The first intimation that [Jack Williamson] had finally made the grade as a professional writer came without notice … when he received the December, 1928, AMAZING STORIES. The cover, by Frank R. Paul, depicted a scene from Williamson's story The Metal Man. The editor clearly recognized Williamson's literary deity in his blurb: "Not since we published 'The Moon Pool' has such a story as this been published by us."

The Metal Man concerned radioactive emanations from a form of intelligent crystalline life which turn all objects into metal. While the story was a good first effort, the enthusiasm with which it was received ran far beyond its conceptual or literary qualities. However, in trying to capture something of [Abe] Merritt in his writing, Jack Williamson had undoubtedly struck the right chord. (pp. 87-8)

[The] sale of The Metal Man caused Williamson to lose interest in academic pursuits. The entire Christmas vacation of 1928 was spent writing a short novel, The Alien Intelligence, which he sold to Hugo Gernsback's newly formed SCIENCE WONDER STORIES…. It was a very competent writing job, dealing with a bizarre hidden valley in Australia. The editors appeared most impressed with Williamson's concept of a mysterious insect race whose brains had grown so large that they were sustained and transported in metal bodies. The belief that intelligence could evolve in the most alien forms was to become a trademark of Williamson's stories. (p. 88)

[His next novel, The Green Girl, was a success.] The story takes place in a strange world under the sea, where the roof of water is suspended in delicate balance by a gas made up of antimatter. "You know that science has held for a long time that there is no reason, per se, to doubt the existence of substances that would repel instead of attracting one another," one of Williamson's characters explains, and there, early in Williamson's writing career, is the seed of the contraterrence matter stories written under the Will Stewart name.

The Green Girl has atomic energy weapons, intelligent flying plants that can be trained to fight or wash dishes, with the action and colorful backdrop of the old scientific romances. Actually, Jack Williamson was to become the author bridging the gulf between the school exemplifying pure escape …, and the group then currently focusing on ideas which Hugo Gernsback strove to include in his magazine.

The influence of Merritt and, to a lesser degree, the S. Fowler Wright of The World Below, was to pervade most of Williamson's writing for the next three years. Yet his ability to come up with a spectacular story device, if not a new idea, gained for him the title of "The Cover Copper" in the early sciencefiction fan magazines, since the subject matter of his stories provided a constant source of provocative illustrative material. (p. 89)

Typical of Williamson's ideas are the following: the notion of the Heaviside layer supporting forms of life …; a girl who is permitted to remain alive by a civilized race of Antarctic crustaceans because they like her singing …; a tiny artificial planet kept suspended in a laboratory …; a beautiful lady flying around in space asking entry into a spaceship…. Williamson was never without some new idea or novel situation.

Stock devices, too, were repeated in Williamson stories. The airplane was his favorite means of carrying his characters into action…. (pp. 89-90)

Jack Williamson loved jewels and they are the catalyst to the fourth dimension in Through the Purple Cloud; the key to eternal life in The Stone from the Green Star …; a pathway to a primeval planet in the lusty adventure In the Scarlet Star…. The jewels, like the vortices of light, the outré cities inside volcanoes, hidden valleys, other dimensions, the monsterlike aliens with an aspect of benevolence, are all of obvious derivation. (p. 90)

The crown jewel of this phase of Williamson's writing was undoubtedly The Moon Era…. The protagonist, falling away from the earth in a spaceship, finds himself moving back in time and lands on the moon when that satellite is still a young world possessing water, air, and life. There he allies himself with The Mother, the last of a race of Lunarians trying to escape to the sea, with the seeds of her young in her. She is pursued by The Eternal Ones, a civilization of brains in gigantic robot bodies, who originally were an offshoot of her race. The physical and mental qualities of The Mother are sketched with such delicacy, the symbols employed to convey the desired mood so unerring, that the unfolding of the story achieves a complete suspension of disbelief in the reader, and it builds to a climax of such stirring poignancy that the reading becomes a memorable experience. (p. 91)

Williamson greatly admired [Miles J.] Breuer's originality and wrote him when he saw his name listed as a member of The Science Correspondence Club, of which he too was a member. Williamson was eager to learn more about the writing craft and Breuer was willing to help. Breuer suggested a novel paralleling the American Revolution but with the locale in the future and on the moon. The result was The Birth of a New Republic…. Williamson did virtually all of the writing, but under the strictest discipline, submitting the outline of every chapter for approval to Breuer. The result was a highly ingenious detailing of a future civilization but not a novel in any true sense, since the entire story was a blow-by-blow description of a future revolution with virtually no other story at all.

The Cosmic Express …, a spoof on interplanetary stories, was heavily influenced by Breuer and is notable for its use of matter transmitters for space travel and the brilliant prediction that westerns would dominate television. (pp. 91-2)

The best of the short stories he sold ASTOUNDING was Dead Star Station … a touching character study of a man who spends fifty years to perfect an antigravity screen and the heroic manner in which he justifies his effort. To accentuate character, Williamson had given his aged hero a lisp. Once before, in The Second Shell, he had attempted to individualize a character by presenting a scientist with a stutter. It was a very small thing, but in a field of writing in which some natural phenomenon was often the lead character, and all human beings were stereotypes, this was a tremendous, perhaps daring, advance in craftsmanship.

The Legion of Space [also sold to ASTOUNDING STORIES] had many of the epic qualities that had made the space operas of Edward E. Smith or John W. Campbell so popular. Yet the impact it made … was predominantly due to a single character, Giles Habibula. An obese, lame, heavy-drinking, complaining old man with a sublime genius for opening locks, Habibula was characterized by a manner of speech distinctively his own…. (p. 94)

The idea for The Legion of Space had come to Jack Williamson from a lecture … in a course in Great Books … where he learned the Polish novelist Henry Sienkiewicz had borrowed characters from Dumas' Three Musketeers and Shakespeare's bawdy old Sir John Falstaff…. If it worked for Sienkiewicz, Williamson thought it might work for him. So, quite literally, in The Legion of Space, the Three Musketeers of Space, John Star, Jay Kalaam and Hal Samdu, accompanied by a rocketage, lock-picking Falstaffian replica, set out to a rousing series of adventures to discover the secret of AKKA, the ultimate weapon…. (pp. 94-5)

Like Sienkiewicz, Williamson developed a trilogy of novels, following The Legion of Space with The Cometeers … and One Against the Legion…. The Cometeers are a seemingly immortal race of energy creatures who control a cosmic collection of sundry worlds collected in a green comet tail twelve million miles long. They propel this interstellar conglomeration through the galaxy, feeding on the life forces of creatures of the worlds they capture….

One Against the Legion, the last of the trilogy, tells of the battle of the legionnaires to bring to terms one supercriminal and in the process ties up some loose ends of the series. (p. 95)

It is quite possible that Williamson's abrupt switch to realism in Crucible of Power … and in portions of Non-Stop to Mars … was part of his coming to terms with himself. Realism was present in the characterization as well as in the plotting of these stories. Giles Habibula had been a milestone, but Garth Hammond, aptly labeled "a hero whose heart is purest brass," in Crucible of Power, was a giant step towards believability in science fiction. Hammond was the man who made the first trip to Mars and built a power station near the sun for sheer selfish, self-seeking gain. The end justified the means, and he was just as callous in romance as in business. There had never been anything as blunt as this in science fiction before.

Science fiction has never achieved much in human characterization, but what little progress it has made is as much due to Jack Williamson as any other author. After he showed the way, not-completely-sympathetic and more three-dimensional people began to appear…. (pp. 95-6)

Selling to ARGOSY was one of the great moments in Williamson's life, since so many of the old science-fiction "masters" had been identified with that magazine. Following Non-Stop to Mars, he sold them Star Bright …, in which a harassed little bookkeeper, hit by a meteor particle, becomes capable of performing miracles in certain circumstances, and Racketeers in the Sky …, in which a dishonest quack foils a conquest of the earth, but with no redemption in character. Williamson's practiced ability to portray something other than a cardboard hero had finally cracked ARGOSY for him.

An early tendency in Williamson's work had been a drift toward fantasy and away from scientific logic as the plot unwound. Paradoxically, he began to move in the other direction as he matured and was one of the pioneers in fictional explanation of the supernatural and witchcraft in scientific terms. His most widely acclaimed work in this area was Darker Than You Think …, which suggests that human beings have the blood strain of Homo lycanthropus and that occasionally there is a throwback. (pp. 96-7)

Darker Than You Think exerted strong influence on Fritz Leiber, who established a reputation for translating the supernatural into logical terms….

Early in 1942, Williamson suggested to John W. Campbell a series of stories on the engineering problems of making asteroids habitable. Campbell … countered with the suggestion that Williamson combine his notion with contraterrene matter and use a pen name. The name was Will Stewart, and the results were two novelettes, Collision Orbit … and Minus Sign …, and one short novel, Opposites—React…. [The] stories ranked high and have come to be considered the most outstanding expositions on the anti-matter theme ever written. (p. 97)

Back to the task of making a living [after World War II], Jack Williamson read the current output of science fiction, decided he was equal to it, and turned out The Equalizer …, about an advance in technology that brings to an end the age of specialization. It was a strikingly modern and effective presentation of the technical factors that might eliminate cities, other than their destruction by atomic bombs.

If any further proof were required that Williamson was one of the most adaptable science-fiction writers alive, "With Folded Hands …" … eliminated that need. In that story, robots are given the duty of seeing that human beings do not hurt themselves or each other. They are also dedicated to seeing that men are happy. How they go about it makes for one of the grimmest horror stories as well as one of the landmarks in modern science fiction.

The sequel was almost a command performance, and Williamson labored on a novel, "… And Searching Mind."… "With Folded Hands …" was almost entirely Williamson's own creation, but the new story incorporated elements of psi phenomena which Campbell had suggested as a means of defeating the robot guardians. The logical ending of benevolent enslavement had already been used on the first story, so Williamson had no alternative but to switch to a less convincing human victory in the second. There were also crudities in the dialogue which made the writing uneven, but it won first place in readers' acclaim … and was [subsequently] published … as The Humanoids. (pp. 98-9)

If science-fiction writing is an art that can be taught, there is probably no one in the world better qualified to teach it than Jack Williamson. His complete understanding of not only the writing techniques, but the changing approach to telling a story, has been demonstrated repeatedly by his adaptability to every shift in direction science fiction takes. Yet the record shows more than adroit adjustability and storytelling competence. It reveals an author who pioneered superior characterization in a field almost barren of it, realism in the presentation of human motivation previously unknown, scientific rationalization of supernatural concepts for story purposes, and exploitation of the untapped story potentials of antimatter. (p. 100)

Sam Moskowitz, "Jack Williamson," in his Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Science Fiction (copyright © 1966, 1964, 1963, 1962, 1961 by Sam Moskowitz; reprinted by permission of the author), World Publishing Co., 1966, pp. 84-100.