REVIEW: THE BEST OF EDMOND HAMILTON

By Edmond Hamilton

Edmond Hamilton is one of the forgotten pioneers of science fiction. His career began in the pulps back in the 1920s and carried on for over fifty years. This 1977 anthology, edited by Hamilton's wife, the multi-talented Leigh Brackett, brought his best short stories between one set of covers.

It seems Hamilton was at his peak in the 1930s and 1940s since that’s when most of these stories date from. In truth that’s an illusion since by the ‘50s the pulp markets for short stories had greatly diminished and Hamilton was concentrating on novels. For me it’s a bonus that this anthology focuses on the early stuff since I find that naïve and sometimes crude sf can pack more of a punch than much more polished recent work.

Some real standouts here are "The Monster-God of Mamurth", a story about an explorer trapped in an invisible city and stalked by an invisible monster (it's an interesting example of the influence of The Arabian Nights on early sf), and "Exile", a very simple short-short about a writer and the imaginary world he is trapped in. "A Conquest of Two Worlds" tells of an earthman so disgusted with the hypocrisy and cruelty of Earth’s conquest of the backward races of Venus and Mars, that he throws in his lot with the rebellious BEMs of Jupiter. This is very much an upside-down version of the typical “alien conquest” tale. "Thundering Worlds" is Hamilton at his wide-screen planet-smashing best, a trick he was pulling off well before Doc Smith got in on the act. "He That Hath Wings" is a take on bad boys, the girls who love them, and what happens when they try to pull them back to earth.

As I said, in many ways this is NOT the most polished work of Hamilton, but perhaps it is the most representative. As a time capsule of early pulp sf, it hits the spot.

-Dave Hardy

WHAT'S NEW

Issue five of Dark Worlds is out. It features a new wrap-around cover & lots of stories.

"Of Kings and Servants" by C. J. Burch (Sword & Sorcery)
"The Hook" by J. F. Gonzalez (Horror)
"The Black Grave of Deception" by Peter J. Welmerink (Sword & Sorcery)
"Body of Work' (Mythos Horror) -- A Book Collector story!
"The Cryo Game" by Jack Mackenzie (Space Adventure)
"Black Destiny of Ys" by David A. Hardy (Historical Fantasy)
"Against the Gathering Darkness" by Joel Jenkins (Historical Horror/Adventure)
"An Interview with C. J. Burch: A Chuck the Barbarian Cartoon"

You can order a copy of Dark Worlds 5 here!

Also new is Thrill of Adventure, a blog for and about writers of, well, thrilling tales of adventure. There's covers & links for writers like Robert E. Howard, Jack London, James Oliver Curwood, Rex Beach, Robert Service, Agnes Laut, John Buchan. W.A Fraser and a lot more. Check out classic stories like "The Lord of Samarkand" by Robert E. Howard and "Cedartown Court House" by Theodore Roosevelt.

And last, but by no means least, my story "Code of the Pahlavan" is up on Static Movement. Static Movement is an online 'zine for a great of speculative fiction appearing monthly. You can find two of my other stories there such as  Dies Ater Draconis and The Bunyip Sea. 

That's all for now. Enjoy your Labor Day weekend! -Dave 

THE EARLY LONG

By Frank Belknap Long

I’ve always been a sucker for collections like this. Anthologies of tales from the pulps are the lands I go prospecting for fiction gold. Sometimes I strike pay dirt and sometimes I find rocks. There is a bit of both in The Early Long.

Although he is often recalled as HP Lovecraft’s friend, Frank Belknap Long had a very long career in science fiction and fantasy writing. This collection begins with some of his earliest sales to Weird Tales in the 1920s and winds up with stories he sold to Unknown in the mid-1940s.

It’s an interesting set, particularly regards the aspect of watching a writer develop. While never a Lovecraft clone, his early work shows some affinities with HPL’s style and preoccupations. The "Hounds of Tindalos" is one of Long’s best known tales and is generally considered a part of the larger Mythos cycle of stories. It is a good example of cosmic horror deployed effectively, although Long was still polishing his writing style. It’s not everyday one finds a tale in which a character writes his death-scream.

Later tales manage to combine science fiction with fantasy to create a modern type of horror story (much as HPL’s critical theory called for) but on a human scale. Long’s tales from the ‘40s are memorable and polished. "Grab Bags are Dangerous" is a fine exercise in dark-fantasy leavened with humor and "Step into my Garden" mixes fantasy, myth and fear for a memorable tale.

If you come across this one, it’s well worth a read.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

DESTINATION INFINITY

By Henry Kuttner

Henry Kuttner was a prolific and popular sf writer, his career spanned from the 1930s to the 1950s when he died young from a heart attack. Destination Infinity is one of the many books he wrote under a pen name, most likely in collaboration with his wife CL Moore.

The tale is classic ‘50s science fiction, set on a Venus covered with roiling seas, and jungles full of man-eating plants. The conflict isn’t exactly about the best means to prune gigantic Venus fly-traps though. It concerns Sam Reed, an illegitimate child of a family of wealthy immortals and his rise from lowly outsider to savior of mankind. Sam is a consummate anti-hero, deliberately abandoned by his father and full of angst and ambition in an uncaring world. The tale follows Sam as a gangster, land-speculator, pioneer, and military dictator.

What Kuttner writes here is sociological science fiction, part speculation on society and part soap opera. Earth was long ago destroyed by nuclear war and mankind lives in undersea habitats on Venus. A few families have developed a hereditary trait of immortality, and live for centuries, aging little if at all. The mass of mankind has stagnated, allowing the immortals to do their thinking for them. Sam Reed blows it all apart in his relentless drive to make it to the top.

This is a book I liked despite itself. The opening is overlong and is basically a lot of exposition to set the story for the rest of the novel. Judging from the names (Reed, Harker, Hale, Delaware, Nevada, Plymouth) and dialog (‘50s Middle American) the only survivors of Earth’s nuclear wars are a bunch of WASPs from North America. I’m not sure I buy the sociology either, immortality is an advantage, but it is practical bribes and threats that keep a society in line, not spiritual intimidation. Just take a look at Eastern Europe in the ‘70s or Medieval Christendom’s struggles with heresy to find examples of orderly, stultified societies. But Kuttner pushes his logic to the end and spices it with soap opera of great verve. Overall, I wasn’t disappointed when I got to Sam Reed’s Destination.

 

-Dave Hardy

DEADLINE AT DAWN

By Cornell Woolrich

Cornell Woolrich was the Homer of bleak, urban landscapes, of heroes that the gods had forgotten, and of epic battles fought by desperate losers struggling to carve out a brief moment of love before the relentless wheels of heaven grind them underfoot. His stories were the essence of that strange thing called the roman noir.

Deadline at Dawn is one such epic. A taxi dancer meets a laborer. They have no reason to experience the least amount of sympathy or interest in one another, except they discover they were neighbors back in their small hometown back in Iowa. Now they are alone in the soulless and predatory city, dying by inches as their souls are abraded away to end up dead husks, existing but not alive.

So they plan to head back to Iowa, but the laborer stole some money, and he will be caught because no matter how cleverly he did it, he knows THEY will divine his secrets. Only it won’t be theft he is caught for, it will be murder, because other forces are at work. In true Woolrich style, these innocents are caught up in someone else's crime, not by accident, but because coincidence is a mask for cosmic cruelty that makes sport of humanity. They have until dawn to find the real murderer and escape the malignant forces that stalk them.  

Woolrich’s obsessive attention to detail is matched by his characters’ certain knowledge that every single clue is meaningful and can be used to reconstruct actions and psychologies. Woolrich works his stories like a crazed “CSI: Deadend Town”. It’s a vision of the world that ranges from pitch-black to blinding light. 

Originally published in 1944 under Woolrich’s penname William Irish, Deadline at Dawn was one of many Woolrich novels reprinted by Ballantine in the ‘80s.

 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE DARK FRIGATE

By Charles Boardman Hawes

Charles Boardman Hawes’ tale of piracy upon the high seas in the days of King Charles is just as fresh today as when it won the Newberry Award in 1923. The Dark Frigate is an excellent work, though classed among young adult novels, it should have a lot of appeal to readers who love a good adventure and can still recall their reading tastes from when they were 13.

The hero is Philip Marsham, a lad who goes to sea in the Rose of Devon. But certain “gentlemen of fortune” under Martin Berwick make themselves masters of the Rose and the honest sailors have no choice but to turn pirate.

This is a dark version of Treasure Island, and Martin Berwick is a grim and tragic Long John Silver. The tale concerns itself with the thin line that divides the lawful from the lawless, and when men are adrift in an uncaring world, how easy it is to cross that thin line. Don’t be looking for easy or happy endings here. Crime is punished, but it’s a near run thing that nearly takes down the innocent too.

The Little, Brown and Co. edition has a good, moody cover illustration and nice black and white line drawings as chapter headings.

 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

DARKER THAN YOU THINK

By Jack Williamson

Jack Williamson is a pioneer in science fiction, he was around before it was science fiction, they called it “scientifiction” back then. But like other pioneers he was not content with tilling the same fields, he had to pick up his musket and wander over where he couldn’t see the smoke from his neighbor’s cabin. His wanderings took him around to sword and sorcery, adventure tales, and horror. His most notable foray into the field of horror fiction was Darker than You Think, now a classic in the genre.

The story’s protagonist is Will Barbee, a hack journalist with a drinking problem and a sense of bitter longing in a New Mexico city (Williamson is nearly as dotty about his home state as Robert E. Howard was about Texas). When he meets a strange red-haired woman at a press conference held by his former professor, Barbee is launched into a nightmare world of murder and madness that rips apart everything he knows about himself and the human race itself!

This is some of Williamson’s best work, more polished than the often crude “scientifiction” he wrote in the ‘30s, but still with a naïve romance that gives the tale great power. Interestingly, Darker than You Think was a favorite of Jack Parsons, the rocket-scientist/occultist who helped found America’s missile program. Parsons’ may have been a grade-A nutjob, but he had very good taste in fiction if we may judge from this.

 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE CONQUEST OF NEW SPAIN

By Bernal Diaz

This is a grunt’s eye view of Cortes’ conquest of Mexico. Bernal Diaz was a gentleman soldier who came to the New World to seek his fortune. He saw Spain’s greatest conquest at first hand in all its grit, glory, and gory excess. The book is not exactly an apologia, few thought an apology necessary at the time. Rather it was written to set the record straight regarding other Spanish chroniclers who Diaz felt had distorted Cortes' record.

Diaz was not much of a stylist and translator JM Cohen has cut down the narrative to a manageable size. What is left has the immediacy of vivid, first-hand recollections. Diaz probably spared the reader quite a bit, but what he put in can be horrid enough. He describes Spanish soldiers using fat from Indians’ corpses to make grease for their weapons. Along with the greed, inhumanity, and fanaticism there are human touches. He describes Montezuma (who Diaz guarded) as a kindly gentleman, who offered to arrange marriages for his captors with Aztec ladies, an offer Diaz accepted. The friars are present always, and Diaz describes how they often moderated demands for immediate, forcible conversion. Perhaps it was respect, but it was also pragmatism. There were a lot of pagans, and not all were ill-disposed to the Spanish, but would be if pushed.

Diaz is a man who was born in the Middle Ages and helped create the Modern Era. This isn’t just the story of exploration, or conquest, or adventure, or genocide. It is literally a day-by-day account of how the world, for better or worse, changed.

 

-Dave Hardy