I just learned about Jack Williamson's death. I find myself much sadder than I imagined I would be.
I first encountered his work as a young teenager, when a friend of the family gave me a whole stack of science fiction novels that included an omnibus edition of Williamson's Legion of Space books. I devoured them greedily, and that sort of grand, cosmic space opera was what my very earliest stories (now justly lost and forgotten) were striving to be.
I was lucky enough at the 1996 WorldCon to have M. Shayne Bell drag me along to breakfast with Williamson and a group of other folks one morning. I didn't say much to him, but I felt as if I were sitting in the presence of nearly the entire history of the SF genre. He was born in 1908 and published his first story in 1928. His final novel was published 77 years later, in 2005.
I wish he had lived to be 100. R.I.P.
