Jack Williamson was born on April 29, 1908, in Bisbee, Arizona Territory, to pioneering parents who moved to a mountain ranch in Sonora, to an irrigation project at Pecos, Texas, and finally, in 1915, by covered wagon, to a sandhill homestead in eastern New Mexico, where he grew up in a rather severe natural environment.  The turning point of his youth was the discovery of Hugo Gernsback's new Amazing Stories, which opened an escape from dust storms and drought into the more exciting worlds of science fiction.  He began writing before he entered college and dropped out before graduation because the courses had little to do with science fiction.  For many years he made a sort of living as a freelance writer.  As an Army Air Forces weather forecaster, he reached the Northern Solomons in 1945.   Back in New Mexico after the war, he married an old school friend, Blanche Slaten Harp, and settled in Portales.  Returning to science fiction from a newspaper job, he found book markets opening.  In the early 1950s he created a comic strip, BEYOND MARS, which ran for three years in the New York Sunday News.

     Discovering the delights of academe, he returned to college when the comic strip expired, receiving the B.A. and M.A. from Eastern New Mexico University in 1957 and teaching English there from 1960 to his retirement in 1977.  He received the Ph.D. from the University of Colorado in 1964, writing a dissertation that later became a book, H.G. WELLS:  CRITIC OF PROGRESS.  His teaching fields included modern fiction, literary criticism, and linguistics.  He was a pioneer teacher of science fiction.  Active in its establishment as a legitimate academic subject, he gathered and published a descriptive list of some five hundred college-level courses, TEACHING SCIENCE FICTION.  He spoke at many schools and fan conventions and wrote a good deal of criticism.  He and his wife traveled widely.

     Writing more or less steadily since his first sale in 1928, he published more than three million words of magazine science fiction and thirty-odd books, with total sales well above two million copies.  His novels have been translated into languages ranging from the Scandinavian to Japanese.  His honors and awards include the Science Fiction Hall of Fame Award, from First Fandom, in 1968, the Pilgrim Award, from the Science Fiction Research Association, in 1973, and the Grand Master Nebula, for “lifetime achievement”, from the Science Fiction Writers of America, in 1976.  He was Guest of Honor at the Thirty-Fifth World Science Fiction Convention at Miami, Florida, in 1977.  Retired from active teaching, though not from writing, he became Distinguished Research Professor in English at Eastern New Mexico University.  He was a member of the New Mexico Humanities Council and President of the Science Fiction Writers of America.

     This interview was conducted with Mr. Williamson on a telephone.

Williamson:  I don't have time just now for a  major interview—I'm leaving in a day or so for a trip to Yugoslavia and China, with a lot of things to look after first.

Interviewer:  Okay, just a few questions—what was your first published science fiction work?

Williamson:  My first SF work was a short story, “The Metal Man”, which appeared in Amazing Stories for December, 1928.

Interviewer: Are you the author of JACK OF EAGLES?

Williamson:  JACK OF EAGLES was written by James Blish.

Interviewer:  Is your name really “Jack”?

Williamson:  Though my full name, to such institutions as governments, colleges, and military establishments, is John Stewart Williamson, the name Jack was applied by my parents, probably on the day I was born.

Interviewer:  Will you explain the meaning of the obscure, to this one reader, story “Kinsman to Lizards”, which appeared in Analog , July 1978?

Williamson:  BROTHER TO DEMONS, BROTHER TO GODS is an effort to push the possibilities of genetic engineering as far as I could imagine them.  The rather remote time was selected to allow ample time for research to take place, and then for the consequences to reveal themselves.  You're a fine gentleman, Stanley Schmidt.

Interviewer:  What do you think of the relevance of science fiction in general?

Williamson:  I have always had a sort of double interest in science fiction.  On the one hand, I like to look at it as a creative art.  On the other, I see it as a way of looking at scientific possibility in its impact on the future, on human beings and human culture.  One aim is aesthetic, the other more or less intellectual.  The two aims are sometimes contradictory, as H.G. Wells discovered.  Yet they are both central to science fiction.  I suppose it draws much of its life from the tension between them.