The Cassutt Files
The Rule of Three

They say these things come in threes. And where I sit today, it sure looks like it: Wilson Tucker, age 92, died on Oct. 6 in Florida. Nelson Bond, age 97, passed away two weeks later, on Nov. 10, in Virginia.

Two days after that, on Nov. 12, Jack Williamson (right), 98, died at home in remote Portales, N.M.

Writing obituaries can be depressing—I have one writer friend, a generation older than me, who says all he does these days is write tributes.

But when three sci-fi writers whose careers spanned the best part of a century pass away, you have to take note. I read stories by all three from age 11 on, and eventually got to meet all three. Not only have I been shaped by their work—

So have you.

A fan by any other name ...

Wilson Tucker (left) was the first and—strangely, given his age—the youngest to pass. In addition to dual writing careers in the mystery field (such as the wonderful Chinese Doll and A Procession of the Damned) and sci-fi novels (Year of the Quiet Sun, The Lincoln Hunters, so many others), he lived several other lives. His mundane career was as a movie projectionist in southern Illinois, but he was famous in the sci-fi community as the legendary fan, "Bob" Tucker ... so famous, in fact, that his reputation as a writer suffered by comparison.

Tucker did one amazing thing, for a writer ... after 30 years of steady publication, several awards, decent money (by the standards of the field) ... he simply quit. Stopped. Retired. And lived happily for another 30 years. A lesson?

Like Tucker, Nelson Bond had not been an active writer for many years, in his case since the mid-1950s, after 25 years of prolific contributions to pulp and slick magazines. The collapse of the high-paying slick market ended a lot of careers then, but Bond had actually worked in radio—and early television—beginning in the 1940s. In fact, his fantasy Mr. Mergenthwirker's Lobblies (yes, not the trippingest of titles) aired on the early NBC network in 1946 and is probably the first TV drama. I discovered this only by accident—but then the TV business has only short-term memories.

No disrespect to either Tucker or Bond, but Jack Williamson was a far more central figure in the world of sci-fi. He's credited with the coining of at least three terms that have entered the language. Humanoids. Genetic engineering. Terraforming. He was a genuine visionary, an amazing thing when you consider that he was raised on an isolated ranch in eastern New Mexico. How a bright young man goes from that environment to hanging around in Hollywood with Jack Parsons (one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory), L. Ron Hubbard and Robert A. Heinlein ... you'd have to be a sci-fi writer to conceive of that.

Jack's first story was published in 1928, a year so ancient that few then alive are still living. Many of his early works were space opera (a term coined by none other than Mr. Wilson "Bob" Tucker), but not all. In 1937 he published "Born of the Sun," one of the most mind-blowing sci-fi stories ever. He explored such then-radical concepts as antimatter in his Seetee series. Another notable story was "Darker Than You Think," probably the best werewolf tale ever. Of course, he also published The Humanoids—but see below.

Williamson went on to script Beyond Mars, the first true sci-fi comic strip (as opposed to superhero things) in the 1950s, then commenced a whole new life as an academic, earning a Ph.D. and teaching for years.

He kept writing sci-fi the whole time, though, and with amazing vigor—his novella "The Ultimate Earth" deservedly won the Hugo Award in 2001. His last novel, Stonehenge Gate, appeared a year ago and is well worth reading.

Our futures will never be the same

I had the great fortune to meet all three of these writers. Indeed, at one time or another, I worked on film or television projects based on their work.

At one point I was developing Bond's (right) Lancelot Biggs, Spaceman as a potential TV series. For those of you who haven't read it—and it won't be easy to find—Biggs is a crew member on a tramp spaceship tooling around the solar system, a well-meaning screwup who always manages to emerge from disaster looking like a genius.

A character like that may have been too old-fashioned for a TV series. Who knows? But it was fun to read, and to get to know Nelson.

Tucker's work was the most cinematic of the trio. His 1954 novel Wild Talent was bought for features but never made. Among others, The Long, Loud Silence (now there's a title) should have been made.

It was Tucker's "Time Exposures," one of his rare short stories, about police trying to solve a murder using a time scanner, that I tried to set up at least three times, with no luck. But the quest brought me into contact with Tucker, who was as charming as legend claims.

My biggest heartbreak was with Jack Williamson's The Humanoids, specifically the first part, published under the title "With Folded Hands ...". Williamson postulated a world in which humans build robots to do their work and, naturally, to keep them safe, only to have the well-meaning machines become so suffocating that humans can't do anything.

It was a frightening tale in the 1940s, and equally relevant today.

I had hoped to use "Folded Hands" as the first episode of a retro sci-fi anthology series, where classic stories like Williamson's would be filmed in their original style and tone. OK, maybe that was a crazy idea (though, years later, Kerry Conrad's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow proved you could do exactly that as a feature film.)

The series didn't sell, so I never got to adapt Jack. But I had already met him at several conventions over the years, and even did a turn as lecturer at his university in 1997. He was a marvelously low-key guy—easily mistaken for a cowboy from the 19th century—but still alive to the possibilities of the future.

Though it violates the Rule of Three, another sci-fi personality passed away on Nov. 9 at the age of 87. Stanley Meltzoff was an artist whose sci-fi work was only a small part of his output, but it was exactly the look I had in mind for that retro sci-fi series. Check out www.stanleymeltzoff.com/Fictions1.html for some of his sci-fi covers.

What amazing stories.