Jack Williamson, 1908 – 2006

I just received an email informing me (and a lot of other people) that Jack Williamson has died. I don’t know if the message from Betty Williamson in the email is for general forwarding, so I won’t put the full text up here, but apparently he was in his study, surrounded by people who loved him. There will be a memorial service, possibly next week.

Jack Williamson sold his first story in 1928, at the age of 20. He was the last living writer who had been writing science fiction since before science fiction existed as a genre. Here‘s an essay by John Clute:

The personal miracle of Jack Williamson’s career is that he wrote himself out of the belatedness that governed the genre when he began; and that for several decades after 1940 his creative mind paced the train. He rode a long ways up the line, which is a very high score for a man. Until he got to here. Where he finds readers half his age — readers a quarter his age — who long to reinhabit the very worlds he climbed out of, the vacuum tubes of Eden, a place to park our bindlestiffs around the campfire, and not miss the train at all.

EDIT: And here’s John Clute’s full obituary, in The Independent.