Jack Williamson (1908 - 2006)
John Stewart 'Jack' Williamson
was born in Arizona in 1908 and raised in an isolated New Mexico
farmstead. After the Second World War, he acquired degrees in English at
the Eastern New Mexico University, joining the faculty there in 1960
and remaining affiliated with the school for the rest of his life.
Williamson sold his first story at the age of 20 - the beginning of a
long, productive and successful career, which started in the pulps, took
in the Golden Age and extended right into his nineties. He was the
second author, after Robert A. Heinlein, to be named a Grand Master of
Science Fiction by SFWA, and by far the oldest recipient of the Hugo
(2001, aged 93) and Nebula (2002, aged 94) awards. A significant voice
in SF for over six decades, Jack Williamson is credited with inventing
the terms 'terraforming' and 'genetic engineering'. He died in 2006.