Jack Williamson
John Stewart Williamson
(born 29. 4. 1908)
Jack Williamson has possibly
the longest career in sci-fi. He has been writing and commenting on science
fiction for 70 years. Born and raised on isolated ranches in the American
Southwest, he still lives on the family ranch near Portales, New Mexico.
He is author of "The Humanoids", "Three From the Legion"
(one of the best written space operas of the golden age), "Darker Than
You Think", "SeeTee", "The Best of Jack Williamson" etc.,
etc...
Jack Williamson was named a Grand
Master at the 1976 Nebula awards and given the Lifetime Achievement Award
from the World Fantasy Convention in 1994.
Jack Williamson's extremely
important work "The Legion of Time" (first published as a magazine
serial in 1938) was a competent adventure novel in the sci-fi tradition
that became the first really scientific concept of branching parallel worlds
- later known as Many-Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. As a
book it has been also published by Sphere, London 1977.
a quotation from The Moon
Era:
"Vaguely I recalled magazine
articles that I had read, upon the nature of space and time. A lecture.
The subject had fascinated me, though I had only layman's knowledge of
it.
The lecturer had defined
our universe in terms of space-time. A four-dimensional "continuum". Time
was a fourth dimension, he had said. An extension as real as the three
of what we call space, and not completely distinguishable from them. A
direction in which motion would carry one into the past, or into the future."
(Jack Williamson:
The
Moon Era,
orig. published in Wonder
Stories, February 1932)
