The Early Williamson Read online

  The Metal Man—and his hideous secret…

  A deadly legacy from a lost planet…

  The grim gateway of the Purple Cloud…

  The power that spanned space to destroy a world…

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  IT’S A SCIENCE FICTION FEAST!

  Also by Jack Williamson in Sphere Books

  The Legion of Space

  The Cometeers

  One Against the Legion

  The Legion of Time

  Darker than you Think

  The Humanoids

  The Power of Blackness

  The Early Williamson

  JACK WILLIAMSON

  sphere books limited

  30/32 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8JL

  First published in Great Britain by Sphere Books Ltd 1978

  Copyright © 1975 by Jack Williamson.

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  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  * * *

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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  Filmset in Photon Times

  Printed in Great Britain by C. Nicholls & Company Ltd

  The Philips Park Press, Manchester

  To Isaac Asimov

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ‘Scientifiction, Searchlight of Science,’ from Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall 1928. Copyright 1928 by Experimenter Publications, Inc.

  ‘The Metal Man,’ from Amazing Stories, December 1928. Copyright 1928 by Experimenter Publications, Inc.

  ‘The Girl from Mars,’ Science Fiction Series No. 1. Copyright 1929 by Gernsback Publications, Inc.

  ‘The Cosmic Express,’ from Amazing Stories, November 1930. Copyright 1931 by Experimenter Publications, Inc.

  ‘The Meteor Girl,’ from Astounding Stories, March 1931. Copyright 1931 by Readers Guild, Inc.

  ‘Through the Purple Cloud,’ from Wonder Stories, May 1931. Copyright 1931 by Gernsback Publications, Inc.

  ‘The Doom from Planet Four,’ from Astounding Stories, July 1931. Copyright 1931 by Clayton Magazines, Inc.

  ‘Twelve Hours to Live!’ from Wonder Stories, August 1931. Copyright 1931 by Gernsback Publications, Inc.

  ‘The Plutonian Terror,’ from Weird Tales, October 1933. Copyright 1933 by Popular Fiction Publishing Co.

  ‘Salvage in Space,’ from Astounding Stories, March 1933. Copyright 1933 by Clayton Magazines, Inc.

  ‘We Ain’t Beggars,’ from New Mexico Quarterly, August 1933. Copyright 1933 by New Mexico Quarterly.

  ‘Dead Star Station,’ from Astounding Stories, November 1933. Copyright 1933 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc.

  INTRODUCTION

  My thanks for this book go to the Good Doctor, Isaac Asimov, who published his own first stories as The Early Asimov and then generously persuaded the people at Doubleday that there ought to be an Early Williamson.

  Flattered and delighted as I am, the actual early Williamson is hard for me to recall. Nearly fifty years have passed since I first tried to write science fiction. Looking for the truth about that almost-forgotten individual, and wondering too about what makes a science fiction writer, I’ve been comparing what I can recall of him with what I know about Isaac. I’m finding odd similarities and wide contrasts—which probably mean nothing at all.

  I have known and admired Isaac since about the time he started selling science fiction; luckily for me, I was already a veteran by then, a dozen years ahead of him. In some ways our careers have really been similar. Not that I can match his impressive number of books in print or his well-earned status as the authority on nearly everything.

  We both grew up in families where the fight for economic survival was real, though I think his family was a bit more secure than mine. We were both the first of several children, both young introverts. We both had early love affairs with science fiction that changed our lives.

  Isaac was born in Russia in 1920. His family had suffered hardships under the Czars. In 1923, a famine year, they came to America and soon bought a candy shop in Brooklyn. Though I was born in Arizona, in 1908, most of my first three years was spent in another country—Mexico. Isaac almost died of double pneumonia in his second year. In my own third I came so near death from something then called cholera infantum that I had to learn to walk all over again. Isaac began tending the shop at about the same age that I began doing farm chores. I’ve found other parallels.

  But, before I discover how to make a science fiction writer, the contrasts begin to strike me. My own parents were Texans. My father’s forebears had been migrating west, generation by generation, since before the Revolution, from New Jersey to Ohio, on to Indiana, by oxcart to Minnesota. His father, for some reason, soon after the Civil War, turned south to Texas. My father was born on a small farm there. A seventh child, he was dedicated to the Lord at birth and schooled for the ministry. Education changed his faith, however; he left the church to become a rancher and farmer, though he remained a somewhat puritanic moralist. Most of all, I think, he was an American pioneer searching in vain for the vanished frontier.

  My mother’s people had been somewhat Faulkneresque southern aristocrats, refugees to Texas from the war that had ruined them and still too much inclined to live in the world they had lost. She was poorly prepared for the hard life she lived. I remember the bits and pieces of her own past she treasured in an old trunk. She was often ill—illness, I suspect, had become her best way to cope with poverty and disaster.

  A city boy, Isaac has always lived among people and machines. In my own childhood, I was pretty much alone. El Rancho la Loba—the Bitch-Wolf Ranch—where I spent my first years, was high in the Sierra Madre of Sonora, a long day’s ride, as my mother used to say, from any road for wheels. Life there was still nearly at a Stone Age level.

  My father had been ranching in partnership with my mother’s brothers. When revolution came, in 1910, we moved from Mexico to an irrigated farm near Pecos, Texas, and went broke there. The year I was seven, we moved again by covered wagon to the arid sandhill homestead in eastern New Mexico where I grew up.

  I don’t know much about the problems of survival in a Brooklyn candy shop, but on our claim they were severe. We were late settlers, and the better land had already been taken. Ours had no water under it; we hauled water through the sandhills in a wagon tank. We soon found that it wasn’t fit for farming—when plowed, it blew away. We picked up cowchips and grubbed mesquite roots for fuel. We milked a few cows and sold cream; we grew share-crops for neighbors on better land; my father went to Arizona one hard winter to work in the copper mines. Later, he and my brother Jim and I spent a winter in the Pecos valley, picking cotton.

  Even in New Mexico, we were several miles from the nearest neighbor and I was pretty well isolated from all the marvels of technology—perhaps that’s why they’re still so exciting to me. Looking back at the impact of the machine age on my life, I remember being sick from the motion of the stagecoach when we came out of Mexico. I vividly recall the first automobile I examined, a Ford touring car just bought by a farm neighbor at Pecos, who cranked it up and turned on the headlamps to astonish me. There were electric lights in the camphouse at the wagon yard where we stayed on the rare occasions when I got to make the three-day trip from the homestead to Portales with my father, and I recall screwing out a bulb to test the electricity with my thumb. I did that several times, feeling nothing worse than wonder. I recall my awe at the first airplane I saw, and the thrill I always felt at seeing and hearing and smelling the steam power of a railroad locomotive.

  Three years older than the next child, my sister Jo, I often played alone. From the age of eight or nine I often worked through long days alone, riding a horse behind cows or some farm implement behind a team of mules. In the dry year of 1918, I remember driving the wagon behind our little herd of starving cattle on a long expedition into Texas to search for grass. These duties didn’t damage me, any more than tending the shop hurt Isaac. I think in fact that it’s good for a child to know that he’s a useful part of a family. But the isolation and monotony of those tasks did help shape the early Williamson.

  Both my parents had been teachers, with the same respect for books that Isaac’s family had, and most of my own early schooling was at home. My first year of real school was rather painful. To weather another dry year, my father had taken a job as principal of a two-room school. My sister Jo and I rode there behind him on an old roan mare. I was admitted to the fourth grade, except in arithmetic. My home training in that had been weak; I remember trying to cheat, in a desperate effort to hold my own even in the third-grade class. I had never learned how to get on with other children, and, as the teacher’s son, I was hazed pretty savagely. No good at games, I spent the recess periods reading books from the library shelf I found in a dusty closet. With the release and adventure I found in them, I got through the term. After two more years at home, I went back to school in the seventh grade and, at the end of the term, managed to pass the state eighth-grade examinations. Even in arithmetic!

  That’s the picture I see, when I look back for the early Jack Williamson. A poor country kid, poorly educated, ill at ease with people and absent-m
inded at his work, secure enough in his place in the family but unhappy with his whole environment, longing for something else.

  There had always been one way out—imagination. As early as I can remember, I was escaping from hardship and boredom into endless cycles of adventure where I was the hero—and where too often I forgot some farm duty. Sometimes in the field with my younger brother and sisters, I entertained them with endless oral sagas. Later we invented our own game world, complete with government, armed forces, and money—with peach seed for coinage.

  My exposure to imaginative literature was pretty spotty. We wore out a copy of The Red Fairy Book. My father subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, and my mother used to read the fiction aloud. My grandmother used to give me subscriptions to Youth’s Companion and The American Boy. With excited delight, I discovered Edgar Allan Poe. I remember spending a whole day, alone on the farm, reading Longfellow’s Hiawatha aloud. On that library shelf at school, I found Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii and The Coming Race. A kind teacher lent me Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee. Once at a newsstand I remember looking at a copy of Weird Tales long enough to sense its exciting strangeness, though I had no money to buy it.

  I spent four years in a rural high school at Richland—a place that has since vanished from the map. Out of school, I felt trapped by circumstance. Farm and ranch life promised nothing I wanted. Our crops had been too often destroyed before harvest, by bugs or wind or hail or • drouth,’ Even when there was something to harvest, it was’ too often worthless on the market. Raising cattle in reality lacked the glamor of western fiction. Once I had owned six or seven head, all descendants of a spotted heifer named Easter. Except for one yearling steer, they all died one dry spring from eating a poison scrub oak. The yearling, standing by a barbed-wire fence, was killed by lightning. I longed to escape from all that.

  Vaguely, I wanted to be some kind of scientist. I had begun to learn my first smatterings of science from the out-dated physics texts in a trunkful of mouse-eaten books that my parents and an uncle had used and from a slightly more recent two-volume encyclopedia that generous teacher had given me. But there were no funds in sight for a scientific education.

  In that nearly desperate situation, I discovered science fiction. Amazing Stories had been launched by Hugo Gernsback in the spring of 1926, the year after I finished high school. A friend of mine, a radio ham, showed me the November issue. A little later I answered an ad in a little farm paper, the Pathfinder, to ask for a free sample copy of my own.

  I still recall my excitement over the issue I received. It was dated March 1927. The bright-hued cover, by Frank R. Paul, showed the alien space rocket taking off for the planet Jupiter in T. S. Stribling’s ‘The Green Splotches.’ Inside, there was also H. G. Wells’s stunning vision of the cosmos in ‘Under the Knife,’ and worlds of strange adventure in the second installment of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land that Time Forgot, and the haunting spell of A. Merritt’s ‘The People of the Pit.’

  Completely enchanted, I persuaded my sister to help me pay for a subscription. Soon I was lost in the wonders of Merritt’s Moon Pool. The browned and crumbling copies of those old magazines give me odd sensations when I look at them today. The covers have become lurid and crude, and A. Merritt’s style is now too rich for my taste. But they were windows to new worlds then.

  I decided to write for Amazing.

  Looked at in any objective way, the odds were against me. My formal schooling totaled six years. I knew more than I wanted to about raising cattle and dry-land farming, but very little about people or literature. My mother had hopes for me, perhaps because she had wanted to write. With well-grounded skepticism, my father was trying to get me a job as a carpenter’s helper or the courthouse janitor.

  By way of training, I had read a set of how-to-write booklets my mother had bought by mail. Actually, they were useful lessons—I can still recite the quotation from Poe about the short story. My uncle loaned me an old basket-model Remington typewriter with a dim purple ribbon. Still doing farm work, I began spending my spare time writing stories and mailing them to Hugo Gernsback.

  Three or four came back with rejection slips. The only one I remember clearly was called ‘Via the Vacium Tubeway’—with ‘vacuum’ misspelled in the title. For its time, the idea wasn’t bad. I was trying to update Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. My hero won an eighty-minute race around the world, traveling on a future railway inside an evacuated tunnel. The story was meant to be humorous, but I guess the editors weren’t amused.

  Another story, ‘The Metal Man,’ had Merritt’s ‘The People of the Pit’ for a model. The encounter with strange beings in a volcanic crater made a somewhat similar plot, and the style was laced with Merritt’s purple adjectives. I revised it with care and sent it off hopefully. The weeks of waiting grew into months, but I heard nothing from it.

  That summer my father sold the oil royalty on our homestead for four dollars an acre and used part of the money to send me and Jo to school at Canyon, Texas. Economizing, we rented a little house and got our own meals. A freshman there at West Texas State that fall, I was shopping for groceries when I happened to pass a drugstore window and saw the December issue of Amazing displayed on the rack, with a bright Paul cover picturing what looked like my own metal man.

  I looked into the magazine. The story was really mine. Unbelievably, the editor compared it to Merritt’s Moon Pool and hoped that ‘Mr. Williamson can be induced to write a number of stories in a similar vein.’ There was nothing I felt more eager to do. In my dazed elation, I bought all three copies off the rack and left my sack of groceries.

  The first delight was only a little tempered by the fact that the story had not been paid for. I knew nothing at all about the business of writing. A week or two earlier, the fall issue of Gernsback’s Amazing Stories Quarterly had come out with an editorial I had submitted in a contest offering a $50 prize. The editorial was five hundred words, the story five thousand. I remember a too-hopeful calculation that the story might be worth $500.

  In January, after I had written two or three plaintive letters, Gernsback sent me $75, $50 for the editorial and $25 for the story. The small size of the check was a sharp disappointment, yet I wasn’t really discouraged. Amazing wanted more stories. I was a writer!

  That editorial was titled ‘Scientifiction, Searchlight of Science.’ The term ‘science fiction’ had not yet been invented; Gernsback coined it the next year when he had lost control of Amazing and put out Science Wonder Stories in its place. I’m reprinting the editorial here for the way it shows what science fiction meant to the youth who wrote it in the summer of 1928.

  AMAZING STORIES QUARTERLY

  Vol. 1, No. 4 FALL 1928

  $50.00 WILL BE PAID FOR

  EVERY EDITORIAL PRINTED HERE

  Scientifiction, Searchlight of Science by jack Williamson

  Science ever widens our conception of the material universe. We drift farther from the old idea of man as the chief end of creation. To the savage, the universe is his valley, with the heavens arching low overhead, and himself, supreme. Science has found a million new worlds, and lost itself in them. Earth has become a cosmic mote; man, utterly ephemeral and insignificant. Science and Intelligence alone remain considerable quantities. Then, if the life of the earth is the briefest instant in Time, a question rises: Must man pass with the earth, or will Human Intelligence rule on, a new factor in the universe? The idea is stupendous. Science is the doorway to the future; scientifiction, the golden key.

  The chief function of scientifiction is the creation of real pictures of new things, new ideas, and new machines. Scientifiction is the product of the human imagination, guided by the suggestion of science. It takes the basis of science, considers all the clues that science has to offer, and then adds a thing that is alien to science—imagination. It goes ahead and lights the way. And when science sees the things made real in the author’s mind, it makes them real indeed. It deals only with that which it can see, or weigh, or measure; only with logical hypothesis, experiment and influence and calculation. Scientifiction begins with the ending of science.