According to his own account, the first three years of his life were spent on a ranch at the top of the Sierra Madre Mountains on the headwaters of the Yaqui River in Sonora, Mexico.

As a young man, he discovered the magazine Amazing Stories, established in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback, after answering an ad for one free issue.

He strove to write his own fiction and sold his first story to Gernsback at age 20: "The Metal Man" was published in the December 1928 issue of Amazing.

A doctor who wrote science fiction in his spare time, Breuer had a strong talent and turned Williamson away from dreamlike fantasies towards more rigorous plotting and stronger narrative.

By the 1930s, he was an established genre author, and the teenaged Isaac Asimov was thrilled to receive a postcard from Williamson, whom he had idolized, which congratulated him on his first published story and offered "welcome to the ranks".

[8] Williamson wrote the resulting strip Beyond Mars (1952–55), loosely based on Seetee Ship, until the paper dropped all comics.

Beginning 1954 and continuing into the 1990s, Williamson and Frederik Pohl wrote more than a dozen science fiction novels together, including the series Jim Eden, Starchild, and Cuckoo.

In my own field, Ed Hamilton and Hank Kuttner and more recently Bob Silverberg are all writers who formed a fine command of the SF genre early in their careers and who later on used this to do work that is more consciously "literary" and hence more admired by critics.

My own experience as a teacher of writing confirms my sense that new authors with artistic ambitions may find themselves scorning too many of the old forms and patterns simply because they blindly associate them with hack work.

That's one reason I'm not completely sympathetic with contemporary writers like Silverberg and Chip Delany and Tom Disch, who are clearly aiming to get themselves recognized as "serious" or mainstream authors.Williamson received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in English in the 1950s from Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU) in Portales (near the Texas panhandle), joining the faculty of that university in 1960.

In the late 1990s, he established a permanent trust to fund the publication of El Portal, ENMU's journal of literature and art.

[18][20] The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Williamson in 1996, its inaugural class of two deceased and two living persons.

[24][25] While attending a Great Books course, Williamson learned that Henryk Sienkiewicz had created one of his works by taking The Three Musketeers of Alexandre Dumas and pairing them with John Falstaff of William Shakespeare.

The story takes place in an era when humans have colonized the Solar System but dare not go farther, as the first extra-solar expedition to Barnard's Star failed and the survivors came back as babbling, grotesque, diseased madmen.

The Legion itself is the military and police force of the Solar System after the overthrow of an empire called the Purple Hall that once ruled all humans.

Their vast spaceships also have very effective plasma weapons, very similar to those the Romulans had in a Star Trek episode called Balance of Terror.

The Legion works also featured a force field called AKKA which can erase from the Universe any matter, of any size, anywhere, even a star or a planet.

Williamson next wrote The Cometeers which takes place twenty years after The Legion of Space in which the same characters battle another alien race, this one of different origin.

Another novel, One Against the Legion, tells of a Purple pretender who sets up a robotic base on a world over seventy light years from Earth, and tries to conquer the Solar System via matter transporter technology he has stolen.

The story also features Jay Kalam, lobbying to allow the New Cometeers to leave the Solar System in peace, as many people were demanding that AKKA be used to obliterate the departing swarm of planets once and for all.

An editor suggested that Williamson combine the ideas of contraterrene matter (antimatter) and asteroid mining, which inspired the Seetee (C-T) series of short stories written as Will Stewart.