{"id":3723,"date":"2006-11-10T19:45:13","date_gmt":"2006-11-11T03:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2006\/11\/10\/3723.html"},"modified":"2006-11-10T19:45:13","modified_gmt":"2006-11-11T03:45:13","slug":"rip-jack-williamson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2006\/11\/10\/rip-jack-williamson\/","title":{"rendered":"R.I.P., Jack Williamson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

To quote Locus Online<\/a><\/cite>:<\/p>\n

\"SF Grand Master Jack Williamson, born 1908, died this afternoon at his home in Portales, New Mexico, at the age of 98.\"<\/p>\n

He was an amazing man. First published story in 1928, at age 20; last published novel in 2005, at age 97 or so. In between, he wrote over forty novels and over a hundred short stories.<\/p>\n

He received the Nebula Grand Master award in 1975, in his late 60s, and then he kept writing for another thirty years. He received a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1994 and a Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement in 1998, and then he kept writing for another nearly ten years. He won his first and only Hugo and Nebula for a specific work of fiction in 2001, both for his novella \"The Ultimate Earth,\" at age 94.<\/p>\n

His impact on the field was impressive. According to Wikipedia<\/a>, \"[h]is Legion of Time<\/cite> (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\"; that article also mentions that he coined the word \"terraforming.\" And: \"By the 1930s [Williamson] 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.\"<\/p>\n

He was among the first to use the term \"genetic engineering,\" and among the first to write fiction about in vitro insemination, space habitats, organ banks, and antimatter. (According to a Science Fiction Weekly<\/cite> interview<\/a> from a couple of years ago.)<\/p>\n

Oh, yeah, and Williamson had a Ph.D. in English Lit; his thesis was on H. G. Wells.<\/p>\n

I'm sad to see him go.<\/p>\n

I haven't seen any obits yet, but I'm sure they'll start appearing soon.<\/p>\n

For more about him, see his ISFDB entry<\/a>, the Williamson Science Fiction Library<\/a> site at Eastern New Mexico University, and his ENMU bio page<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To quote Locus Online: “SF Grand Master Jack Williamson, born 1908, died this afternoon at his home in Portales, New…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,27,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-death","category-speculative-fiction","category-writers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3723\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}