Description

Larry McCaffery and Jack Williamson meet in Williamson’s house in Portales, New Mexico and discuss Williamson’s long career as a science fiction writer. Williamson discusses the early days of writing science fiction in the late 1920s, writing for Hugo Gernsback (who was hands-off and sometimes didn’t pay) and John Campbell (who was more of a hand-on editor and was more influential). Williamson stresses the importance of optimism in technology and what technology can do for the human race, both in science fiction and in reality. Williamson’s writing stems from an isolated youth and attempts to entertain himself and from reading writers like H.G. Wells, who Williamson would later write a dissertation about. Williamson explores the source of his ideas, including his own time in psychoanalysis. Williamson, as one of the most prolific collaborators in the history of science fiction, discusses his various collaborators and what it was like to work with such different artists as James A. Gunn, Frederik Pohl and Lee Elias. Williamson discusses the rise of science fiction as an academic subject and what he has done to further that, with his own thesis and years of teaching. Throughout the interview, Williamson returns time and again to the notion of progress through technology and civilization and the reflection of that in science fiction. An edited version of the interview appears in Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Jul., 1991), pp. 230-252.