Jack and fellow Writers of the Future Contest judge Frederik Pohl presented 1997 grand-prize winner Morgan Burke with the L. Ron Hubbard Gold Award.

Author Services Inc.: How did you first become a science fiction writer?

Jack: I grew up on a hard-scrabble farm here in New Mexico. When I graduated from high school in 1926, I thought I wanted to be some sort of scientist, but I had no money for a scientific education. Then I discovered Amazing Stories magazine. Now that was science that really worked. You could travel in space and time and make new inventions and explore new worlds. I was totally fascinated and started writing my own stories and mailed them in to Hugo Gernsback (the editor of Amazing Stories magazine). Several came back to me with rejection slips. Then in the summer of 1928, one didn’t come back. The title of my story was “The Metal Man.” That fall, I happened to be walking by a newsstand and I saw my “Metal Man” on the cover of the magazine. Suddenly, I was a science fiction writer. It was one of the great moments of my life.