S P A C E L I G H T
INDEX
Name: JONES, Raymond Fisher
Aged: 78
Born:November 17, 1915
Where: Salt Lake City
Died:January 24, 1994
Where: Sandy, Utah
Interred: Salt Lake City Cemetery
Married: Elaine Kimball (died 1970)
When: June 27, 1940
Married 2: Lillian Wats
When: May 2, 1973
Raymond F. Jones
"There are no bad people.
Only sick ones, stupid ones, ignorant ones."
A Mormon from birth to death, who lived the life and embraced the tenets...and put more than a little of it in his writings. Jones loved the longer short story forms and almost all of his work was in the long novelette or short novella lengths. Had he and Donald Wollheim discovered one another, Raymond F. Jones would have been far more famous in the field today than he is. He was an educated man and a very good writer.
But Jones seemed happy and content in the niche he had carved out for himself at Astounding, writing science fiction and echoing in his stories the various pet themes and beliefs of its editor, John W. Campbell. That statement is so true, within the 1940 to 1955 period, that it might be impossible to find another Astounding writer who reflected Campbell as well. But as that peculiarly slanted era aged and withered away, the Jones stories were carried forward with few anthologized and fewer collected.
The 1955 Universal-International movie This Island Earth was based on Jones' novel/collection of the same title. And a more than a passing "hmmm" has to be given to similarities between a well known movie and Jones' novel The Alien, where explorers in the asteroid belt find an entombed alien. Among Raymond's best short stories were "Discontinuity," "The Person From Porlock," and "Black Market." His best collection was 1951's The Toymaker.
PEN NAMES: David Anderson
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mine here.
OBITUARY: Salt Lake Tribune
