was a good first effort, the enthusiasm with which it was received ran far beyond its conceptual or literary qualities. However, in trying to capture something of Merritt in his writing, Jack Williamson had undoubtedly struck the right chord.

Despite the fact that he was offered a scholarship in chemistry at the end of his second year and consistently scored "A's" in his other subjects, the sale of
The Metal Man
caused Williamson to lose interest in academic pursuits. The entire Christmas vacation of 1928 was spent writing a short novel,
The
Alien Intelligence,
which he sold to Hugo Gernsback's newly formed science wonder stories (July and August, 1929). It was a very competent writing job, dealing with a bizarre hidden valley in Australia. The editors appeared most impressed with Williamson's concept of a mysterious insect race whose brains had grown so large that they were sustained and transported in metal bodies. The belief that intelligence could evolve in the most alien forms was to become a trademark of Williamson's stories. Williamson decided that education was an impediment to his drive to become a writer, particularly since he was devoting as much time to reading H. G. Wells as to his studies. He left school at the end of his second year and plunged whole-heartedly into fiction.
The Green Girl,
published as a two-part novel in the March and April, 1930, issues of amazing stories, was a success. His opening sentence—"At high noon on May 4, 1999 the sun went out!"—is frequently quoted by the school of writing that believes you should get right into your story. The story takes place in a strange world under the sea, where the roof of water is suspended in delicate balance by a gas made up of
antimatter.
"You know that science has held for a long time that there is no reason, per se, to doubt the existence of substances that would repel instead of attracting one another," one of Williamson's char-acters explains, and there, early in Williamson's writing career, is the seed of the contraterrence matter stories writ-ten under the Will Stewart name.
The Green Girl
has atomic energy weapons, intelligent flying plants that can be trained to fight or wash dishes, with the action and colorful backdrop of the old scientific ro-mances. Actually, Jack Williamson was to become the author bridging the gulf between the school exemplifying pure escape in the tradition of A. Merritt, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Otis Adelbert Kline, and Ralph Milne Farley, and the group then currently focusing on ideas which Hugo Gernsback strove to include in his magazine.

The influence of Merritt and, to a lesser degree, the S. Fowler Wright of
The World Below,
was to pervade most of Williamson's writing for the next three years. Yet his ability to come up with a spectacular story device, if not a new idea, gained for him the title of "The Cover Copper" in the early science-fiction fan magazines, since the subject matter of his stories provided a constant source of provocative illustrative material. Of his first 21 stories, published between 1928 and 1932, 13 gained a cover. Typical of Williamson's ideas are the following: the notion of the Heaviside layer supporting forms of life
(The Second Shell,
air wonder stories, November, 1929); a girl who is permitted to remain alive by a civilized race of Antarctic crustaceans because they like her singing
(The Lake of Light,
astounding stories, April, 1931), a tiny artificial planet kept suspended in a laboratory
(The Pygmy Planet,
astounding stories, February, 1932), a beautiful lady flying around in space asking entry into a spaceship
(The Lady of
Light,
amazing stories, September, 1932). Williamson was never without some new idea or novel situation. Stock devices, too, were repeated in Williamson stories. The airplane was his favorite means of carrying his charac-ters into action, beginning with his first story,
The Metal Man,
then later on the cover of wonder stories, May, 1931, in
Through the Purple Cloud,
and on to the ultimate extreme in
Non-Stop to Mars
(argosy, February 25, 1939), in which he contrives a semilogical means of flying an air-plane to the Red Planet.

Jack Williamson loved jewels and they are the catalyst to the fourth dimension in
Through the Purple
Cloud;
the key to eternal life in
The Stone from the Green Star
(amazing stories, October and November, 1931), a superscience epic of the far galaxies related in symbols of
The Moon Pool;
a pathway to a primeval planet in the lusty adventure
In the Scarlet Star
(amazing stories, March, 1933). The jewels, like the vortices of light, the outre cities inside volcanoes, hidden valleys, other dimensions, the monsterlike aliens with an aspect of benevolence, are all of obvious derivation.

Perhaps Williamson's devotion to Merritt might not have lasted so long if he had not received encouragement from that author in the form of a letter praising
The Alien Intelligence.
On a tour east with his correspondent and friend Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson was cordially received by Merritt at the American weekly, where he was Morrill Goddard's right-hand man, and they discussed science fiction. Williamson enthusiastically suggested collaborating on a se-quel to
The Face in the Abyss,
but Merritt had already completed one
(The Snake Mother)
and turned it over to argosy. Merritt finally did agree to work with Williamson on a novel to be called
The Purple Mountain.
Some 20,000 words were actually written by Williamson and mailed to Merritt in 1930. The manuscript was acknowledged but nev-er returned. The crown jewel of this phase of Williamson's writing was undoubtedly
The Moon Era
(wonder stories, February, 1932). The protagonist, falling away from the earth in a spaceship, finds himself moving back in time and lands on the moon when that satellite is still a young world possessing water, air, and life. There he allies himself with The Mother, the last of a race of Lunarians trying to escape to the sea, with the seeds of her young in her. She is pursued by The Eternal Ones, a civilization of brains in gigantic robot bodies, who originally were an off-shoot of her race. The physical and mental qualities of The Mother are sketched with such delicacy, the symbols employed to convey the desired mood so unerring, that the unfolding of the story achieves a com-plete suspension of disbelief in the reader, and it builds to a climax of such stirring poignancy that the reading becomes a memorable experience.

The man who would play the biggest initial role in direct-ing Williamson away from Merritt would be Miles J. Breuer, M.D. Breuer was a successful practicing physician in Lincoln, Nebraska, who wrote science fiction for the love of it He was no stylist, but for off-beat ideas handled with a degree of depth and maturity he ranked high. His remarkable novel
Paradise and Iron
(amazing stories quarterly, Summer, 1930), portraying the ultimate in automation dominated by thinking machines, belongs with the very best stories on the subject.

Williamson greatly admired Breuer's originality and wrote him when he saw his name listed as a member of The Science Correspondence Club, of which he too was a mem-ber. Williamson was eager to learn more about the writing craft and Breuer was willing to help. Breuer suggested a novel paralleling the American Revolution but with the locale in the future and on the moon. The result was
The Birth of a New
Republic
which appeared complete in the Winter, 1931, amazing stories quarterly. Williamson did virtually all of the writing, but under the strictest discipline, submitting the outline of every chapter to Breuer for approval. The result was a highly ingenious detailing of a future civilization but not a novel in any true sense, since the entire story was a blow-by-blow description of a future revolution with virtually no other story line at all.

The Cosmic Express
(amazing stories, November, 1930), a spoof on interplanetary stories, was heavily influenced by Breuer and is notable for its use of matter transmitters for space travel and the brilliant prediction that westerns would dominate television.

"Breuer was an antidote to my own tendency toward unrestrained fantasy," Williamson acknowledges.

"He insisted upon solid plot construction, upon the importance of real human values in character, and upon the element of theme."

Despite his reader acclaim and steady sales record, Williamson found that a writing career had failed to bring him complete satisfaction. He felt the trouble rested in his own personality. Shy, sensitive, and withdrawn, he made few friends and had neither the courage nor flourish to approach a member of the opposite sex.

He seriously considered taking up psychiatry as a profes-sion, but was discouraged when David H. Keller, M.D., practicing in that field, and his friend Miles J. Breuer, M.D., both told him of the time and money required. He briefly flirted with the idea of becoming an astronomer, then settled for a philosophy major at the University of New Mexico, rolling into Albuquerque in the fall of 1932 on a freight car, as the finale to a summer of riding the rods.

Returning from Albuquerque in 1933, Williamson bought some paper and typewriter ribbons, secreted himself in his shack on the family ranch, and started a novel. During his entire writing career from 1928

through the end of World War II, he never found it necessary to hold a steady job. At the ranch his personal expenses would drop to virtually nothing and his writing income sustained him. His biggest coup of 1933 had been the publication of
Golden Blood,
a colorful lusty action novel in weird tales, but it brought him more prestige than sustenance, since a bank closing held up payment.

It was essential that his new novel
The Legion of Space
score effectively and quickly if life was to be conducted at some level above subsistence. Between the time the novel was started and completed, the entire complexion of the science-fiction market changed. Previously, Williamson had unerring-ly hit in every market he had tried, running the gamut. The best-paying market had been astounding stories, which under the editorship of Harry Bates paid 2 cents a word on acceptance. In the midst of the Depression this was a princely rate, especially when it is compared with 1/2 cent on publi-cation or after offered by amazing stories and wonder stories, and the top of 1 cent a word on publication by weird tales. However, astounding stories had ceased pub-lication with its March, 1933, issue, which carried Williamson's
Salvage in Space,
a skillful and highly original story of men on a spaceship stalked by an invisible monster. While there was little question that other science-fiction magazines would ac-cept
The Legion of Space,
payment might conceivably be one or more years off.