Jack Williamson has written steadily since his first sale in 1928 and has had published more than three million words of magazine science fiction, thirty-one novels, and at least eight collections and scholarly books. His works have been much anthologized and translated into many European and Asian languages. Williamson's honors and awards are numerous: the Science Fiction Hall of Fame Award in 1968 (from First Fandom), the Pilgrim Award of the Science Fiction Research Association in 1973, and the Grandmaster Nebula Award, "for lifetime achievement," in 1976. He was guest of honor at the thirty-fifth World Science-Fiction Convention (SunCon) at Miami in 1977. He is at present the president of the Science Fiction Writers Association.

John Stewart Williamson was born in Bisbee, Arizona Territory. After moving to a mountain ranch in Sonora, Mexico, and in 1915 to an irrigation project at Pecos, Texas, his family traveled by covered wagon to a sandhill homestead in...