One of the last greats. He’ll be missed.
Still, 98 years old. That’s a truly impressive run.
They had a special session devoted to him at the last Noreascon two years ago – there was an impressive gathering of Sf talent there. Larry NMiven, Mike Resnick, Jack Chalker… Williamson himself couldn’t make the flight to Boston, but he “attended” via phone hookup. He announced that he had a new book coming out (which must be out by now – I haven’t looked for it), so the guy was publishing right up to the end. He’s published in every decade since the 1920s! A truly mpressive run. He was there at the beginning, overlapping with H.G. wells and preceding the Big Names of the Golden Age, and was there after most of them had died.
I didn’t even know about him until I’d been reading science fiction for many years. “Jack who?” I asked, when I first saw a picture of him. It wasm much later when I finally started buying and reading his stuff. It’s important and influential. As Larry Niven said at that session "Jack, I see that they finally filmed your book “The Humanoids”. But for some reason they’re calling it “I, Robot.” That brought a laugh.