Raymond F. Jones

Writer

  • Born: March 29, 1905
  • Birthplace: Salt Lake City, Utah
  • Died: January 24, 1994
  • Place of death: Sandy, Utah

Biography

Raymond F. Jones, the son of David F. and Josephine (Anderson) Jones, was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on November 17, 1915. His family belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), and Jones was raised a Mormon. He attended Madison Elementary and Madison Junior High School, and both LDS and Granite High Schools. After completing secondary school, he served as a Mormon missionary in Galveston, Texas, eventually rising to the level of district president. He then attended the University of Utah.

In 1939, he moved to Albequerque, New Mexico, after accepting a job with Western Electric Company installing telephone exchange equipment. The following year he married Elaine Kimball, an acquaintance from his teenage years with whom he would have five children. Jones moved to Baltimore in the early 1940’s and worked for several years in the engineering department of Bendix Radio, but his asthma forced him to seek a drier climate. He moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where he served as a junior weather observer with the National Weather Bureau during World War II. After the war he tried chicken farming, but after two unsuccessful summers he decided to turn his attention to writing.

Jones had sold his first story at the age of seventeen, and he began indulging a passion for science fiction (born when he came across an H. G. Wells’s novel reprinted in a pulp magazine in 1927) with submissions to Astounding Science Fiction, Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and other leading genre magazines. In the 1940’s and 1950’s Jones wrote prolifically for the science-fiction pulps and established a reputation as a writer of technology-driven, hard science fiction. His first novel, Renaissance, which was serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in 1944 and published in hardcover in 1951, tells of a scientist who helps save his own troubled world and a parallel universe to which he travels. Jones shaped several stories that he wrote for Thrilling Wonder Stories between 1949 and 1950 into another novel, This Island Earth (1952), which tells of aliens who recruit earth scientists in their battle against an intergalactic enemy. The novel was successfully adapted for film in 1954. A number of Jones’s stories from these years were eventually collected in The Toymaker (1951) and The Non-Statistical Man (1964). Jones also wrote several science-fiction juveniles in these years, including Son of the Stars (1952), Planet of Light (1953), and The Year When Stardust Fell (1958), the latter concerned with a group of teenagers who must overcome personal problems to work cooperatively in dealing with aftermath of a comet’s fallout. These were complemented by a number of nonfiction books about science for young readers, including The World of Weather (1961), Animals of Long Ago (1965), and Physicians of Tomorrow (1971).

Jones moved back to Salt Lake City in the early 1950’s after the deaths of his parents. Despite his success, he did not find science-fiction writing lucrative enough to make a living. In the 1960’s he took a job as a researcher with the Genealogical Society and later a technical writing position with Sperry Utah, which he held until he retired. He continued to write science fiction, albeit sporadically, and earned a Hugo Award nomination for his story, “Rat Race,” in 1967. His wife died in 1970, and in 1973 Jones married Lillian Watts. His last novel, Weeping Mary Tarry, which he wrote with Lester del Rey, appeared in 1978. He gave up writing in 1980 to devote himself to genealogical research and commodities trading. Jones died from complications of pancreatic cancer on January 24, 1994, in Sandy, Utah.