Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Amazing Stories, June 1945

Is that a great big cat, or are those little-bitty spacemen? I don't know, but it's a striking cover by Robert Gibson Jones anyway. Several of the usual suspects are on hand in this issue of AMAZING STORIES, including Richard S. Shaver, Chester S. Geier, Berkeley Livingston, Frances M. Deegan, Don Wilcox, and surely the best-known name in the issue, at least as far as we remember them today, the great Edmond Hamilton. There's also a short story by William Hamling, who would go on to be the publisher of the Fifties digests IMAGINATION and IMAGINATIVE TALES, as well as hundreds if not thousands of pseudonymous soft-core novels by Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Evan Hunter, and many other authors who became famous in other fields. It never hurts to recall that Hamling was a science fiction guy starting out.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Sun Smasher - Edmond Hamilton

The opening of this novel reminded me a bit of the sort of set-up that Cornell Woolrich used in many of his stories. A young man named Neal Banning, who works as a publisher’s rep in New York City, pays a visit to his Norman Rockwell-esque hometown in Nebraska – but when he gets there, he finds a vacant lot where the house he grew up in should be. Not only that, but the neighbors are different and insist that there was never a house on the lot, that they don’t know Neal, and that the aunt and uncle who raised him never existed. Naturally, with his world upended like this, Neal goes to the police and tries to get to the bottom of what he thinks is a conspiracy, only to be locked up because everybody thinks he’s crazy.

Of course, in the hands of the master of space opera, Edmond Hamilton, things play out a lot differently from there than they would in a Cornell Woolrich story. Veteran readers won’t be surprised when a mysterious man shows up, breaks Neal out of jail, and tells him an incredible story about how he’s really the Valkar, the former leader of a galactic empire whose enemies captured him, had his brain wiped clean, and implanted false memories of his life as Neal Banning. Neal’s rescuer is one of his former followers who has finally tracked him down and now wants to return him to his home planet so his memory can be restored and he can lead a rebellion against the New Empire and restore the Old Empire to power. How’s he going to do that, you ask? Simple. Even though he can’t remember it at the moment, Neal is the only one in the cosmos who knows the location of a super-weapon called the Hammer of the Valkar, which will give whoever possesses it the power to rule the galaxy.

If all that doesn’t get your heart pounding . . . well, then, you probably didn’t grow up reading and loving this kind of stuff like I did. There were few authors better at it than Edmond Hamilton. Super-weapons, beautiful haughty empresses, spaceships with fins . . . sure, there’s a certain degree of silliness to it all, but I don’t care. I hadn’t read this novel before, and I found it highly entertaining. Hamilton was never much of a stylist. His prose is simple and direct and very fast-moving, although there are definite touches of poetry here and there, especially when he’s describing things like the vastness of space. This novel rockets (no pun intended) along to a twist ending that probably won’t surprise very many readers but is still quite satisfying.

The thing is, they still write stories like this, only now it would be a 500,000 word trilogy stuffed to the gills with back-story, angst, political intrigue, sex, and realistic-sounding science. Hamilton spins his yarn in less than a tenth of that wordage. You pays your money and you takes your choice, and I know that many modern readers would rather have the fat trilogy than the 110-page Ace Double. As for me, I’m gonna go smash some suns with Ed Hamilton.

(This post originally appeared on May 21, 2010. Since that time, there's been an e-book reprint of THE SUN SMASHER that's still available on Amazon. I need to read more by Edmond Hamilton.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1940

There may not be any Space Babes of the sort he's known for on this THRILLING WONDER STORIES cover by Earle Bergey, but it's pretty eye-catching anyway. And the lineup of authors inside is more than enough to spark the interest of a science fiction fan: Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, Ray Cummings, Sam Merwin Jr., G.T. Fleming-Roberts, and Gordon Giles (Otto Binder). Those guys were dependably entertaining pulpsters. If you want to check out their work, this issue and many other issues of THRILLING WONDER STORIES are available here. 

Review: The World With a Thousand Moons - Edmond Hamilton

Edmond Hamilton continues to be one of my favorite authors of the sort of action-packed adventure science fiction I really enjoy. This novella originally appeared in the December 1942 issue of AMAZING STORIES. There’s a free e-book edition available on Amazon, which is where I read it.

This yarn is set in our solar system, no deep space or space opera in this one. Instead, it has a gritty, hardboiled tone as meteor miner Lance Kenniston (a pulp hero name if I ever saw one) and his hulking Jovian partner trick a group of rich, thrill-seeking space tourists from Earth into helping them try to recover a fortune in loot from a crashed spaceship that belonged to a notorious space pirate. The wrecked ship is on Vesta, the second-largest body in the Asteroid Belt, and since it’s surrounded by smaller asteroids, that makes it the World With a Thousand Moons, according to the title.

Just navigating through those orbiting obstacles and getting there is enough of a challenge, but Vesta is also inhabited by mysterious, deadly creatures that are feared throughout the solar system. Throw in the complication that not everything is as it appears to be at first, and you’ve got the makings of a fast-paced, exciting tale.

It occurred to me as I was reading this novella that it’s the science fiction equivalent of the sort of adventure stories H. Bedford-Jones was so good at. You’ve got a two-fisted sailor (spaceman) protagonist, a beautiful girl, a treasure to be salvaged, treachery all around, and despicable bad guys. I always enjoy this plot when Bedford-Jones uses it, and in Hamilton’s hands, it’s almost as good.

I had a fine time reading THE WORLD WITH A THOUSAND MOONS. If you’re a fan of classic-style science fiction, there’s a good chance you would, too. Recommended.

Review: The Sargasso of Space - Edmond Hamilton

I was in the mood for some classic, old-style science fiction, so I read “The Sargasso of Space”, a novelette by Edmond Hamilton first published in the September 1931 issue of ASTOUNDING STORIES, when it was still a Clayton pulp. The cover of that issue is by H.W. Wessolowski. I’ve never been a big fan of Wesso’s work, but I like this cover quite a bit. It’s taken right from Hamilton’s story, which is available on Amazon in an inexpensive e-book edition.

This is a near-space story, set entirely in our solar system, and it’s small in scope for a Hamilton yarn. No galaxy-busting epic here. The crew of the space freighter Pallas find themselves in dire straits indeed: due to a leak that wasn’t discovered until it was too late, the ship has lost its fuel and is adrift. It’s headed into the so-called Sargasso of Space, where the gravitational pull of all the bodies in the solar system is exactly equal, so powerless ships are stuck there. In fact, as our intrepid spacemen soon discover, thousands of dead ships have clumped together there, and the Pallas is soon added to this grim monument to gravitational forces.

But they also soon discover they’re not the only ones alive in this graveyard of spaceships. The stalwart second officer has come up with a plan that might save all of them, especially if they team up with the survivors of previously trapped ships. The question on which all their lives ride is—can those survivors be trusted?

I don’t think you’ll have much trouble figuring out what’s going to happen in this story. What matters is how much entertainment value Hamilton generates from it. Some of the reviews I’ve read online complain about the science. Hamilton makes it sound plausible, and it works for the story he wants to tell, and the story was published nearly a hundred years ago, so what do I care if the science is accurate? As Neal Barrett once said to me, “Who do I look like? Mr. Wizard?” (Those of you of a certain age will understand that reference.) Other reviewers point out the lack of characterization. Yeah, there’s not much, but I doubt if the readers of ASTOUNDING STORIES in 1931 cared about that. The wooden dialogue probably didn’t bother them much, either.

But what you get instead is a graveyard of wrecked spaceships! And guys in spacesuits fighting! And a beautiful girl to be saved! Did I want anything else when I sat down to read this story? No. No, I did not. I wanted action, adventure, and a sense of wonder, and that’s exactly whe I got. If you’re ever in the mood for the same things, you could do a lot worse than “The Sargasso of Space”.

Batman & Superman in World's Finest: The Silver Age, Volume One - Edmond Hamilton, Bill Finger, et al.

When I was a kid I was a sporadic reader of the Superman and Batman team-ups in WORLD’S FINEST. I only had so much money to spend on comic books. Now there’s lots of stuff I never read back in the day that I can catch up on. For the past couple of months, I’ve been reading BATMAN & SUPERMAN IN WORLD’S FINEST: THE SILVER AGE, VOLUME ONE, which reprints the first meeting of Superman and Batman from SUPERMAN #76 in 1952 and then the regular Superman/Batman series from WORLD’S FINEST #71-94, from 1954 to 1958 . . . which was before I could read, so I couldn’t have read them anyway. Most of the stories were written by Edmond Hamilton. Several are by Bill Finger, the co-creator of Batman. The art is mostly by Dick Sprang, the regular Bat-artist in the Fifties. A few stories were drawn by the great Curt Swan, the iconic Superman artist as far as I’m concerned. It’s an entertaining volume, especially the story where Luthor and The Joker team up.

But . . . these short (12 pages), gimmicky, stand-alone stories don’t have much impact. The villains are mostly petty crooks with stupid schemes, and there’s never any real sense of danger for our heroes. I can understand why, after a steady diet of stories like this, the stuff that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko came up with over at Marvel just a few years later was like a punch in the gut to the comics readers of the time. The difference is really stark (no pun intended). Despite that, I enjoyed this collection and already have the second one on my Kindle. For long-time comics fans, it’s worth reading. Available in paperback and e-book editions.

The Lake of Life - Edmond Hamilton

Most of you know that it’s hard to go wrong with Edmond Hamilton’s fiction. THE LAKE OF LIFE is a novel of his that I hadn’t heard of until recently. Originally serialized in the September, October, and November 1937 issues of WEIRD TALES, it was reprinted in 2019 by Armchair Fiction, the edition I read.

At first glance, THE LAKE OF LIFE bears a superficial resemblance to a Doc Savage novel. The protagonist’s name is even Clark . . . Clark Stannard, an adventurer and explorer who finds himself in financial straits and needs money to help his family. Because of this, he agrees to take on a job for millionaire Montgomery Burns—I’m sorry, I mean Asa Brand, but when you read this description from Hamilton, you’ll see why I made that mistake: “The old man was quite bald, and his hairless, yellowed skull and wrinkled hatchet face and scrawny neck made him look like an ancient, unclean vulture.”

Anyway, Brand hires Clark Stannard to find the legendary Lake of Life, which is supposedly located in deepest, darkest Africa behind a range of mountains known as the Mountains of Death. The legendary part comes in because the water from the Lake of Life is supposed to confer immortality on whoever drinks it, and Brand is willing to pay a high price for eternal life. In order to accomplish this, Stannard recruits a crew of five assistants (there’s that possible Doc Savage influence again) who are highly competent but who have suffered some sort of setback in life: Ephraim Quell, a sea captain who lost his ship in an accident and was stripped of his captain’s license; Mike Shinn, a heavyweight boxer whose career ended after he was paid to take a dive; John Morrow, an former army officer dishonorably discharged for punching a superior officer in a fight over a woman; gangster Blacky Cain, who had to leave the States because the law is after him; and Link Wilson, a gunfighting Texan on the run from a murder charge arising from a deadly shootout in a bordertown cantina.

Are all these stereotypes? Sure they are. Do I care? Not one bit, because Hamilton uses them to tell a very fast-paced tale full of colorful settings and breathless adventure and even a little bit of philosophy. Stannard and his crew find a way through the Mountains of Death, of course, and discover the Lake of Life, but at the same time they also discover a war between two lost races (a favorite plot of Edgar Rice Burroughs, as most of you probably are thinking right now). Our heroes get mixed up in that war, naturally, and equally naturally, there are two beautiful young women on hand, one good, one maybe not so good. Will Clark Stannard and his men survive the epic battles between one group that wants to protect the Lake of Life and another that wants to use it for evil?

I had an absolutely wonderful time reading this novel. It’s a Front Porch Book, for sure. The plot is nothing we haven’t all seen before, but Hamilton does such a superb job of spinning his yarn that I couldn’t stop turning the pages. I’m shocked that this was never published as half of an Ace Double in the Sixties, as some of Hamilton’s other pulp work was. If it had been, I’d have been right there on my parents’ front porch with it, galloping through it on a summer day with a big grin on my face. If you’ve read this far, you already know whether or not you like this kind of stuff. If you do, I give THE LAKE OF LIFE a very high recommendation.

A note on the cover of the Armchair Fiction edition: That’s actually a Robert Gibson Jones cover from the August 1951 issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. As soon as I saw it, I thought to myself that it must have been a FANTASTIC ADVENTURES cover. It just has that look. But it kind of fits THE LAKE OF LIFE, too, if you squint your eyes and hold your mouth just right. I put that image at the top of this review because I wanted it to pop up when I share the post on Facebook. I figured the original WEIRD TALES covers by Margaret Brundage, which you can see below, might catch me a jail term from the censors over there.

The Legion of Lazarus - Edmond Hamilton

I’ve been a fan of Edmond Hamilton’s science fiction since reading his Starwolf novels in the Sixties, followed by the paperback reprints of some of his Captain Future pulp novels. Actually, I’d read and enjoyed some of Hamilton’s work before that—his Superman stories published in the comic books—but I didn’t know that at the time. Over the decades since, I’ve read many of his novels and stories in various anthologies, including the highly recommended Del Rey collection THE BEST OF EDMOND HAMILTON, edited by Hamilton’s wife, writer Leigh Brackett.

All of which brings us to the most recent work by Hamilton I’ve read, the short novel THE LEGION OF LAZARUS, which was published in the April 1956 issue of the science fiction digest magazine IMAGINATION. Hamilton contributed a lot of stories to IMAGINATION and its sister publication, IMAGINATIVE TALES, during the Fifties.

THE LEGION OF LAZARUS is a “lost loot” yarn, a plot common in Westerns and hardboiled crime novels. You know how it goes: a criminal, or an outlaw gang if it’s a Western, stashes either a lot of money or something worth a lot of money and then is either killed or caught and sent to prison. Years later, various factions, sometimes including the original thief, try to locate the loot and fight over who’ll get their hands on it first.

In this case, the lost loot is a cache of Titanite, a rare element found only on Saturn’s moon Titan, which is the last thing needed to power an interstellar drive that will allow mankind to escape our solar system. The protagonist, who was found guilty of murdering the guy who stole the Titanite in the first place, has been on ice for the past fifty years—literally. The justice system doesn’t execute murderers anymore, it freezes them for fifty years and then brings them back to life. Hence the reference to Lazarus in the title. But an unintended by-product of this process is that it gives the Lazarites (as they call themselves) the ability to communicate telepathically, along with other mental powers.

When our hero, who’s actually innocent of the crime for which he was convicted (another common hardboiled crime novel element), wakes up after his fifty years of punishment, he has to clear his name, find the loot, and navigate the treacherous waters of the various groups who want him and the Titanite. Hamilton establishes all this pretty quickly and then never lets the action flag in what’s basically a chase yarn across the Solar System.

I thoroughly enjoyed THE LEGION OF LAZARUS. Hamilton packs it so full of concepts that it probably would have been a thick 150,000 word novel these days, as opposed to the lean 30,000 or so it actually is. I much prefer galloping through a yarn like this instead of slogging through some doorstop. An e-book version is available for free on Amazon, and there are several inexpensive paperback editions to be found, as well. The Forties and Fifties remain my favorite era for science fiction, and if you enjoy SF adventures from those days, I give THE LEGION OF LAZARUS a high recommendation.

Forgotten Books: A Yank at Valhalla - Edmond Hamilton

I’ve been a fan of Edmond Hamilton’s science fiction novels and stories for more than fifty years now, starting with the Starwolf series he wrote for Ace in the mid-Sixties, the paperback reprints of his Captain Future pulp novels, and the stories of his that were included in Isaac Asimov’s great anthology BEFORE THE GOLDEN AGE. It’s entirely possible that I read some of the Superman stories Hamilton wrote for the comic books, too, but I’ve never really looked into that part of his career.

Recently I read a 1973 Ace Double edition of one of Hamilton’s science fiction novels that appeared originally in the January 1941 issue of the pulp STARTLING STORIES. That’s my copy of the paperback in the scan. Just the title is enough to make my blood start to pump a little faster: A YANK AT VALHALLA. That certainly sounds like an epic.

And it kind of is. The narrator is Keith Masters, a two-fisted scientist/pilot who is part of a scientific expedition to the Arctic. The ship which carries Masters and his fellow scientists to these polar climes has dropped anchor, and the group trawls the sea floor to see if they can come up with anything interesting. What would you call an ancient golden cylinder covered with Old Norse runes? What could possibly go wrong with finding something like that and hanging on to it?

Well, if you’re Keith Masters, your rocket plane (the only real indication that this yarn is set in the future) could be blown off course by a violent, mysterious storm while you’re exploring. And you could find a hidden land beyond a mysterious barrier where there’s an island called Asgard off the coast of a continent known as Midgard. And there’s a rainbow bridge called Bifrost spanning the gap between the two, a big guy named Thor who carries a hammer, a wise ruler called Odin, a beautiful shield maiden, two feuding races, the Aesir and the Jotuns, and an evil scientist named Loki who has been imprisoned for centuries along with his giant wolf Fenris and the equally giant Midgard Serpent. Any guesses what rune-covered artifact will free Loki and unleash Ragnarok on the world?

Snark aside, that summary isn’t as much of a spoiler as you might think, because everything in it is established pretty quickly. In fact, that’s really the only weakness in A YANK AT VALHALLA. Keith Masters adapts to the bizarre situation in which he finds himself a little too easily for it to be believable. “So . . . I’m in Asgard having adventures with the Norse gods. Sure, why not?”

But this novel was written for the pulps, after all, where the motto was action, action, and more action, and A YANK AT VALHALLA delivers on that in fine fashion. This is a Front Porch Book for sure, the kind of thing I would have raced through on a lazy summer day, sitting in a lawn chair on my parents’ front porch with a glass of iced tea beside me.

In addition to that, though, Hamilton actually comes up with the plausible (or at least, plausible-sounding) explanation for the existence of Asgard and the Norse gods. I’ve always liked Hamilton’s scientific speculation. Some of it may be far-fetched, but you can tell he put some thought into it, and he was one of the best at combining such speculation with swashbuckling action.

So, does the twilight of the gods fall on Asgard because of the mortal Keith Masters? You’ll have to read the book to find out. I don’t imagine it’s difficult to find in the paperback edition, and there’s actually an e-book version available, so it’s not completely forgotten. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and if you enjoy action-packed, big-idea science fiction, I think there’s a good chance you might, too.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Popular Detective, March 1936

Now there's a thoroughly bizarre cover for you. I'm not sure what's going on here, but I am certain there are some good authors in this issue of POPULAR DETECTIVE, including Hugh B. Cave, Steve Fisher, Edmond Hamilton, Barry Perowne, Emile C. Tepperman, Frederick C. Painton, and George A. McDonald. If I'd had an extra dime and nickel in my pocket back in 1936, I might've had to buy this one just to try to figure out the cover.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1949

This is an odd issue of THRILLING WONDER STORIES in that the cover art isn't attributed to Earle Bergey. I don't know who painted it, but it's certainly an appealing, eye-catching cover. The list of authors with stories inside is pretty eye-catching, too: Ray Bradbury, Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, Murray Leinster, James Blish, Noel Loomis, Margaret St. Clair, and Rog Phillips. And it was edited by my old mentor Sam Merwin Jr. Some people today may not think so, but to me that was a great era in science fiction.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Adventures, February 1938

It's been a while since there's been a Mountie cover in this series, so here's one from the February 1938 issue of THRILLING ADVENTURES. Not only does this issue feature a cover with a two-gun Mountie on it, there are stories inside by E. Hoffmann Price, Edmond Hamilton, Philip Ketchum, Arthur J. Burks, and S. Gordon Gurwit. That's a pretty strong line-up for any pulp with the word "Adventure" in the title.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Weird Tales, November 1941

This cover by Hannes Bok seems appropriate for a few days before Halloween. I like the 1940s issues of WEIRD TALES. Great lineup of authors in this one: Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, Henry Kuttner, August Derleth, Frank Gruber, Clifford Ball, Robert H. Leitfred . . . These guys wrote some fine weird fiction.

Forgotten Books: The Harpers of Titan - Edmond Hamilton

Simon Wright, the Living Brain, takes center stage in "The Harpers of Titan", a Captain Future adventure from the September 1950 issue of STARTLING STORIES. In order to keep a bloody rebellion from sweeping across one of Earth's colony worlds, Simon has to give up his brain-in-a-box existence and allow his brain to be transplanted into the body of a slain political leader from that world. The would-be rebels have a terrible secret weapon that if unleashed will not only wipe out the Earth colonists but possibly all life on the planet.

This story lacks the cosmic sweep of the other stories I've read so far in CAPTAIN FUTURE, MAN OF TOMORROW, but it's really beautifully written, with a real sense of poetic melancholy. It's not easy to combine a poignant examination of what it means to be human with a slam-bang SF adventure yarn, but Edmond Hamilton (with a possible assist from his wife Leigh Brackett) pulls it off in "The Harpers of Titan". I'm really enjoying these tales and will be sorry to see the book end.

Forgotten Books: Children of the Sun - Edmond Hamilton

"Children of the Sun" is the second of the Captain Future novellas to appear in the pulp STARTLING STORIES (the May 1950 issue) after the character was on a long hiatus. In this one, Curt Newton, the adventurer/scientist known as Captain Future, and his three friends, brain-in-a-box Simon Wright, android Otho, and robot Grag, are searching for a fellow scientist who disappeared while doing research on Vulcan, a planetoid circling the Sun inside the orbit of Mercury.

Author Edmond Hamilton, with a likely assist from his wife Leigh Brackett, does a great job of world-building in this story. It seems from the context that Vulcan appeared in an earlier Captain Future yarn, but if that's the case I don't know which one. That background isn't necessary to enjoy this story, which does a perfectly fine job of getting the reader up to speed. Vulcan is an interesting world and seems at least sort of scientifically plausible. It's one of those inner worlds like Pellucidar and Skartaris and is inhabited by primitive descendants of colonists from the Old Empire, which collapsed millennia earlier, as well as the strange creatures known as Children of the Sun.

It's not really a spoiler to say that Captain Future and his friends find the scientist they're looking for, although how they go about it requires some heavy-duty suspension of disbelief. To be honest I kind of struggled with that, which is the main reason I didn't like this story as much as the previous one. But it's very well-written, has the same sort of epic scope to it despite the relatively short length, and once again uses a poignant, offbeat ending to great effect. This is intelligent, big-idea, well-written space opera, just the sort of science fiction I like.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1938

It's been a while since I've featured a pulp with a giant ant cover. Actually, I'm not sure I've ever had a pulp with a giant ant cover on here. But I like this one a lot, and based on the authors, a lot to like inside the issue as well: Henry Kuttner twice (once under his own name and once as by Will Garth), Edmond Hamilton, Clifford D. Simak, Stanley Weinbaum, Ray Cummings, and Eando Binder (actually Earl and Otto Binder). Looks like a fine issue. And I know what my dad would have done if he'd ever been confronted by a giant ant like that. He would have got himself some giant ant dope.

Forgotten Books: The Return of Captain Future - Edmond Hamilton

Captain Future, for those of you who don't know, was a pulp hero whose space opera adventures appeared in a series of novels in his own magazine and then in STARTLING STORIES. His real name was Curt Newton, and there's a touch of Doc Savage influence in his background, as he was raised in a laboratory on the Moon by Simon Wright, a scientist whose disembodied brain lives on in a box, a giant robot called Grag, and a shape-shifting android named Otho. When he was just a baby, Curt's parents were murdered by an evil rival scientist, so he grows up sworn to battle crime across the Solar System, along with his three strange allies who come to be called the Futuremen.

This series was created by editor Mort Weisinger and written mostly by Edmond Hamilton. The stories start out fairly juvenile but great fun, and when some of them were reprinted in paperback during the Sixties (my introduction to the series), I ate 'em up, reading and enjoying every one I could get my hands on. Later on, I was able to find some of the original pulps and read a few of the novels that weren't reprinted.

The thing of it is, although the series may have started out being aimed primarily at kids, it evolved over time as Hamilton began writing more serious science fiction. The juvenile trappings are still there all the way through, but the plots widen to an epic level as Curt Newton and his friends tackle such mind-boggling mysteries as the origins of humanity and the creation of the universe itself.

In the late Forties the series, which by then was appearing in STARTLING STORIES, disappears for more than three years. But the cover of the January 1950 issue of the magazine (an iconic cover painting by Earle Bergey, by the way) heralds "The Return of Captain Future", and Curt's back, all right, along with all his supporting cast. In an unusual move for the pulps, the story accounts for Captain Future's absence by explaining that he and his Futuremen set out more than three years earlier on an expedition to find the Andromeda Galaxy. In previous adventures, they had found evidence that this is where the human race originated. But they never came back, and everyone assumes they died somewhere out there in the far reaches of space.

Of course, that's not the case. On a visit to the moon laboratory, Joan Randall, a member of the Space Patrol who also serves as Curt's romantic interest, and the grizzled old space marshal Erza Gurney discover that Curt and the Futuremen are not only back, they've brought with them the only surviving member of an ancient race of conquerors that once ruled the galaxies. This incredibly powerful alien being is held in stasis at the moment, but Curt plans to revive it so he can interrogate it.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, of course, things do go wrong, but how they play out might not be exactly what you'd expect. The resolution is more in line with Hamilton's increasingly serious approach to the series, and by this time the old World-Wrecker (as Hamilton was sometimes known) had developed a definite poetic streak in his writing. The ending of this story had me nodding my head and saying out loud, "That's good stuff."

"The Return of Captain Future" is the first of seven novellas to appear in STARTLING STORIES in 1950 and '51. I had never read any of them until now, but they're all collected in a trade paperback called CAPTAIN FUTURE: MAN OF TOMORROW. I'll be reading the rest of them and posting about them as the weeks go along. For now, if you're looking for space opera yarns with a slightly more serious slant that are still highly entertaining, you can't wrong with Captain Future.

Forgotten Books: The Vortex Blasters - Sam Moskowitz, ed.

This book has some special meaning for me because I remember that my brother-in-law (who introduced me to science fiction) had a copy of it when he and my sister lived down the street from us in the early Seventies. I borrowed it from him and read the title story, but I don’t think I ever got around to the others. The stories in THE VORTEX BLASTERS were pulled from another anthology edited by Sam Moskowitz, MODERN MASTERPIECES OF SCIENCE FICTION, published by World Publishing Company in 1965. “Masterpieces” might be going a little too far, but there are some good stories in here.

“The Vortex Blasters” (originally published in COMET, July 1941 under the title “The Vortex Blaster”) was my introduction to the work of Edward E. “Doc” Smith, PhD. (Gotta add the PhD after his name.) It’s set in the same universe as his magnum opus, the Lensman series, and is sometimes counted as part of that series although the only Lensman in the story is a supporting character. The protagonist is an atomic scientist named Neal “Storm” Cloud. Earth has atomic power, but it’s not very stable and will sometimes generate out-of-control vortices, which are basically atomic tornadoes. One of those vortices kills Cloud’s wife and children, and in his obsession for vengeance he comes up with a way to destroy these violent forces of nature.

I enjoy Doc Smith’s work, but I’m not a huge fan. His prose is pretty stiff and his dialogue usually sounds like nothing that ever came out of a human mouth. But his ideas are always big and interesting and the stories move along well. His stodgy heroes kind of grow on me, too. I enjoyed “The Vortex Blasters” when I read it 40-some-odd years ago, and I enjoyed it when I reread it now, too. That same long-ago summer, my brother-in-law and I both read Smith’s Skylark of Space series. That was enough Doc Smith to last me for a good long while. He had a huge influence on science fiction for decades, though.

Edmond Hamilton’s “Requiem”, from the April 1962 issue of AMAZING STORIES, is a far-future tale about an expedition sent to explore a planet about to be consumed by an expanding star and then observe its extinction. That planet, of course, is Earth, the birthplace of the by now far-flung galactic empire. I loved Hamilton’s pulp space opera stories, but late in his career he was writing thoughtful, poignant stories like this that are even better. I liked this one a lot.

Eric Frank Russell is almost totally forgotten these days (although I’ll bet many of you reading this remember his work), but I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by him. Good ideas and a nice undercurrent of humor running through all his stories. “The Witness” (OTHER WORLDS SCIENCE STORIES, September 1951) is a first contact story of sorts, with an alien visitor being put on trial for possibly being a spy for a race that wants to invade and conquer Earth. Russell has a lot of fun with the legal system. This is another good one.

Lester del Rey’s “Kindness”, from the October 1944 issue of ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION, is also a far-future story in which a new, super-smart mutation of humanity, homo intelligens, has replaced good old homo sapiens . . . except for one guy. His fate has a bittersweet taste to it that echoes Hamilton’s “Requiem”. I’ve never been a big fan of del Rey’s work and this story is maybe a little too predictable, but it still has some nice touches to it.

“—We Also Walk Dogs” (ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION, July 1941, under the pseudonym Anson McDonald) is part of Robert A. Heinlein’s Future History series. It’s the story of a company that hires out to do any sort of legal job, no matter how seemingly impossible, and how they manage to set up a diplomatic conference for various alien races and in the process come up with an unexpected bonus. I’ve read a lot of Heinlein’s work over the years (he was my brother-in-law’s favorite SF author) but don’t recall ever reading this story before. The prose is as smooth as always and I love the premise, but I don’t think Heinlein did as much with it as he could have. Still a good story.

Fritz Leiber is another author I usually like, but his story “Coming Attraction”, originally published in the November 1950 issue of GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION, was kind of a miss for me. Set in New York City after it’s been semi-devastated by a limited nuclear war, it’s mainly about how women have started wearing masks over their faces as a fashion trend, inspired by anti-radiation garb after the war. I’m not sure why it didn’t work very well for me, but it didn’t. A little too much of a kitchen sink story, maybe, with lots of changes in society but no real point to any of them. Or maybe I’m just dense.

Then we come to the final story in this volume, Henry Kuttner’s “We Guard the Black Planet!” (SUPER SCIENCE STORIES, November 1942). Now this is the real deal! A hardboiled Norwegian spacer throws in with a couple of shady characters to track down the origin of the Valkyrie myth on Earth. Seems he’s got this golden armband with the directions to a legendary invisible planet engraved on it, and the inhabitants of that planet are supposed to be beautiful winged women who visited Earth in the far distant past and gave rise to the stories of Valkyries bearing fallen warriors off to Valhalla. This is by far my favorite story in this anthology. Kuttner’s prose is colorful, imaginative, and very fast-moving, and the story has some decent scientific background to boot. I really enjoyed it. My kind of SF.

So all in all, THE VORTEX BLASTERS is a pretty strong anthology, with a couple of excellent stories (“We Guard the Black Planet!” and “Requiem”), several very good ones, and only one that I didn’t care for—and it wasn’t terrible. I’m glad I finally got around to reading the whole thing after so many years.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Startling Stories, Winter 1946

Bergey! Need I say more?

Well, how about the fact that I read Edmond Hamilton's Captain Future novel from this issue, "Outlaw World", in its paperback reprint from Popular Library many years ago. I don't remember anything about it, but I never read a Captain Future novel I didn't like, so I'm sure it was good. Also in this issue are stories by P. Schuyler Miller (a reprint from the April 1933 issue of WONDER STORIES) and Sam Merwin Jr., who was also the editor of STARTLING STORIES at the time. Miller I've never read, at least that I remember, and I probably should. Merwin, of course, was my mentor during the early days of my career and the first editor to publish a story under my name.

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.