Jack Williamson
Jack Williamson was born in 1908 and arrived in New Mexico via covered wagon at the age of seven, where his family homesteaded land that they still manage today. He first became aware of the new field of “scientifiction” in his late teens and decided that writing these new adventures would be even better than reading them. He sold his first story to Amazing Stories in 1928, and quickly became a popular writer in the genre, a distinction he held throughout his career. Named a Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master in 1976, he won numerous awards for his writing, including both Hugos and Nebulas. He passed away in 2006.
Pathway to Print
Placing a story is somewhat like joining a conversation. You must know the language and the culture of the group, the ideals and taboos. You need a grasp of the topic under discussion and something fresh to add. You wait for a pause when your addition will be apt.
The contents of a magazine may be regarded as a conversation, the editor as the autocrat at the breakfast table. Any genre is a wider group of related conversations, with editors and publishers directing scores of separate tables, all sharing common interests.
A story idea can commonly be expressed in one sentence. In my own novel, Darker Than You Think, a hard bitten newsman finds himself a werewolf, hunting down and killing his former friends. In The Black Sun, a shipload of space colonists are marooned in the eternal frigid night on the dead planet of a dead sun. In Terraforming Earth, the fall of a giant asteroid sterilizes the globe and the tiny staff of a station on the moon must nurse life back to it.
I commonly write two or three opening chapters to test the idea. A story reveals itself only as I write it. I can’t begin it until the people come alive, and I could never write a full outline until after it is finished. A brief paragraph about the idea may be enough to interest an editor. He may need an outline to sell it to the publisher, but that can be ignored once the contract is signed. With the story free to find its own way, I can write it with the same sense of discovery and surprise that I hope the reader will feel.
—Jack Williamson
Jack Williamson addressed the following letters to Frederik Pohl in 1950-51, synopsizing various story ideas in different stages of completion. Pohl had been the editor of Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories in earlier years, and had become a successful literary agent, in addition to being an accomplished science fiction author himself. Pohl would later become editor of the popular magazines Galaxy Science Fiction and Worlds of If.
Williamson and Pohl had a working relationship by the early 1950’s, and sometimes Pohl would propose his own ideas to see if that would trigger anything. I could not locate Pohl’s emails back to Williamson.
Of his “feelies” story, Williamson said, “I sold this idea to Orrin Keepnews at Simon & Schuster, somewhat to Fred’s surprise, and received a $250 advance—which would be many times that in today’s money. The plot in the letter is pretty crude. I worked out a much better one and spent a couple months doing a novel-length draft, but never got anything fit to send in. Looking back at it, I think it could have made a strong story. I simply wasn’t able to write it. I finally had to refund the advance out of the other royalties.” Upon reflection, Williamson added that the idea was “elaborated considerably, maybe too much.”
Some stories are subjected to over-baking, and a writer must be brave enough to stand back and simplify, cutting chunks of ideas that he or she has fallen in love with, for the betterment of the whole.
“I tried to make it a satire on the motion picture industry and the personal cost of stardom,” Williamson continued. “I tried to base it on the myth that Sir James Frasier [sic] researched in The Golden [Bough]. The primitive fertility custom in which the victim is treated like a king for a year, sacrificed, and the body parts planted to ensure next year’s crops. Elements of it survive in the Christian Easter. I still think there’s a strong story in the material. Perhaps I was trying to do too many things. Anyhow, I somehow failed to unify it around a convincing sense of human experience.”
A writer should never be afraid to give up on a piece that isn’t working out as planned. And bouncing ideas off of other writers, editors, or agents (providing you have the right relationship with them) can help to illuminate your path, even if their opinion is different from yours. And do not worry about your great idea being “taken.”
“The amateur thinks ideas are precious and apt to be stolen,” Williamson said. “Actually, they’re common. What matters is the ability to do something with them. [John W.] Campbell used to give the same idea to everybody, on the theory that the resulting stories would be so different that he could use them all—if they met the standard.”
Case in point, Williamson’s synopsis about the shape-shifting replica human bears a resemblance to John W. Campbell’s now-famous novella, Who Goes There? published two years prior. Particularly where Williamson wrote, “The hero, after being eaten and duplicated, is killed by the rival groups, but he comes back to life. He does things while he thinks he is asleep—such as flowing into a hideous slime and eating the girl, who later reappears as another replica.” In the novella Who Goes There?, Campbell (writing as Don A. Stuart) introduced an alien that could replicate other creatures in their exact likeness by absorbing them. He thus introduced one of the most frightening creatures in the history of literature. While that story had inspired the 1951 movie The Thing From Another World, the creature had been completely reimagined into something easier for special effects of the time. But in 1982, Universal Pictures more faithfully adapted Who Goes There? into John Carpenter’s The Thing, now a cult classic. One of the only similarities between the two adaptations is referring to the creature as “the thing.” In 1950, Williamson referred to his creature similarly: “He still apparently has his own body and his own mind—though vague thoughts of the Thing creep into his consciousness now and then.…”
“The shape-changing story still looks tempting,” Williamson said about this synopsis. “It could make a good horror novel. I don’t recall any response from Fred. Getting a story going requires a nice fit of several elements. The idea itself. A feeling in the writer that it expresses something he wants to say—often it can symbolize a solution to some unconscious conflict. A confidence that a market exists. Writing is communication. That requires an audience, the expectation of a feedback, hopefully in the form of a contract, a check, and the sense of an appreciative readership. We are social beings. Writing gives the satisfying sense of belonging to society. Maybe the idea just didn’t ring a bell with Fred.
“My own novel, Darker Than You Think (1940) was another early adventure with the shape-changing theme. My hero becomes a giant snake, a pterodactyl, finally a werewolf.”
Apparently none of the story ideas in these letters led to a finished novel, but his ongoing relationship with Frederik Pohl resulted in many novel collaborations in the years to come.
Pohl passed away in 2013.
—CSH
Dear Fred,
Your suggestion for an atomic murder story has had me thinking, and I’m beginning to think that something might be done with the idea that might be very successful—perhaps even with such a market as the SEP—if it were developed along the proper lines. But, since I haven’t had much experience in this field, I’d like your reaction to this:
The hero is a young nuclear physicist, who has just left his job at Los Alamos, probably because he didn’t like the bureaucracy in charge or had ideas about the future of atomic energy in conflict with those of the AEC—point of entry here for the theme of the story, whatever it is to be.
Anyhow, the hero is spending his first night outside at a tourist court in Santa Fe, waiting for his wife to join them—she has been on a trip east or something, and they’re going to his new academic or private industrial job together.
Sleepless that night, his thoughts flashing back to her and to his reasons for leaving the weapons project, he sees a blue flash in the room. Doesn’t think much of it, until an hour or so later he is nauseated, sick in the bathroom. Then he knows it was a real dose of radiation.
He has no Geiger counters or any other equipment of the sort, but he does have a loaded camera, and he takes that to a friend of his in town, a young doctor who was formerly with the Manhattan project, but is now in private practice. The doctor takes blood count, urinalysis—lets hero listen to radiation from his own body clicking in counters. Develops film, which is blackened. Doctor tells him he has a heavy dose, probably lethal, wants him to report to the hospital on the hill.
Hero, however, knowing that very little can be done for him, wants to know who killed him, and why. He realizes that in the absence of a cyclotron or something of the kind, the radiation must have come from a sample of fissionable material, which could only have been stolen from the project.
Thinking along those lines, he is already afraid to report what has happened. Anybody in position to steal plutonium would also be in position to learn of the report—and he knows what the consequences of that might be.
Borrowing a Geiger counter from the doctor, the physicist returns to the tourist court. The counter shows strong radioactivity still coming from one wall of room. Entering adjoining cabin, now empty, he finds “hot” lead bricks used to beam the deadly radiation at him. Murderers, however, have removed rest of equipment and themselves. He sets out, with counter, to run them down.
The reason he can’t ask for aid from the Security Service guards or the FBI is that he soon uncovers additional information to confirm his fear that the criminals are expert scientists, who have planned to use the stolen plutonium to blow up the whole Los Alamos laboratory, and the fear that any alarm would make them do so at once.
The doctor, who has been helping him, is soon murdered—preferably with a massive dose of radiation, which kills him at once.
The wife, arriving, is abducted by the enemy (or perhaps has already been abducted, which is why she didn’t meet him) and when she does turn up she is loaded with an appalling confession that she and the doctor and her husband had engineered the whole plot themselves, for private profit.
Finally, as the desperate and dying physicist runs down the plotters, he finds that the scheme was engineered by an efficient and brilliant Russian spy: a fanatical, cold-blooded man with military experience, who has been masquerading as an artist with a studio up in the hills as near as possible to Los Alamos. His assistants include a German physicist who has been broken in the concentration camps, and the fellow-traveling American in the project who stole the plutonium for him, a few grams at a time (this last a pretty soft-headed, contemptible character.)
While the actual detonating mechanism of a Bomb—besides the relatively small mass of plutonium required—is too massive to steal, these people have built detonating equipment of their own, installed in a mine shaft near the studio, which is all set to blow the top of “the hill” and leave America deprived of the atom bomb in the war for which that detonation will be the signal.
The physicist, working alone, will be required to prevent that explosion and recover the stolen plutonium.
The Geiger counter is one useful bit of equipment in the investigation—since the enemy have contaminated themselves and their equipment with a good deal of radioactivity, in the course of their effort to murder the hero.
Motive for that was, in the beginning, just a mistaken fear that he was on their trail. When he came down from the hill and moved into the tourist court where some of the plotters were staying, they thought he was after them. They rigged up equipment to give him lethal shot through wall, and then departed.
Later, when the clever major learned what had happened, he worked over the abducted wife with his expert secret police methods, to get her to make confession involving hero, in order to throw pursuit off trail until he can blow up the laboratory.
In the end, after the explosion is averted—it wouldn’t be a bad idea if all the villains had got a fatal dose themselves—doctors at a hospital give hero a fair chance to recover (he hadn’t got quite so much as he supposed.)
(Alternative development—that the radiation blast in the tourist court was entirely accidental, resulting from a test of some of the equipment, and that the Red major has since carried stoically on with his plot, despite the fact that he, too, is dying—I rather like that, as giving an impression of the stern devotion of Communists to the Cause.)
What do you think of that? I’m undecided, myself, about using communists for villains, and about the plot to blow up Los Alamos—which all looks pretty trite and melodramatic. But on the other hand, the greatest actual danger to the secrets of the bomb is from Reds, and the best use of a stolen bomb would be to blow up the bomb factory.
I’ve already written to inquire about making a visit to Los Alamos, but I’m no longer sure that is desirable—after all, even if I know all about the hill and what happens on it, only a limited amount of the material would be available for use as fiction or otherwise, and I certainly don’t want to have to submit the manuscript to censorship. Probably, within limits, the less I know about Los Alamos the better.
The above treatment would set all the action off the project. I know Santa Fe more or less from having lived there a year, and could easily visit it again to pick up a bit more color—there might be an interesting contrast in setting the terrible secret of the bomb against the innocent gaiety of that old town at Fiesta time.
Part of my stimulus for the above comes from James Benet’s article “Murder with a Meaning” on the suspense as opposed to the whodunit novel in the ’49 Writers Year Book, and I had thought of looking over one or two of the books he mentions in search of a model.
I’d be grateful for any suggestions.
Yours,
Jack Williamson
27 November 1950
Dear Fred,
(This morning, in fact, I wrote out a fairly detailed plot for an entirely different story, in brief: A space ship lands on Earth, after a long interstellar flight. The things on it are protean—shape-changers. That is, they are highly evolved unicellular creatures, which can form temporary multicellular bodies, through a temporary specialization. They have a regular life-cycle; in one phase, they eat and multiply as a semi-liquid mass of individual cells; in the more static phase, they can live in temporary associations.
(These shape-changers eat the first human beings who find them, and then replace them with replicas for scouting purposes. These replicas are complete and functional, even to the functions of digestion and memory. The story is written from the viewpoint of an eaten man—who doesn’t know that he has been eaten. He still apparently has his own body and his own mind—though vague thoughts of the Thing creep into his consciousness now and then, and his body has a surprising way of coming to life after it has been killed, regenerating limbs, etc.
(This hero is embarked on some sort of dangerous quest with which the reader can have a sympathetic interest. Perhaps the ship fell in an Asiatic desert dominated by Russia. The mechanisms and the science that made them constitute a prize of enormous value, for either military or peaceful ends. The hero might be a lone American geologist or explorer who finds the ship ahead of the Russians, and who then attempts to learn and claim the secret of it for America—opposed by more powerful later arrivals from Russia and perhaps from other nations. One of them doubtless a beautiful girl.
(The hero, after being eaten and duplicated, is killed by the rival groups, but he comes back to life. He does things while he thinks he is asleep—such as flowing into a hideous slime and eating the girl, who later reappears as another replica.
(The shape changers have some interesting scheme of their own for dominating the world through the use of replicas. Perhaps they invent some sort of fiction to impose on the psychology of men as they are learning it, and set up or plan to set up their replicas as a race of supermen. The fiction might be that the ship left Earth thousands of years ago, from the predeluvian civilization, and that it has now returned with the knowledge that will bring about the millennium.
(The ending comes about from the circumstance that the actual voyage was long, that the unicellular things have been weakened by it or perhaps undergone some weakening mutation which slows and finally halts the vital cycle of their shape-changing. That is: the duplicates last longer than they should between dissolving for eating and cell-division. Finally, the replicas become permanent—the shape-changers become the things they have destroyed.
(When I plotted that, I was looking around for something that would make room for the Van Vogt sort of surprise and suspense, and it seems to me that this idea has most of the ingredients of a good Van Vogt story.… What got me started along this line is the Simak serial in Galaxy, which is pretty good Van Vogt up to the middle of the second installment, when for some reason he lets the cat out of the bag—a mistake, as I see it, which Van Vogt would never have made. Maybe I’m wrong of course; actually the rest of the serial may be very good, but that is the point where I quit reading and started trying to think up a better story of my own.
(What do you think of that set-up, for either Campbell or Gold—and Orrin, too, I hope? It looks more interesting to me right now than Lethal Agent—though I still think a little creative effort would make Lethal Agent just as interesting, whenever I get in the mood to do something with it.)
Anyhow, I think it’s probably best not to send the rough of Lethal Agent to Orrin at this time. If he’s willing to spend his time on a rough draft, it would be better to wait at least until we have rough draft of something nearer publishable shape—Campbell’s suggestions, as well as my own revision ideas, would lead to a story that has very little to do with this rough.
Enclosed also is another letter from Campbell, which arrived this morning. He’s upset over the Galaxy’s reprints of serials from his magazines. I’ve written him the best letter I could. This is a pretty delicate matter. I’m anxious to keep the good will of Street & Smith, and also of course to retain and reclaim all the pocketbook rights possible. There seems to be no legal question here, but he implies that Street & Smith may become difficult over rights again. Anyhow, I’m sending along this letter and my reply for your information, and of course I’d like to have them returned.
Best to Judy and Ann.
Yours,
Jack Williamson
30 April 1951
Dear Fred:
Since I finished Seetee Ship, I’ve been working on a plot for a novel about the “feelies.” The entertainment industry that follows the talkies, based on the new science of psionics, which makes it possible to pick up, record, and broadcast thoughts, emotions, and sensations. The fundamental difference, so far as the performer is concerned, is that the day of acting is over—now the performer has to live his part. (The trend of the times is already in that direction, of course, with all the movie stars who are able really only to play themselves, and the radio shows in which members of the audience are either rewarded or victimized.)
The main character is a scientist who made some of the basic inventions—including devices which make it possible to implant unconscious urges in the audience, to buy this product or in the end to vote for that politician. He received a modest payment for his patents and retired to his ivory tower, where he is at work on refinements of his theory that might eventually make it possible to reach the minds of beings on other worlds, and so end the lonely exile of man on the little island of the Earth, and join some universal communion of intelligence.
An effort at irony. In his large dreams, the scientist has neglected to follow the practical application of his work in the world around him. The story begins when he finds himself abruptly trapped by the monstrous thing he has created. (A point of the responsibility of the scientist for the social consequences of his discoveries.)
The men of General Psionics, Inc., have managed to make a trade secret out of the technique of broadcasting unconscious urges. They have pretty well crushed their competitors in the psionics field, as well as swept the movies, television, radio, most publishing and most profession sports into oblivion. They are fighting the efforts to establish some sort of legal control, by going into politics. They expect to swing the vote, to elect and control their own candidates.
The troubles of Peter Warneke begin when they realize that his knowledge of that unpatented device is a danger to them. He might reveal its existence to the public, or even sell it to one of their rivals. They pull him out of his ivory tower, and put him to work for the company—they are cautious, they try at first to charm him, to use him, before it turns out in the end that he must be destroyed.
He’s unwilling to leave his own vast idealistic project, until he is induced to receive some of the company propaganda programs, which make him a victim of his own device. He becomes temporarily a friend of the company, and comes to the new city of Quill River—which has replaced Hollywood and Radio City as the capital of the entertainment world. He is at first employed as a psionics engineer, to assist in turning out some of the new entertainments.
The particular entertainment he first deals with took its inspiration from the worship of Diana at Nemi—the King of the Wood, who reigns until slain by his successor. In the program “Public Enemy,” a cynical director has worked out an arrangement to give the public what he thinks it wants: sex, glamour, mystery, danger, wealth, triumph and disaster—all vicarious for the public, but real for the people involved. Dan Candella is the reigning Public Enemy, a glorified gangster. In a typical drama, he is permitted to pick up a beautiful girl who wants the rewards of stardom, and a man who wants the girl is permitted to pursue her and to fight Candella for the girl and for his own crown. Their thoughts and emotions and sensations are picked up and recorded on tape. Everything has to be edited, doctored up for the public—in this entertainment Warneke is assigned the work on, the girl is a cheap and selfish individual who surrendered to Candella without a second thought of the man she left behind, who was tricked into entering the contest for her and actually murdered—though of course he had signed waivers for the legal department, and his death was technically an accident.
Anyhow, Warneke doesn’t care for that sort of thing, so far from his idealistic purpose, and he doubts that the public does. He starts a campaign of protest, but gradually finds out that he is trapped—though it takes a certain amount of time and detective work for him to find out why.
That’s the situation, as well as I’ve been able to work it out. As the plot develops, Warneke and the girl he has met at Quill River become trapped themselves in the Public Enemy Program, in some such way is this:
There was another engineer, who was employed to doctor the tapes and to put in the unconscious suggestions that sold soap flakes. He got fed up with the job, and planned to go to Senator Hansen, a liberal politician who is fighting to break up the psionics monopoly and put it under legal control. He removed from the company safe a number of the original undoctored tapes—including interviews between the head of the company and the political puppets that are about to be elected by voters under psionic compulsion. Before he could reach Hansen, however, Blinn was murdered by Candella—because his change of loyalties had been discovered. The tapes, the loss of which was not immediate discovered, have been left in the hands of the heroine—who is the secretary of the producer, Frinkel.
The girl, Jenny Grant, has hidden these tapes. She is afraid to do anything with them. She is terrified. She is afraid of Candella, who has picked her for one of his future stars. She can’t help picking up the Public Enemy broadcasts, and the unconscious suggestions in that are such as to turn the gangster, who is already bad enough, into a sort of monstrous and implacable figure of evil.
When J. Marshall Sharry—the head of the company—finds that she knows where the tapes are, it becomes necessary to make her Candella’s new star—so that a pick-up can be turned to her mind, and the tapes found. The trouble is, that in her terror, she has forgotten the tapes entirely, so that even the machine can’t read the secret from her mind.
Warneke, in the meantime, is finding out the truth, exploring the trap which he comes to realize is of his own making, looking for a way out. He comes across Hansen’s name—he has been aloof from politics before—finally gets in touch with Hansen, learns that the tapes exist and that they are a lever which might be used to topple the company political machine in the forthcoming election—the people will vote wisely, when they have been told the truth. The problem is to get the truth and get it told.
Warneke learns the nature of his trap but fails to escape it. He is forced to enter the Public Enemy Program as the champion of Jenny Grant—even though he knows that all the odds will be in favor of Candella, who has been promising for some time to kill him.
(This battle between Warneke and Candella, while directed by the producer, Frinkel, and intended for broadcast, is kept as far as possible within the frame of the real situation and developed as a logical outcome of the rivalry between them that has existed from the first. Frinkel is on hand to point out that this is in the fine old tradition of shows about show business.)
In the end, despite the odds, Warneke does kill Candella. This victory turns out to be a defeat for him, however. Sharry, in fact, had been wanting to get Candella out of the way—the man was getting ideas. And with Candella dead, Jenny Grant loses her fear. She remembers the tapes and where she hid them. The machine picks up her thoughts. Sharry finds the tapes, which might have destroyed him, and burns them. It is election eve, and he is triumphant. He expects his puppets to go in, and Hansen’s forces to be defeated. Another challenger is being readied to enter Public Enemy, and kill Warneke.
But there is another record of the tapes—in Jenny’s mind. With his skill as a psionic engineer, Warneke is able to broadcast that record of the truth. He is able to present Sharry to the world, stripped of the lies and unconscious suggestions that have made a public hero of him. The election goes the other way.
I’ve been working on this for nearly a month now, and I’m still not entirely satisfied with the plot. It still seems a little loose and vague. Yet I believe that the thing holds possibilities of real interest—among other things, it might be made into a good satiric picture of the entertainment industries. I spent last week making tentative starts on the actual narrative without ever getting past page six.
I’d be very glad for any comments you can make about this. How can it be sharpened and improved? If written, what are the chances of a sale? (One way or another, I’ve got to make some money. I need some good commercial advice.)
Please let me hear from you.
With all the best to Judy.
Cordially Yours,
Jack Williamson
From the Frederik Pohl Correspondence collection, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries at Syracuse University.
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