Stellar Showboat. Malcolm Jameson

      

      Table of Contents

       COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

       INTRODUCTION

       STELLAR SHOWBOAT

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 2020 by Wildside Press LLC.

      Originally published in Planet Stories, Fall 1942.

      Published by Wildside Press LLC.

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INTRODUCTION

      Malcolm Routh Jameson (1891–1945), commonly known as Malcolm Jameson, was an American science fiction author. An officer in the US Navy, he was active in American pulp magazines during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. His writing career began when complications of throat cancer limited his activity. According to John W. Campbell Jr., Jameson “had much to do with the development of modern [c.1945] naval ordnance.”

      Jameson’s first published fiction appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in 1938. His story “Doubled and Redoubled” may be the earliest work of fiction to feature a time loop. His stories of Solar System exploration about “Bullard of the Space Patrol” were posthumously collected in 1951 as a fixup novel and won the Boys Clubs of America Award. Reviewing that collection, Boucher and McComas praised Bullard as “the most successfully drawn series character in modern science fiction.” P. Schuyler Miller wrote that Jameson drew on his own naval experience to give the stories “a warm atmosphere of reality.”

      Alfred Bester described meeting Jameson in about 1939: “Mort Weisinger introduced me to the informal luncheon gatherings of the working science fiction authors of the late thirties… Malcolm Jameson, author of navy-oriented space stories, was there, tall, gaunt, prematurely grey, speaking in slow, heavy tones. Now and then he brought along his pretty daughter, who turned everybody’s head.”

      He is best remembered for his novella “Blind Alley,” first published in the June 1943 issue of Unknown, which formed the basis of the 1963 Twilight Zone episode “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville” starring Albert Salmi, John Anderson, and Julie Newmar.