JONES, Neil R(onald)

(1909-1988)

   US writer who until his retirement in 1973 worked as a New York State unemployment insurance claims investigator. His first story, "The Death's Head Meteor" (the first sf story to use the word "astronaut") for Air Wonder Stories in 1930, shares with almost all his fiction a very generalized common background, a future HISTORY-one of the earliest seen in US genre sf - which is given some explanation in "Time's Mausoleum" (1933), a story from the Professor Jameson series. Against a background ofepic advances and conflicts in the 24th and 26th centuries, Professor Jameson arranges for his corpse to be preserved indefinitely in orbit.After millions of years, long after all other humans have died, he is woken by the ROBOT Zoromes, which encase his brain in metal and give him the chance to travel the Universe in search of knowledge and adventure. He embraces the opportunity. The first Jameson story, "The Jameson Satellite", dates from 1931. Most of the pre-WWII stories in the seriesappeared in AMZ, and most of the somewhat inferior later instalments in Super Science Stories and Astonishing Stories. The first 16 stories of thesequence were collected much later as The Planet of the Double Sun (coll 1967), The Sunless World (coll 1967), Space War (coll 1967), Twin Worlds(coll 1967) and Doomsday on Ajiat (coll 1968 including 2 previously unpublished stories). The stories that did not reach book form are "The Cat-Men of Aemt" (1940), "Cosmic Derelict" (1941), "Slaves of the Unknown"(1942), "Parasite Planet" (1949), "World without Darkness" (1950), "The Mind Masters" (1950) and "The Star Killers" (1951); of the 7 further hitherto-unpublished stories "Exiles from Below" appeared in the SEMIPROZINE Astro-Adventures in 1987.NRJ was a vigorous, straightforwardwriter whose style and concerns were typical of the first blossoming of sf at the end of the 1920s.

   JC

   See also: CYBORGS; IMMORTALITY; UNDER THE SEA.