Seekers of Tomorrow (10 page)

readers. Farnsworth Wright was delighted. Hamilton was clearly an asset in hold-ing the science-fiction members of his audience now that amazing stories was on the scene. He might even attract new ones looking for more science fiction. In the 27 years of life that remained to it, weird tales, after that first pause in accepting
The Desert God,
never rejected an Edmond Hamil-ton story for any reason. Particularly influential was Hamilton's story
The Moon Menace
(weird tales, September, 1927). It was here that Murray Leinster obtained the idea of using impenetrable darkness as a weapon (in
The Darkness
on Fifth Avenue)
which caused something of a sensation when run in argosy (November 30, 1929).
The
Moon Menace
also made early use of matter transmitters as a method of interplanetary transport.
(Radio
Mates
by Benjamin Witwer, amazing sto-ries, July, 1927 had used it for getting about on earth.) This story won a well-deserved first place as the best in the issue.

Equally remarkable was
The Time Raider,
a four-part novel beginning in the October, 1927, weird tales. The intriguing notion of bringing together in one age a number of warriors from different eras in history had been used previ-ously for ghostly visitants by John Kendrick Bangs in
A Houseboat on the Styx
(1895) and more scientifically by J. L. Anton in his short story
Creatures of the Ray
(argosy, October 10, 1925) but it had never been explored in a full-length novel. A man from the future utilizes a time machine to go back into the past recruiting or kidnaping the army he needs for his purposes. It would remain the most notable story of its type until A. E. van Vogt's
Recruiting Station
(astounding science-fiction, March, 1942). A few years later, John W. Campbell would pick up the problem of fighting an invisible airship
(Solarite,
amazing stories, November, 1930) which Hamilton had used so dramatically in
The Time Raider
and solve it in his own manner. Despite the passage of the years,
The Time Raider
still remains a superior thriller. The entire lead editorial in the June, 1928, weird tales was devoted to Edmond Hamilton, and in the October num-ber the editor further said: "Two examples of
genius
discov-ered and made public, Edmond Hamilton, supreme master of the weird scientific story, and Robert S. Carr, the apostle of the young generation and author of the popular novel
The Rampant Age,
at 19 a best seller." This was at the time when Hamilton had launched into the superscience phase of his writing, a period when he began tossing worlds and suns around like billiard balls. This flair derived from old-timer Homer Eon Flint
(The Planeteer,
all-weekly story, March 9, 1928) and Hamilton went to an extra-solar-system-scale in
Crashing Suns,
a two-part serial in WEIRD TALES (August, 1928). Even more significant and far ahead of its time was
The Star Stealers
(weird tales, Feb., 1929), the first of a series which projected the reader into a far-distant time when the planets around most of the suns were inhabited and formed an interstellar council called The Council of Suns. To keep order in the galaxy and enforce its edicts, the council's tool was the Interstellar Patrol. The problem raised by the neces-sity of diverting an invading dark star is the first one solved by the patrol.
Galactic Patrol
by E. E. Smith, based on a similar concept, would not appear until the September, 1938, astounding science-fiction. After that such cosmic agen-cies would become science-fiction cliches.

A. Merritt was so taken with the idea of an interstellar patrol that he descended from his editorial Olympus and tried with might and main to get his own book publisher, Boni, to issue the Interstellar Patrol Series as one volume, to no avail.

During the period 1927-1929, though the weird tales roster included such legendary notables as H. P. Lovecraft, Seabury Quinn, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry S. Whitehead, Donald Wandrei, August W. Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, S. Fowler Wright, Gaston Leroux, Otis Adelbert Kline, E. F. Benson, Murray Leinster, Ray Cum-mings, Victor Rousseau, and David H. Keller, M.D., to name a few, Edmond Hamilton was
the
most popular author, as a simple adding up of first and second places in the readership polls of those years proves. That Hamilton's stature today is not greater presents an apparent paradox—until the facts are analyzed.

There are two reasons basically. First, only a minority of the regular readers of amazing stories and, later, the other science-fiction magazines, ever read weird tales at all. amazing stories claimed a readership of about 100,000. It is doubtful if weird tales had more than 50,000 readers at any time during its 30 years of publication. Of that, probably 25 percent, at a generous estimate, represented readership of both magazines. Most of the readers of amazing stories were unaware of Hamilton's fine contributions elsewhere and the truth is that the majority of ideas innovated by Hamilton were not directly copied from him at all but were
rediscov-ered
at a later date by other authors. Issues of the early weird tales containing his stories are so few and so rare that only a handful of people own them. As a result, even if someone deliberately adapted an old Hamilton idea, extreme-ly few would suspect the origin. As substantiation: when Hamilton submitted his first story to amazing stories,
The Comet Doom,
the editor bragged about discovering a great new talent, although when the story appeared in the January, 1928, issue, Hamilton stories had been appearing and had been exceptionally well received in weird tales for more than a year. A story of a race of aliens who have transferred their brains to metal bodies and do the same for an earthman, offering to take him around the universe (probably the genesis of the famed Prof. Jameson series by Neil R. Jones as well as H. P. Lovecraft's
The Whisperer in Darkness), The Comet Doom
was thought by the editors to be good enough for a scene from it to be used on the cover, but they did not think Hamilton's name suffi-ciently well known to be mentioned on that cover.

The second reason for Hamilton's comparative lack of stature lies in the repetitious plot structure of his early stories. The framework of each story was very nearly the same. A menace threatens to conquer, enslave, or wipe out the world (or the universe) and is thwarted by a single man. To this must be added a sprinkling of major scientific faults, frequently so glaring as to all but negate believability. Typi-cal of these scientific sins of omission was the questionable premise in
Across Space
that Mars could be pulled to the very edge of the Earth's atmospheric envelope and left dan-gling there while Martians flew down to the surface. Even worse is the complete disregard for distances and time fac-tors in the Interstellar Patrol series, in which ships zip past star systems thousands of light years apart in days or some-times only hours, with no explanation from the author.

In addition, characterization was virtually nonexistent and dialogue was frequently on the Frank Merriwell level.

Despite these considerable faults, Hamilton had imagina-tive vitality and narrative ability of considerable power. A Stapeldonian thoroughness in delineating the history, culture and philosophy of his aliens was not completely appreciated by the reader distracted by the vividness and swiftness of unfolding events. It was the extraordinary variety of his locales and the striking originality of his secondary themes that gave Hamilton popularity, even while some readers injected a note of criticism by bestowing on him the appella-tion "World Saver."

When he began writing novels for amazing stories quar-terly and amazing stories, he did not vary the formula that had enjoyed such success in weird tales. In
Locked Worlds
(amazing stories quarterly, Spring, 1929) he saves Earth from the menace of the spider men, inhabitants of a simul-taneous world whose electrons move in the opposite direction from Earth's;
The Other Side of the Moon
(amazing stories quarterly, Fall, 1929) finds the turtle men of the moon thwarted in their evil design to conquer the earth; in
The Universe Wreckers,
a three-part novel beginning in amazing stories for May, 1930, a marvelously enthralling and infinitely detailed account of the metal-roofed planet of Neptune cloaks the well-worn plot of the defeat of a plan to split the sun and destroy the earth.

No story of his of this genre was ever rejected by any editor, but Hamilton, almost hopelessly typed, could abide the stigma no longer. For his declaration of independence, he wrote
The Man Who Saw the
Future
(amazing stories, October, 1930), a tale of a fifteenth century apothecary, transferred to the twentieth century to the accompaniment of a clap of thunder, who is sentenced to death as a sorcerer when he returns to his own time and relates the marvels he has seen. His narration of the wonders of our times, told in the figures of speech of the Middle Ages, remains memorable in its effective simplicity. Eric Frank Russell was to popularize the bizarrely logical intimations of Charles Fort in
Sinister Barrier
(unknown, March, 1939), but it was Edmond Hamilton who had actual-ly introduced Fortean themes to the science-fiction field ten years earlier. After reading
The Book of the Damned
(1919) and
New Lands
(1923), he had sent a batch of newspaper clippings about strange phenomena to the Bronx belittler of science, Charles Fort, and they struck up a correspondence. In one letter he asked Fort what he would do if the Fortean system were taught in the schools as right and proper. Fort wrote back, "Why, in that case I would propound the damna-bly heterodox theory that the world is round!"
The Space Visitors,
published in the March, 1930, air wonder stories (a short-lived experiment of Hugo Gerns-back's), was taken right out of
The Book of the Damned
and tells of a gigantic scoop that periodically descends from the upper atmosphere, scraping up samples for some un-imaginable group of intelligences to examine. It was a strong-ly Fortean symbolic effort.

More than a year later, the identical idea of
Sinister Barrier,
that "Earth is property," was used in Hamilton's
The Earth Owners
(weird tales, August, 1931) and impressed no one at all except Julius Schwartz, a specialist in science fiction, in a few years to become Hamilton's agent, who wrote a letter to the magazine.

Somewhat earlier, in air wonder stories (November and December, 1929), Hamilton had presented another of his pioneering ideas in
Cities in the Air.
Though the concept of a floating aerial city had been used as early as Jonathan Swift's
Gulliver's Travels
(Laputa), Hamilton's spectacle of ranks of mighty cities wheeling through the air to join in stupendous conflict may well have inspired James Blish's spindizzy's in that author's popular series of the foot-loose space Okies.

Hamilton did not live all of his adventures vicariously. Through correspondent Jerome Siegel he had made contact with Jack Williamson, a New Mexico writer, who had in common the fact that he was inspired to write by reading A. Merritt. The two decided to sail down the full length of the Mississippi in the manner of Huckleberry Finn, agreeing to meet in Minneapolis the first week of June, 1931, there to begin the trip.

On the way to Minneapolis, Hamilton stopped in Chicago to see the editor of weird tales, Farnsworth Wright, as well as two of that magazine's most popular authors, Otis Adelbert Kline and E. Hoffman Price. Warm personal friendships were thus formed.

In Minneapolis, Hamilton and Williamson bought a 14-foot skiff, two outboard motors, and a camping outfit. Armed with nautical ignorance, they sailed forth to conquer Old Man River. A summer of blunder, near-danger, explora-tion, and fun followed, until even the emergency engine sputtered its choking last cough and they completed the trip to New Orleans aboard the only remaining stern-wheel steamer still operating on the river.

The two men were a contrast in personalities: "Jack was then," Hamilton reported, "one of the most patient and restrained people alive. I was then mercurial, explosive, im-patient. In spite of that we got along."

The autumn of 1933, Williamson showed up at New Castle and the two hied off to Florida, ending up as beachcomb-ers.

There were two trips to the ranch of Jack Williamson's parents in 1935 and 1937 and the pair traveled about the Southwest and the border country regularly.

The years of good times together were also the years in which Hamilton's powers as a writer matured. Evolution had been a recurrent theme in his stories and he reached a peak in his handling of it in
The Man
Who Evolved
(wonder stories, April, 1931), in which the pace of natural change is artificially stepped up by a machine. A scientist experiment-ing on himself moves from level to level, eventually being transformed into a tremendous brain feeding itself on pure energy and capable of moving interdimensionally. Still, prod-ded by curiosity, the brain commands that the experiment progress. The result: protoplasm. Evolution proves to be circular. The fascination and power of the idea compensates for occasional weakness in writing.

Hamilton has written so much that it is possible to record only the most memorable of his stories. High on the list of selections is
A Conquest of Two Worlds
(wonder stories, April, 1932), a strong protest against colonial psychology in dealing with the less technologically advanced creatures of other worlds that is prophetic in its weaponry.

The theme of A. Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger novelette
When the World Screamed
(in
The
Maracot Deep,
1929), that this planet is a living entity, capable of physical feeling, is made vivid in Hamilton's handling of
The Earth Brain
(weird tales, April, 1932). In this story, a man who has tracked the intelligence center of the globe to the North Pole defies it, and is forced to flee perpetually for his life as tremors and quakes seek him out in each new hiding place and threaten destruction of the entire community unless he leaves.