Neil R Jones

Neil Ronald Jones (May 29, 1909 – February 15, 1988) was an American writer who worked for the state of New York. 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. In the late 1960s, Ace. Books editor Donald Wollheim compiled five collections, comprising two sixteen of these previously unpublished stories, including two Jameson stories. Twenty-one of these stories were written by Jones (twenty four eventually saw publication), and twenty-two unrelated pieces remain unpublished. Many readers have found the stories to be memorable despite their crude writing, despite their similarities as well as their similarities to succeeding stories by Everett F. Bleiler and D.R. Mullen.