Star Bridge Part 25

But the biggest event was standing in line at registration and turning to find behind me a face I recognized from the backs of some of my favorite novels. "You're Jack Williamson," I said, and he admitted that he was. It was the beginning of a long friends.h.i.+p that ended only with his death at the age of ninety-eight. We met again in early 1953 when Jack and his wife, Blanche, visited Kansas City, where her sister lived, and at that time Jack mentioned that he'd had writer's block for the past decade and would I be interested in working on a novel he'd started and couldn't continue. I was writing my first novel, This Fortress World, but I would finish that soon and I agreed to look at his ma.n.u.script.

Jack sent me the first fifty pages (the opening chapter as I rewrote it) and 150 pages of notes about the background and the characters. I developed an outline that Jack approved and then wrote the novel (and rewrote it once) in three months, and Jack approved that. Our mutual agent (Fred again) sold it to Marty Greenberg of Gnome Press, a small specialty press that was publis.h.i.+ng more science fiction than anyone. Gnome published Star Bridge and This Fortress World in 1955. He paid us a $500 advance for each book, but since I shared the royalties for Star Bridge with Jack, that amounted to a total of $750 for six months' writing. Even in the early 1950s when my wife and I were living in my parents' home rent free (they had moved in with my physician brother a couple of miles away, and I was using a bas.e.m.e.nt room as an office) and my brother was providing free health care, that wasn't a living wage. I decided to give up s.p.a.ce epics and collaborations, and focus on near-future issues, and to break up future novels into novelettes or novellas publishable individually in magazines. That's when I derived my later motto "Sell it twice." Most of my later novels were written that way.

Marty Greenberg was a good publisher but not so good at paying his authors. Jack and I never got any share of the paperback royalties, and it was only some years later, when Gnome Press went out of business and Star Bridge and This Fortress World and my other novels began to be reprinted in the United States and overseas, that we got some financial return. Actually, the three years I spent as a freelance writer selling almost everything I wrote but never earning more than $3,000 a year provided the basis for a literary career and financial return as reprints continued. Star Bridge has been in print, somewhere in the world, almost continuously.

But I had no idea that Star Bridge had any claims to cla.s.sic status until writer Ed Bryant showed up in Missoula, Montana, where the Science Fiction Research a.s.sociation met in 1976. Ed had just attended a convention in Was.h.i.+ngton and he told an audience that a novel named Star Bridge had turned him into a science fiction writer, and he added, turning to Jack and me in the audience, "I'm not sure I thanked you."

A month later I was having breakfast in New York City with John Brunner and Samuel R. Delany, and I mentioned the incident. Delany said, "The same thing happened to me." And we put Delany's comment on the cover of the Berkeley reprint that Jonas reviewed.

Since then Bryant wrote, in an introduction to volume #4 of The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson: "I think I was about twelve, probably in the sixth grade, when the TAB Book Club delivered a paperback of Star Bridge by Jack Williamson and James E. Gunn. To this day, I refuse to understand why this novel is not accorded the same cla.s.sic status as The Stars My Destination or The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress."

I don't know that I can really take any credit for it. Oh, I wrote it. I know that because it has my name on the cover, along with Jack's. But that was more than fifty years ago, and I read it now as if they were someone else's words. No doubt Jack's vision had a lot to do with it. He was always young in spirit and his imagination soared.

A number of years ago I was having lunch with David Hartwell in New York City, when he was editor of Timescape Books, and he said that he wanted to reprint Star Bridge. "I seem to reprint it whenever I move to another publisher," he said. "It has the ideal combination of Jack's experience and your youthful energy."

"You've got it wrong," I said. "It was my experience and Jack's youthful energy!"

James Gunn.

TOR BOOKS BY JACK WILLIAMSON AND JAMES GUNN.

Star Bridge.

TOR BOOKS BY JACK WILLIAMSON.

Beachhead.

Darker Than You Think.

Demon Moon.

Firechild.

Terraforming Earth..

The Black Sun.

The Humanoids.

The Silicon Dagger.

The Stonehenge Gate.

TOR BOOKS BY JAMES GUNN.

Crisis!.

Reading Science Fiction.

The Toy Collector.

Transcendental.

PRAISE FOR STAR BRIDGE.

"A fast-moving blood-and-thunder novel."

-The New York Times.

PRAISE FOR JACK WILLIAMSON.

"I have no hesitation in placing Jack Williamson on a plane with two other American giants, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein."

-Arthur C. Clarke.

"A pair of science fiction cla.s.sics, as fresh and apposite today as they were nearly half a century ago."

-Kirkus Reviews on The Humanoids.

PRAISE FOR JAMES GUNN.

"Transcendental shows exactly why Gunn attained Grandmaster status in the first place."

-Paul Di Filippo.

"One of the very best portrayals of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence ever written."

-Carl Sagan on The Listeners.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS.

JACK WILLIAMSON (19082006) was born in Arizona and sold his first story at the age of twenty. He was the second author to be named a Grand Master of Science Fiction by SFWA and is often credited with inventing the terms "terraforming" and "genetic engineering."

JAMES GUNN is the Hugo Awardwinning science fiction author of The Joy Makers, The Immortals, and The Listeners. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors' imaginations or are used fict.i.tiously.

STAR BRIDGE.

end.