Forgotten Books: Last Call for Doomsday - Edmond Hamilton

I wrote about Leigh Brackett last week, so it seemed fair to read something by her husband Edmond Hamilton this week. LAST CALL FOR DOOMSDAY is a short novel that first appeared in the December 1956 issue of IMAGINATION under the house-name S.M. Tenneshaw. It uses the old plot of an asteroid closing in for a collision with Earth and the efforts to evacuate the planet's population, in this case to a colony that already exists on Mars.

Instead of focusing on the evacuation, though, Hamilton centers his story on those who don't want to be evacuated and who, in fact, believe that the whole thing is a hoax and Earth won't be destroyed. The astronomer who discovered the asteroid that's on a collision course has disappeared, and the novel's protagonist, an Earth official named Jay Wales, is given the job of finding him so he can convince the holdouts to go ahead and leave. Wales soon discovers that there's more going on than there appears to be, and he has to untangle a dangerous plot to get to the truth.

Even though Hamilton had been a very successful author of science fiction for more than a decade before he ever met Brackett, he credited her with making him a better writer, and I think he was correct. LAST CALL FOR DOOMSDAY has the great narrative drive of Hamilton's pulp work, but it also has decent characterization and some passages that are both poignant and evocative. Hamilton has long been one of my favorite SF authors, and while this novel may be one of his minor efforts (because it lacks the epic scope of his best work), it's still well written and quite entertaining. It's been reprinted as part of the Armchair Fiction line under Hamilton's name, and if you're in the mood for some fine SF adventure, it'll do very nicely.