Jack Williamson (1908 - 2006)John Stewart 'Jack' Williamson was born in Arizona in 1908 and raised in an isolated New Mexico farmstead. After the Second World War, he acquired degrees in English at the Eastern New Mexico University, joining the faculty there in 1960 and remaining affiliated with the school for the rest of his life. Williamson sold his first story at the age of 20 - the beginning of a long, productive and successful career, which started in the pulps, took in the Golden Age and extended right into his nineties.
He was the second author, after Robert A. Heinlein, to be named a Grand Master of Science Fiction by SFWA, and by far the oldest recipient of the Hugo (2001, aged 93) and Nebula (2002, aged 94) awards. A significant voice in SF for over six decades, Jack Williamson is credited with inventing the terms 'terraforming' and 'genetic engineering'. He died in 2006.
Frederik Pohl (1919-2013)Frederik Pohl had an extensive career as both a writer and editor spanning over seventy years.
Using various pseudonyms, Pohl began writing in the late 1930s, his first published work being a poem titled "Elegy to a Dead Planet: Luna", which appeared in the October 1937 issue of Amazing Stories. Pohl edited both Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories between 1939 and 1943 and whilst many of his own stories appeared in these two pulp magazines they were never under his own name. After this period, from 1943 to 1945, Pohl served in the U.
S. Army, rising to the rank of sergeant as an air corps weatherman. Between the end of the war and the early '50s, Pohl was active as a literary agent, representing many successful writers of the genre including Isaac Asimov. The winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, Pohl became the SFWA Grand Master in 1993 and was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1998. He died in September 2013.
