The stories in [The Early Williamson] date from 1928 through 1933. They are not modern science fiction…. No writer today … traces more clearly the evolution of SF from a sort of clumsy hobby, through the slam-bang pulp era, and into something with aspirations toward permanence. These are generally not stories to be taken quite seriously anymore as things in themselves, although there is some surprisingly good reading and solid entertainment here; the past is not a wasteland, even by our current high standards, uh-huh. These are stories which, taken together with the interpolated essays, form a literary narrative; an adventure of creativity; of a man making himself better able to communicate what is essentially he to what is essentially us. (pp. 47-8)

Algis Budrys, in a review of "The Early Williamson" (© 1976 by Mercury Press Inc.; reprinted by permission of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and the author), in...