Our Adventures in Fiction series is meant to take a look at the writers and creators behind the genre(s) that helped to forge not only our favorite hobby but our lives. We invite you to explore the entirety of the series on our Adventures In Fiction home page.Adventures in Fiction: Jack Williamsonby Ngo Vinh-HoiIn the storied list of Appendix N authors, there is one name that encapsulates nearly the entire course of modern American science fiction and fantasy: Jack Williamson. John Stewart Williamson was born on April 29th, 1908 in an adobe hut in what was then still the Arizona Territory. Seeking to better themselves, the Williamson family travelled by horse-drawn covered wagon to New Mexico in 1915, where Williamson recalled that they “homesteaded in Eastern New Mexico in 1916 after the good land had been claimed. We were living below the poverty line, struggling for survival.”This isolated, hardscrabble existence continued throughout Williamson’s entire youth, but his imagination and inquisitive mind helped him to endure. As he describes, “I did a lot of farmwork—riding horses after a string of cattle, gathering the corn, that sort of thing. Working alone so often like that was naturally pretty boring, so I started creating these endless epics and fictional cycles in which I was the principal character—all this done simply as a way of keeping my mind alive.” Williamson’s imaginative horizons expanded radically in 1926 when he wrote away for a free issue of the newly-launched Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted solely to “scientifiction”. It was herethat Williamson first encountered the work of A. Merritt via a reprint of the short story “The People of the Pit.” Inspired by the “color, wonder, the magic of sheer imagination” of Merritt’s writing, Williamson began submitting stories for publication and had his first story, the Merritt-esque “The Metal Man” published in Amazing Stories in 1928. Williamson eventually found a more naturalistic voice, aided by other literary mentors and collaborators including Miles J. Breuer and John W. Campbell, Jr., the legendary editor of Astounding and Unknown magazines. The most well-known works of the first phase of Williamson’s career are the Legion of Space stories, a star-spanning riff on Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers with the addition of the Falstaffian figure of Giles Habibula, a reformed master criminal of roguish demeanor and enormous appetites.During this period Williamson also...