Quick Facts
Biography
Neil Ronald Jones (May 29, 1909 – February 15, 1988) was an American author who worked for the state of New York. Not prolific, and little remembered today, Jones was ground-breaking in science fiction. His first story, "The Death's Head Meteor", was published in Air Wonder Stories in 1930, possibly recording the first use of "astronaut" in fiction. He also pioneered cyborg and robotic characters, and is credited with inspiring the modern idea of cryonics. Most of his stories fit into a "future history" like that of Robert A. Heinlein or Cordwainer Smith, well before either of them used this convention in their fiction.
Professor Jameson stories
Rating not even a cover mention, the first installment of Jones' most popular creation, "The Jameson Satellite", appeared in the July 1931 issue of Amazing Stories. The hero was Professor Jameson, the last Earthman, who became immortal through the science of the Zoromes. Jameson was obsessed with the idea of perfectly preserving his body after death and succeeded by having it launched into space in a small capsule. Jameson's body survived for 40,000,000 years, where it was found orbiting a dead planet Earth by a passing Zorome exploration ship. The Zoromes, or machine men as they sometimes called themselves, were cyborgs. They came from a race of biological beings who had achieved immortality by transferring their brains to machine bodies. They occasionally assisted members of other races with this transition (e.g. the Tri-Peds and the Mumes), allowing others to become Zoromes and join them on their expeditions, which sometimes lasted hundreds of years. So, much like the Borg of the Star Trek series, a Zorome crew could be made up of assimilated members of many different biological species. The Zoromes discovered that Jameson's body had been so well preserved that they were able to repair his brain, incorporate it into a Zorome machine body and restart it. The professor joined their crew and, over the course of the series, participated in many adventures, even visiting Zor, the Zorome homeworld, where he met biological Zoromes. The professor eventually rose to command his own crew of machine men on a new Zorome exploration ship. "The Jameson Satellite" proved so popular with readers that later installments in Amazing Stories got not only cover mentions but the cover artwork. The series eventually became some of the most popular and well-known of the 1930s pulps.
Being cryopreserved and revived is an idea that would recur in hundreds of science fiction novels, movies, and television shows. One young science fiction fan who read The Jameson Satellite and drew inspiration from the idea of cryonics was Robert Ettinger, who became known as the father of cryonics. An eleven and a half year old Isaac Asimov also read the story. Asimov noted that the Zorome's organic brains were a minor detail, "Jones treated them as mechanical men, making them objective without being unfeeling, benevolent without being busybodies." He cites Jones' Zoromes as the "spiritual ancestors" of his positronic robot series and credits them as the origin of his attraction to the idea of benevolent robots.
Masamune Shirow paid homage to Jones in his cyborg-populated Ghost in the Shell saga by including a no-frills brain-in-a-box design, even naming them Jameson-type cyborgs.
Just as the Jameson stories inspired Asimov, Ettinger, and other young readers, Neil R. Jones has said he was inspired to invent the Zoromes by H. G. Wells' Martians from The War of the Worlds, whose weak bodies were augmented by giant war machines. He also drew inspiration from Sewell Peaslee Wright's stories of Commander Hanson and the space patrol which were running in Astounding Stories around the time Jones began writing the Jameson series.
Jameson (or 21MM392, as he was known to his fellow metal beings) was the subject of twenty-one stories between 1931 and 1951, when Jones stopped writing, with nine stories still unpublished. In the late 1960s, Ace Books editor Donald A. Wollheim compiled five collections, comprising sixteen of these, including two previously unpublished. In all there were thirty Jameson stories written (twenty four eventually saw publication, six remain unpublished), and twenty-two unrelated pieces.
R. D. Mullen, reviewing The Planet of the Double Sun, commented that while many readers have found the stories memorable despite their exceptionally crude writing, he found the characters and events "of such little interest that I feel no desire to follow them through the succeeding stories." Everett F. Bleiler found the stories marked by "drearily innocuous similarities" as well as "weak writing and literary flatness." In contrast, Isaac Asimov wrote of his experience reading the Jameson Satellite as a pre-teen, "None of the flaws in language and construction were obvious" ... "What I responded to was the tantalizing glimpse of possible immortality and the vision of the world's sad death". With the pulp audience of the 1930s, the Jameson stories were very popular as evident from the amount of praise that appeared in the letters column of any pulp that published one of the stories.