Tag: edmond hamilton

Short Story Review: “Day of Judgment” by Edmond Hamilton

October 29th, 2025

(Cover by Pete Kuhlhoff. Weird Tales, September 1946.)

Who Goes There?

Born in 1904, Edmond Hamilton was, along with friend and close contemporary Jack Williamson, one of the last of the classic SF pulp writers, and one of the few of that type to survive the raising of standards for SF writing that came about during the World War II years. He tried but failed to strike a business relationship with John W. Campbell, but found Campbell’s criteria to be too exacting and finicky, so he was to appear regularly in just about every genre magazine of the era that Campbell wasn’t editing. In the pre-war years Hamilton was known for his quite literally world-shattering space opera, being one of the pioneers of that subgenre; but whereas E. E. Smith captured readers’ imaginations with his novels, Hamilton stuck to the short story and novella early in his career, and he also deliberately mixed horror elements in with his SF. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that he had made his debut in Weird Tales, and was maybe the most consistent contributor of “weird-scientific” stories for that magazine. He remained loyal to Weird Tales until it shut down (not for the last time) in 1954. So we have a story today that’s not really horror at all, but rather is SF that could’ve just as well have been published in Startling Stories or Thrilling Wonder Stories at the time. This is also one of those cases where I checked out the story based on the nifty magazine cover it inspired.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 1946 issue of Weird Tales. It’s only been reprinted twice, in The Last Man on Earth (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh) and the Hamilton collection The Best of Edmond Hamilton.

Enhancing Image

As you can guess from the cover, this story involves anthropomorphized animals, or more accurately animals that have been unintentionally uplifted via atom-bomb-induced mutation. Hahl and his comrade S’San, a dog-man and a cat-man respectively, are minding their own business when a star passes over them, passing so close in fact that it crashes in the Crying Stones, an island that is forbidden to the Clans. The Clans are of course communities of different humanoid animals, including dogs, cats, foxes, and even horses. These beast-people are akin to those poor mutilated creatures in The Island of Doctor Moreau; but whereas the beast-folk in that novel are in a state of constant agony, their equivalents in “Day of Judgment” don’t have too bad a life—even barring the nuclear devastation they’ve been born into. Hahl, being a dog, if one that walks on two legs, is curious about this fallen star, going against S’San’s warnings. Naturally the fallen star turns out to be a spaceship that’s landed on the island, home to two humans, a man and a woman. When I reviewed Peter Phillips’s very good (and chilling) “Lost Memory” not long ago I went into some detail about how humankind getting back into contact with one of our robot or animal companions might turn out badly, but this is not so much case with the humans in Hamilton’s story. For one, it’s been long enough since the nuclear holocaust wrecked the world (several dog generations we’re told) that the radiation has long since died down. Also, while the humans are outnumbered, they do have futuristic weapons, whereas the beast-folk have not yet gotten past the stone-and-spear phase. Still, their first meeting is a rough one.

Unfortunately “Day of Judgment” is not very interesting on its own, although it is interesting when taken in the context of a certain strand of SF that proliferated in the years immediately following WWII, that being the tale of nuclear anxiety/depression. I wrote an editorial on this topic some months back, because it’s a topic that informs a great deal of SF published from about 1946 to 1960. There were stories beforehand that speculated on the use of a theoretical nuclear weapon, but following the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki there came along a new subspecies of SF story, written from an American or at least Allied perspective, about a world in which humanity has disfigured or destroyed itself with atom bombs. There are too many examples to count, but some notable ones include Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” Judith Merrill’s “That Only a Mother,” Theodore Sturgeon’s “Memorial,” A. E. van Vogt’s “Dormant,” and perhaps the ultimate post-nuclear story of the era, Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. These are at times melancholy and outright pitch-black stories in tone, and it’s strange to think these are coming from people who were on the winning side. Hamilton himself was a hawk who supported America’s involvement in WWII and later (more regrettably) Vietnam, although he was not the the screaming cold warrior that Robert Heinlein was. Even someone with Hamilton’s politics could see that the proliferation of nuclear weapons would likely be a losing game for everybody. The human couple in “Day of Judgment” have returned from a failed Venus colony, only to find Earth has been bereft of human life for a hot minute now, replaced by intelligent beast-people.

The immediate question is what ought to be done with these humans, as they could well present a threat to the Clans, but the thematic question is whether humanity, in the wake of the nuclear age, deserves a second chance. This is Hamilton, who for how dark he can be at times is not as much a pessimist as his wife (Leigh Brackett), so you can guess.

There Be Spoilers Here

A trial ensues among the clans, with the humans being in a position where they might be executed; of course they won’t be, which is a bit of a shame, since a bleaker ending would’ve elevated this story a bit. I’d like to take a moment to talk about a gripe I have with Trondor, the leader of the horse clan, and his ilk: these fuckers stand on their hind legs, which are hoofed. This simply doesn’t work. Humans are able to walk on two legs because of a lack of a real tail, and more importantly we have feet with flexible toes which are good for keeping ourselves balanced. If someone loses even one toe on one of their feet they find it more difficult to stay balanced when standing, so imagine not having any toes on your feet. I can take cat and dog furries, but I draw the line at horse-people with hooves instead of clawed or fingered toes. Anyway, that was my TED talk.

A Step Farther Out

I would say I’m sorry for the delay, but I didn’t have too much to say about this one and I’m not sure how many cared to hear what I had to say. This is the second time I’ve reviewed Edmond Hamilton and the second time I’ve come away feeling rather indifferent, which sucks because I’ve read enough of his work outside the confines of this site that I know he’s capable of a good deal better. Then again, he wrote a lot, and since he wrote as a way to make a living, he didn’t spend much time on revising his work. He’s a relic from a bygone era, but I don’t mean that in an insulting way.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: October 2025

October 1st, 2025
(Cover by Wayne Barlowe. Asimov’s, June 1984.)

There’s something about October that brings a change in me. It could be that autumn has now unambiguously started, as opposed to just going by the autumnal equinox. The weather is now colder and dryer. My hands and nose are getting dry, the latter occasionally resulting in a nosebleed. I now feel like I can put on a hoodie and jog around the city. The trees will start being stripped of their leaves. Overall it’s a time of changes, mostly for the better. October is also the month of Halloween, which is far and away my favorite holiday, to the point where it might the only one I really get festive about. Now is the time for watching horror movies, from the classices to some grade-A schlock. Time to catch up on some horror reads I’ve accumulated on my shelf. Time for pumpkin spice lattes, if you’re into that. In other words, this is for me what Christmastime is for some people—mind you that I tend to get depressed around Christmas.

For this month we’re back to reviews at regular intervals, all short stories, all featuring thrills, chills, and assorted horrors. For the first time in a while I’m actually excited with what I’m gonna be writing about. Hopefully you’ll be joining me in reading at least a few of these.

We have one story from the 1940s, three from the ’50s, three from the ’80s, one from the ’90s, and one from the 2020s.

For the short stories:
1. “The Hungry House” by Robert Bloch. From the April 1951 issue of Imagination. Bloch was correspondents with H. P. Lovecraft when the former was still in high school, and this friendship had an apparent influence on Bloch’s early fiction. While he’s most famous for writing Psycho, which is non-supernatural horror, most of Bloch’s work involves ghouls, cosmic horrors, and whatnot.
2. “Rabbit Test” by Samantha Mills. From the November-December 2022 issue of Uncanny Magazine. Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, being only the third story ever to win all three. Mills debuted in 2016, with her debut novel published in 2024. “Rabbit Test” was the last of a streak of short stories, as Mills stopped writing short fiction for three years.
3. “Punishment Without Crime” by Ray Bradbury. From the March 1950 issue of Other Worlds Science Fiction. Being one of the most famous American authors ever, it can be easy to forget that Bradbury started writing for the genre magazines, not all of them being of the first rate. He also wrote so much horror early in his career that only a fraction of it appeared in The October Country.
4. “Lost Memory” by Peter Phillips. From the May 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. I had ever heard of Peter Phillips before, which might be because he was only active for a short time, from about 1948 to 1958. He stopped writing SF for reasons I’m not sure of. He was also British, at a time when there weren’t too many active in the field, even appearing in the inaugural issue of New Worlds.
5. “Yellowjacket Summer” by Robert McCammon. From the October 1986 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. McCammon made his debut in 1978, but it took him a bit to come to the forefront of contemporary horror fiction. His massive post-apocalyptic novel Swan Song tied for the inaugural Stoker for Best Novel. Disillusionment with the industry made him step away from writing for a decade.
6. “Bloodchild” by Octavia E. Butler. From the June 1984 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Winner of the Hugo and Nebula for Best Novelette. This is a reread for me, but I’ve been meaning to return to it for a close read for a minute. Butler wrote only maybe a dozen short stories, but they’ve received a disproportinate amount of praise, with her winning Hugos for short fiction twice consecutively.
7. “Reckoning” by Kathe Koja. From the July 1990 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Koja debuted in the late ’80s with a pretty strong string of short stories before her debut novel, The Cipher, hit stores in 1991. She was a formiddable horror talent in the ’90s, but in the 2000s onward took to writing novels aimed at young readers, and she hasn’t written much generally lately.
8. “Day of Judgment” by Edmond Hamilton. From the September 1946 issue of Weird Tales. While he’s most known as a pioneer of space opera, as well as his Captain Future series, Hamilton appeared frequently in Weird Tales from the beginning of his career, sometimes with SF but also sometimes with fantasy and horror. He was an old-school pulp writer in that he wrote for basically any market.
9. “The Pear-Shaped Man” by George R. R. Martin. From the October 1987 issue of Omni. Winner of the Stoker for Best Long Fiction. Martin is a case where a series (A Song of Ice and Fire) of his is so famous that it overshadows the rest of his work, which mind you is considerable. Martin’s gone on record as thinking of himself as instincively a horror writer, a fact which is on display here.
We have pretty much an all-star cast of authors here, so I hope this will help my recent writing slump. Of course, the most important thing is that we have fun with this. Happy Halloween.
The Observatory: Why Review Old Science Fiction?

August 15th, 2023
(Before the Golden Age. Cover by Tim Lewis. Doubleday, 1974.)

This month’s editorial will be rambling and not straightforward. For one, now is the time to reveal my thought process with regards to how I pick review materials and why I do that; so in a way this will be a bit of a meta post. You’ll get to see how the sausage is made. You see, I’m not a book reviewer who gets paid to receive review copies of upcoming releases and give them my honest (but not too honest) opinions, wrapped in professional plastic and safe for toddlers and small dogs to chew on. There may come a point when I take on a review column for some publication, but that’s not now, nor is it in the immediate future. After all, SFF Remembrance is already time-consuming and it serves a different purpose. This is my blog that I run for the fun of it and I get to review what I want, without some editor breathing down my neck.

This still raises the question: Why do I do it? Why, so far, have I tackled only a handful of stories from the 2010s and nothing from the 2020s (yet) in favor of dusty, pulpy, uncouth genre fiction from the time before my parents were even in diapers? This is a question that actually involves several questions within it, like one of those Russian nesting dolls, especially for someone of my age who does not have the ability to remember any of these stories from when they had that fresh car smell.

We have to ask the following:
1. What counts as “old” science fiction?
2. What differentiates “old” science fiction from “classic” science fiction?
3. Why read the damn things in the first place?
4. If we should read them, why should we write about them?
5. If we’re to write about them, should it be as a reader or as a pseudo-academic?
6. When all is said and done, who would want to read these reviews?
That first question sounds like it has an obvious answer, but it doesn’t; nor does “old” necessarily mean “classic” science fiction, hence the second question. Most old SF is not considered classic by today’s readers. Here’s another way to look at it: Dune is a classic novel, without question. It has been continuously in print since 1965, won awards, and has now received multiple film and TV adaptations. It is a classic by reputation, which really is what makes something a classic; that is to say there’s a collective agreement among a set of people that this work is still worth celebrating. Contrast this with a novel that came out only one year prior, Robert Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold, which despite having Heinlein’s name attached to it is often reviled, with even contemporary reviews being unkind towards it; it’s old, but not really a classic. Then again, 1965 is over half a century ago, so surely anything from then would be deemed old by anyone now living—certainly by anyone in my age bracket. There’s a certain point where people can agree that something has gathered enough wrinkles to be considered old—only we don’t always agree on when.

Much like how beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so one could also argue the age of a work of art is relative to the person perceiving it. I mentioned 1965, but let’s turn the dial to the year of my birth: 1995. For some people 1995 was not that long ago—maybe even too recent to be considered old, let alone grounds for now-classic works. I used to think the same way myself, that SF from 1995 is still fairly contemporary; only problem is it’s not. While many of the authors who were active then are still active and producing good work now (Nancy Kress, James Patrick Kelly, Michael Swanwick, to name a few), and while writing techniques have not evolved greatly in the past 28 years (certainly not as jarring a shift as, say, between 1932 and 1960), the recurring concerns and, more importantly, the perspectives of SF writing have changed greatly. Now we see not so much white American writers spouting about other cultures as people of those other cultures having their seat at the table. This is a good change, mind you. While there is still much exciting and fresh fiction from 28 years ago, there’s some dust gathering on the surface, visible to the naked eye.

(To put this in context, and with all due respect, it’s hard to imagine Mike Resnick’s Kirinyaga stories, which won him awards in the ’80s and ’90s, would get such a glowing reception if published today.)

If such fiction now strikes us as a little (or very) dusty, why should we still read it then? I am not referring to the work that still reads as fresh but that which does not read as fresh. These are stories whose style and morals have since been superseded by works that are at least superficially better. Why go back and read Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time when there have been many time war narratives since then that are more sophisticated and less problematic? Indeed, why do we still read Dune whilst acknowledging that Frank Herbert’s prose now reads as confusing and overcrowded? Surely there are novels that are reminiscent of Dune that are also more delicate with the English language? Why are Heinlein’s books all still in print despite his being a lecherous right-wing militant with a penchant for monologuing? These are not easy questions, nor do they seem to have an “objective” answer that can be gathered via the scientific method.

I’m also asking these questions specifically with regards to old science fiction, and not old fantasy or horror. Nobody asks why we still read Tolkien (although I do) despite his being a lackluster stylist and a puritan. Nobody doubts the immense power and importance of Edgar Allan Poe’s writing despite its vintage and Poe’s own stylistic flaws. Even that most controversial of old-timey horror writers, Lovecraft, is still held as the sun around which cosmic horror orbits, despite efforts (lousy efforts, mind you) over the decades to discredit him. The viability of these fine and flawed gentlemen and their flawed works need not be thrown out the window casually. To be fair, there is a straightforward reason for this attitude that does not carry over to science fiction: fantasy and horror are genres that have not been subjected to change nearly as viciously as SF. Time, who is always a harsh mistress, has devoured entire worlds with SF for the simple reason that SF, far more than its sister genres, hinges on discoveries of the moment. Our understanding of the natural world has changed over time, and so by extension what was considered cutting-edge in the past is now quaint—or even worse, incompatible with current understanding.

Consider that Frankenstein, that most foundational of SF novels, is still widely read and beloved—but not as science fiction. It’s still effective as horror, and as a cautionary tale, but as a narrative supposedly rooted in science it now reads as nigh incomprehensible. Even when I read it for the first time as a semi-literate high schooler I knew that Dr. Frankenstein’s method for resurrecting a corpse, and especially his subsequent fear that the monster would breed deformed hellspawn, made no sense. Mary Shelley wrote in a world that would not know Darwinian evolution for a few more decades, and it shows. Here’s another example: In the 1920s and ’30s there were a lot of stories about “cosmic rays” playing a part in evolution, perhaps best encapsulated in Edmond Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved.” This is total nonsense that cannot be taken seriously with a modern lens. Why, then, do people still read Frankenstein but “The Man Who Evolved” will forever be deemed a relic of the super-science era? Probably because, aside from being such a monumental work, Frankenstein can be understood as something other than science fiction, whereas Hamilton’s story can only be understood as a story founded on bad science.

And yet…

(Cover by Frank R. Paul. Wonder Stories, April 1931.)

We still see reprints, from time to time, of very old and very dusty SF, and there are several blogs running right now that specialize in engaging with vintage SF. I myself started as part of the online book club Young People Read Old SFF before creating my own blog. Unfortunately said book club has dwindled in number over the past couple years, and outside of it I’ve seen scarcely any interest from people my age in the old stuff. I suspect this is for a few reasons. If you’re a part of fandom and you don’t have the memory capacity of a goldfish then you may recall several incidents in the past decade (most infamously the Sad Puppies fiasco) wherein old folks and reactionaries would rant about how kids these days don’t respect “the classics” and how SF is absolutely 100% for sure on its way out. It’s true that we may be heading into another dark age for SFF magazine publishing, but never before has the field been more inclusive, more niche-filling, and more accepting of ideas that go against heteronormativity, capitalism, etc. And yet there is the grain of truth that young readers (I’m thinking people aged thirty and under) fail to engage with where the field has been.

It’s true also that SF with a fine layer of dust on it does present a problem for young readers—one which reviewers like myself should but are unlikely to solve. You see, you can’t force somebody to enjoy a work of art. You could contextualize art and give it the proper platform for which to be understood, but enjoying something, much like romance or the urge to produce children, is totally beyond rational understanding. Ultimately I have to say I read this or that because I enjoy it, and then try to apply a veil of reason to my desire. Even when I come out of a story not liking it I usually feel joy from thinking and writing about it—because I like to think and write about science fiction as something that has changed over time, as indeed it does. If I wanted to read something and enjoy it in a vacuum I could do that, which is basically how most readers go about it, and true enough when I sit down and dig into a novella or serial installment I’d been anticipating I do it for the same reason as the rest of us: for the pleasure of it. My reviews and other posts are not as professional-sounding as those of my peers, in part because I wanna make it clear that I come from the place of someone who reads because he finds the act of reading pleasurable and thus unbusinesslike; it could also be that I’m from New Jersey, so pardon me on that.

A little bit of a story here.

I have a lot of SF anthologies on my shelves, and almost entirely ones published prior to 2010, which means that inherently these volumes cover pre-2010 material; most of those are from the 20th century, which they cover (necessarily) even older material. There are two books I have that are of particularly relevant note to this month’s editorial, which have a strange amount in common, including their mission statements and the era in which they were published. These are Isaac Asimov’s Before the Golden Age and Damon Knight’s Science Fiction of the Thirties, from 1974 and 1976 respectively. Asimov and Knight are pretty close in age, the former born in 1920 (the official story, that is, although Asimov was probably born in late 1919) and the latter in 1922, and so these two men grew up reading mostly the same fiction. Even so, their temperaments are radically different. Asimov has a nostalgic view of the super-science stuff of the ’30s and his writing technique is a dot that connects perfectly with that era, his prose thoroughly beige (which is not to say dull); then in Knight’s case we have someone who started out as a critic before moving into writing and editing fiction, and thus someone who is more willing to experiment.

Asimov, for his anthology, picked 25 of what he considered the best SF stories he had read during his formative years—stories which he still enjoyed upon rereading as an adult. Knight, for his part, scouts the same time period (1931 to 1938 or thereabouts) but with a more “objective” stance, picking stories he had found whilst digging through old magazine issues that he thinks are worth rediscovering. Asimov’s book is autobiographical while Knight’s serves more as a brief history of short SF in the ’30s, and while I think the latter has stronger fiction on average (there are some truly awful picks in the Asimov), it seems people gravitate much more towards the Asimov because of that copious and shameless subjectivity. Before the Golden Age is a 900-page monster and about a hundred of those pages are Asimov reflecting on both his life and the stories he chose. We’re given, on top of a handful of still pretty good stories and a lot of clunkers, a look into Asimov’s mindset as reader, writer, and, for a brief time, reviewer. It’s an essential anthology, not so much for the stories but in how it argues for the need to return to old science fiction.

Something to think about is that when Asimov and Knight put together their anthologies, these being books deliberately collecting very old and outmoded fiction, the oldest story from was a mere 43 years old when Before the Golden Age was published; and yet the science fiction of 1931 and the ’70s were worlds apart. Time is relative, and merciless.
Short Story Review: “The Star-Stealers” by Edmond Hamilton

March 10th, 2023

(Cover by Hugh Rankin. Weird Tales, February 1929.)

Who Goes There?

For a certain generation of SF readers (many of whom are now dead), Edmond Hamilton was one of the quintessential pulp writers—for both good and ill. Hamilton debuted in 1926, in Weird Tales, and he remained a loyal contributor to that magazine for the next two decades, churning out what were then called “weird-scientific” tales; that’s right, a cross between weird fiction and SF. Aside from maybe E. E. Smith and Jack Williamson, nobody embodied the virtues and constraints of ’30s pulp SF writing like Hamilton did. Too unrefined to appear in Astounding Science Fiction once John W. Campbell took over, Hamilton remained a regular presence in the second-rate magazines. Hamilton in the late ’40s and through the ’50s proved a different and relatively more refined beast, though, compared to his pre-World War II output, and it’s possible that his marriage to fellow author Leigh Brackett inspired him to better his craft, even if he did not put out as much work as a result.

Now listen…

Anyone who writes a story of such high caliber as “What’s It Like Out There?” is at least worth keeping track of; you write a story that good and you get a golden ticket basically for life. While Hamilton no doubt wrote a lot of forgettable stuff for money’s sake (the Captain Future series being the most infamous example), he was also quite capable of artistry. With all that said, “The Star-Stealers,” today’s story, is very much Hamilton in pulp adventure mode, being an entry in his Interstellar Patrol series—worthy of remembrance for, if nothing else, being some of the very first space opera ever written, almost parallel to E. E. Smith’s Skylark series. You could even say that space opera has two dads, such that modern/famous space opera like Star Wars have at least a little Hamilton in their DNA.

Placing Coordinates

“The Star-Stealers” (it’s reprinted sometimes with the hyphen, sometimes not) was first published in the February 1929 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive, and with a pretty eye-catching Hugh Rankin cover! It was collected in the Interstellar Patrol volume (containing most but for some reason not all the entries) Crashing Suns. The two big anthologies to find this story in nowadays are the out-of-print but easy to find The Space Opera Renaissance (ed. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer), which contains “The Star-Stealers” and a few other pulp examples and juxtaposes them with works from the ’90s onward. But the big anthology, indeed the biggest, is The Big Book of Science Fiction (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), which I cited in another review not long ago and whose contents I’ll no doubt mine again. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the VanderMeers, being devotees of weird fiction, picked this one.

Enhancing Image

Our Heroes™ are traversing the stars when they’re called back to home base rather abruptly, and so start at eighty times the speed of light back to our soler system, which naturally is the birthplace of the Federation of this series. Because there’s always a human federation with these things. Also try not to think too hard about how spaceships in this series are able to just casually break physics in half or else we’ll be here all day; Edmond Hamilton was a science-fictionist and he really put emphasis on the latter word. Anyway, the captain/protagonist/narrator of the battle cruiser at the story’s center is called home because there’s a pretty serious issue that only he and maybe a few other qualified captains can handle, and the issue has to be one of the first Big Dumb Objects in SF.

The BDO in question is a dark star that has apparently been dislodged from its solar system—a renogade planet that’s heading for our solar system at an impossible (for us, not for the characters) speed. Now, SF has a long proud (sometimes not so proud) tradition of BDOs, perhaps the most famous of them all being Larry Niven’s Ringworld or Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, but “The Star-Stealers” is innovative for combining space opera with the BDO narrative. “Innovative” is the keyword here. I’m about to sound rather harsh and dismissive about Hamilton’s story, but we needs be reminded that pioneers must always contend with later, more refined variations on what they took the pains to introduce.

With that said, this is all rather a bit silly, and only about to get sillier.

In order to get into the correct headspace for “The Star-Stealers” you have to put aside the Wile E. Coyote physics and take everything at face value—that the internal logic of the story is perfectly reasonable and understood by its characters and just roll with it. Unfortunately I found I was… not quite able to do this. It could be that I’ve read another later Hamilton to have set up unfair expectations for his very early work, but I do prefer the pulpy but more serious Hamilton of “What’s It Like Out There?” and City at World’s End. Or even the slightly more sophisticated stories of his ’30s output. “The Star-Stealers” is an important milestone, but it’s also primitive, and I suspect its lack of presence (or indeed the lack of the Interstellar Patrol series generally) in The Best of Edmond Hamilton implies that Brackett did not think too highly of her husband’s early space opera.

Anyway, the idea is for the captain to take a fleet of ships and do something about the runaway dark star before it enters our solar system and seriously messes with the planets’ stability. Something not to worry about with Hamilton is modesty: there will always be more of a given thing than what is needed. For instance, we probably don’t need fifty damn ships for this expedition, but given how many ships the Federation has… but I’m getting ahead of myself. The fleet must meet up with and divert the dark star before it gets in range of our solar system and quite possibly dislodges our sun. Up to this point in this story we’re led to believe that the dark star being rogue was the result of some freak accident that would only make sense on old-timey super-science logic, but assuming you didn’t forget (like I did, how embarrassing) about “The Star-Stealers” being the cover story for this issue and what that cover illustrates, you know there’s more going on here. This would not be as much of adventure if we were just dealing with a BDO.

Upon investigating the dark star closely, the crew find that a) it has an atmosphere, which we shouldn’t think too hard about, and b) the assumed “dead” star is actually not that dead; in fact it’s teeming with alien life. We find a whole civilization here, with buildings shaped like pyramids containing similarly shaped alien beings. Now, to Hamilton’s credit, the aliens here are pretty freaky-looking: they’re a few things but they’re certainly not humanoid. Actually this has to be one of the first instances in SF (at least pulp SF) where we see so-called starfish aliens. And of course, because this is an interplanetary adventure yarn, the aliens have no interest in befriending or even conversing with the crew—indeed destroying basically the entire fleet before Our Heroes™ have even hit the ground.

Here we get a good description of the aliens:

Imagine an upright cone of black flesh, several feet in diameter and three or more in height, supported by a dozen or more smooth long tentacles which branched from its lower end—supple, boneless octopus-arms which held the cone-body upright and which served both as arms and legs. And near the top of that cone trunk were the only features, the twin tiny orifices which were the ears and a single round and red-rimmed white eye, set between them. Thus were these beings in appearance, black tentacle-creatures, moving in unending swirling throngs through streets and squares and buildings of their glowing city.

Our Heroes™, the one ship out of a fleet of fifty that didn’t get blown up, are taken prisoner and at least one (a bit of a redshirt) gets vivisected like he was some animal. So we have a bit of a weird situation on our hands, with starfish aliens that perform horrible tests on beings they evidently deem lesser. The question then becomes of how the surviving crew is gonna break out of prison, get back to the ship (since the aliens have not taken it apart, at least not yet), and call for reinforcements before the dark star enters our solar system. Even with the presence of aliens sentient enough to have built their own civilization, the dark star heading towards our sun could still be an accident, but we find out that’s not the case…

There Be Spoilers Here

The starfish aliens intend to steal (get it?) our sun via a gravitational device, strengthening the dark star’s already immense pull and basically swiping our sun out of the solar system as it passes through, the results of which would obviously be disastrous. If this barely makes sense to you, don’t worry, even Bugs Bunny would call the aliens’ plan a bit zany. Again I struggle to take what’s happening seriously because of the goddamn Looney Tunes logic of it, although Hamilton’s melodramatic style employed here both helps and hurts it. On the one hand it’s easy to see how a reader in 1929 would find the action exhilarating, especially because space opera was such a young subgenre and SF had rarely if ever ventured beyond our solar system up to this point; on the other, it is so silly. The image of Our Heroes™ breaking out of prison, one of the pyramid buildings, and fighting off one of the aliens (the inspiration for the cover) is fun but also frivolous—both the story’s salvation and its damnation.

I may be slightly too old and “cultured” to be reading this.

Going on a mini-rant here, but my criticisms of “The Star-Stealers” are not so unique to it as more a general (you could say unfair) criticism of space opera as a concept. Oh sure, space opera in SF literature has come a long way since the days of Hamilton and Williamson, what with a far more “sophisticated” writer like Peter F. superseding Edmond for modern readers, but space opera remains very much a gosh-wow subspecies of SF, this especially still being the case for film and TV. There’s a valid criticism to be made, for instance, of the so-called Kelvin Star Trek series of movies (I like Beyond a lot myself, for the record), that those movies put a much higher priority on space action than the TV show they’re based on, but that’s only true insofar as comparing one Star Trek product with another Star Trek product.

In actuality, the pew pew action of the Kelvin movies has a precedent much older than the original Star Trek series, rather calling back to what made space opera during the super-science era of SF so appealing—but also so laughably primitive now. I’m not even getting into Star Wars again; I think my point’s been made. What made Star Trek, the original series, so unique was that while it was technically a space opera (it ticks enough boxes), it subverts tropes in the subgenre (while admittedly making new ones) that are still worth subverting. Smashing spaceships together like they’re toys was and still is a thing in space opera, but in Star Trek the best solution to a problem was often a non-violent one; conversely the epic space battles of the new movies are not the product of newfangled Hollywood meddling but rather descended from a very old storytelling philosophy.

Speaking of which, the solution to the problem in “The Star-Stealers” is to smash spaceships together like they’re toys. Somehow one ship out of the fleet that had gotten its shit kicked in earlier managed to evade the aliens and bring word back to the Federation, so that once Our Heroes™ have gotten back to their own ship they’re met with another fleet—only this time it’s hundreds rather than dozens of ships. The gravitational device the aliens use is disabled and the dark star is finally sent on its merry way, only now far away from our solar system. The day is saved! To Hamilton’s credit, the climactic space battle is pretty epic, being almost a novel’s worth of action condensed into the back end of a novelette, even if we knew from the beginning that everything would turn out fine.

A Step Farther Out

We all have our thresholds. A lot of people now find the Foundation trilogy a hard pill to swallow, due to Isaac Asimov’s minimalist and dialogue-heavy style, while others fault his lack of eagerness to write female characters. Time comes for us all, and what was considered the shit half a century ago will probably not pass muster now. Go back and read some “classic” New Wave stories and see how many of them make you cringe. This is a nice way of saying that while it no doubt has its place, I found it impossible to take “The Star-Stealers” seriously—which strikes me as a shame, because it obviously has its appeal. What Hamilton lacks in finesse he compensates with scope; it’s a shame, then, that his “science” fiction now almost reads as fantasy, and not the kind of fantasy with elves and ogres. I didn’t dislike it, but I feel I may have hit my threshold with SF of such a vintage as “The Star-Stealers.” I take comfort, however, in knowing Hamilton was capable of better, and that indeed he would improve tremendously.

See you next time.

Tag: edmond hamilton

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