Neil R. Jones

Born on May 29, 1909, and dying on February 15, 1988, Neil R. Jones was an American science fiction writer best known for his Professor Jameson series. He published in the great pulp magazines of the genre, including Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories Quarterly, where his adventurous, idea-driven tales found a wide audience.

Jones is especially remembered for stories that mixed cosmic adventure with striking scientific speculation. The Professor Jameson stories imagined a human mind preserved after death and carried into deep space, where it continues its adventures among machines and alien worlds. That blend of far-future thinking and energetic storytelling made his work stand out in early magazine science fiction.

He was not a full-time literary figure; sources describe him as also working as a New York State civil servant. That everyday professional life, alongside his ambitious fiction, gives his career a quietly fascinating quality: he helped build the sense of wonder that defined early American SF while living far from the usual image of the full-time author.