Neil R Jones

He was a Pulp writer that has become less than well known in the past decades. He was one of a stable of writers that Hugo Gernsback trained in the earliest days to write new Scientifiction for Gernsback's pulps. Jones first story was "The Death's Head Meteor" (Air Wonder Stories, January 1930) (which uses the word 'astronaut' for the very first time) and his last may have been "The Citadel in Space" (Two Complete Science-Adventure Books, Summer 1951). In his 21 year career he wrote at least 50 works for such magazines as Wonder Stories, Amazing Stories, Planet Stories, Comet, Science Fiction and Super Science Stories. His most famous series is the Jameson tales featuring the Zoromes. These 30 stories comprise the largest and most famous part of his canon. These stories had a profound influence on Isaac Asimov (as he talks about in his book Before the Golden Age) and even modern anime (Masasume Shirow names his cyborbs in Ghost inthe Shell 'Jameson-type' robots.) Of his non-Zorome pieces an Edgar Rice Burroughs influence can be seen in some. According to Jones' profile in Amazing Stories 1941, his two biggest influences are ERB and H. R. Haggard. Like many SF writers, Jones was a fan as well as a writer. He wrote: "I have done quite a bit of bookbinding both in leather and cloth, confining this almost entirely to science fiction. I have a complete set of AMAZING STORIES from the beginning." Thus sf fans once had to satisfy their need for SF books because no one published any. Jones did not write any more after 1951 though he lived to 1988.