Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Visionaries of Tomorrow Edmond Hamilton and the Legion...

Recently I've been thinking about checking out some of Hamilton's sci-fi stories. I was wondering if anyone was particularly familiar with his work, and could make any recommendations. I guess that one of things I'm interested in is whether there is anything that seems "relevant" to his Legion stories, maybe due to similar plots or sci-fi elements or something. I guess that more generally I'm just intrigued by the fact that the most important early Legion writer was also one of the pioneers of the sci-fi genre.

I sort of remember reading some of Hamilton's works when I was a teen but it's been So long since then.. ..

I did enjoy the read though, I think it was something called 'the Rimworlds' a series (though not a lot of them) set in a "tramp freighter" that limped along from star to star making a little money and getting mixed up in local problems. Character driven stuff, if I remember correctly.

I guess his idea of aliens and human colonies on other worlds might be applicable to his Legion run. More philosophically than anything, I suppose, I don't recall any specific races or situations that I thought were Legion-esque.

A really good sampler for Edmond Hamilton's work is The Best of Edmond Hamilton, which, like other Hamilton books, can be found in used book stores if you're lucky. I paid ninety cents for my copy, and I'd never part with it! 381 pages of small type, all chock full of good stuff. Easily the best penny-per-page purchase which I've ever made.

Hamilton also wrote the Captain Future series of pulps for Mort Weisinger, and his Intersteller Patrol stories were much enjoyed by a young science-fiction fan in Cleveland by the name of Jerry Siegel, who wrote Hamilton fan letters about them. Pretty ironic when you consider that the two used to alternate on the Legion years later! Both are super-heroic enough to appeal to Legion fans.

As far as "relevant" goes, in 1927 Hamilton wrote a four-part story called "The Time Raider" about a character very much like The Time Trapper. In his own words, he described it as "... a wowser. The Raider of the title was a mysterious entity of mind and force that could travel into the past and future, and could drag people along with him from other ages. Intent upon a total conquest of Earth, the Raider brought thousands of fighting men from past ages and penned them up, until he needed them, in a vast underground pit. The story really had five heroes instead of one... at the climax of this tale, the five friends, by dint of heroic swordsmanship, held a stair that was the only exit from the pit, preventing the ravening hordes of the past from surging out to attack all Earth. There, I tell you, was a fight!"

Unfortunately, as far as I've been able to determine, the story has never been reprinted. It originally ran in Weird Tales from Oct. 1927 - Jan. 1928, and would certainly be in the public domain by now. (You can see the covers here .) Hamilton died without an heir (actually, he died before his wife, Leigh Brackett, who wrote the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back, and she died without a known heir), so his stories don't really get reprinted anymore. Your best bet to find Hamilton's work is either online via eBay or a used book seller, or offline at a used book store or library. Any decent library is actually a pretty decent bet, especially if we're talking about hardcovers.

Thanks, Glen. "The Time Raider" sounds like the kind of thing I was looking for.

One thing I've found already just reading about his work on the web is that at least one of his novels features a familiar-sounding villain called "Zarth Arn". Not sure if he's an android, though.

Son of a gun! I just found a used copy of The Best of Edmond Hamilton over at amazon.com for seventy cents! And there's a review of it by Greybird, too!

Ed was one of my favorite authors long before I realized his Legion connection.
Here is a page with reviews of some of his work

http://us.7zip.net/edmondhamilton/

UPDATE: I've ordered a copy of the Best of Hamilton, and picked up City at World's End from the library to read this weekend!

And I just read City at World's End! This groovy story features ordinary twentieth century Americans flung a million years to a barren dead Earth, like where people in the Legion used to imprison space criminals! And it's got a blonde, man-stealing hussy of the future in a position of authority!

My copy of "The Best of..." just arrived!

"The Man Who Evolved" is a cool tale of a scientist who uses cosmic rays to mutate himself into various forms that the descendants of human beings will take far in the future!

It turns out that we will one day all be large craniumed bald people! And then later than that we will all be bodiless brains!

How did you like "The Monster-God of Mamurth"?

I generally find the idea of giant spiders or insects to be one of the most frightening concepts in science fiction. And what's more frightening than that? Giant invisible spiders!

I liked the story, but it kind of felt like it should be the setup to a longer story (with people going back to explore Mamurth after the archeologist's death).

Jillikers! I just read some more of this!

"Thundering Worlds" features the people of far future Earth moving the planets of our solar system to another sun, Brain Globes of Rambat style!

"The Seeds from Outside" features plant people from another world sending their seeds to Earth!

Fortunately they manage to defeat themselves, because there's no Substitute Heroes around to stop them!

Mental note: Must get back to reading this.

In the meantime, every else should check out the extremely cool The Man Who Evolved!

Why, Pollard, you old oyster - or something.

Looks like Sketchy was onto some early Hamilton when he drew this:

In Germany, Hamilton is most famous for his Captain Future series which was made into a groovy cartoon in the late 70s. This japanese cartoon was translated into German, given a whole new soundtrack which still sounds great today (and is sometimes even played in Clubs nearly 30 years later).

Kind of a "cult hit" for every boy growing up back then. Captain Futures adventures were a must-see - and nearly every 30 something can relate to it when you bring up the topic... so yes, Edmond Hamilton was one of the big ones! Try to get some of the original novels - they are kind of cool too!

That's pretty cool. I knew about the Captain Future cartoon but wasn't really sure how popular it had been.

The novels are great! It's like reading comics in book form. The stories are reminiscent of Mystery in Space or Strange Adventures.

Some of his earlier novels are definitely passe now and may be a little silly (entire fleets of spaceships hurtling suns or comets against each other like playing a cosmic softball game) but they are enchanting nonetheless!

Ranging somewhat off Hamilton, but delving on to sci-fi antecedents of the Legion, I have seen an old Buck Rogers comic strip in which Buck and crew find their way blocked by a super-hard indestructable wall made of inertron.

I never did find out when the strip was originally published, but I suspect it was in the 1930s. Hamilton never wrote Buck, but his most celbrated creation, from the 1940s, is a similar character called Captain Future.

If you are going to research Hamilton, it might not be a bad idea to also look into the works of his wife, Leigh Brackett, who is largely credited with improving the overall quality of Hamilton's work after their nuptules.

You can probably score copies of the old Pulp magazine, Weird Tales, for not a lot of money on ebay. Hamilton wrote 79 stories for the mag between 1926 and 1948. That's probably the best place to find concepts later recycled for comics, considering Unca Mort's pencahnt for recycling ideas that, in theory, predated the average age of his readership. I would not be surprised to find that Hamilton canabalized many of his old pulp works. Probably less likely to find similar reuse in novels and short stories from collections that might have remained in print.

That said, Hamilton's "Superman under the Red Sun," from Action Comics #300 (1963) has been indentified as sharing many common elements with his 1951 novel, City At World's End. The character Chris KL-99, who appeared in Strange Adventures is said to have been based on Captain Future.

For his sci-fi pulp writing, the best souce is probably Wonder Stories, especially from the 1930s. Again, the pulps are cheap enough on ebay, mostly becasue pulp collectors have fastidiously resisted the publication of any kind of price guide for their hobby, for fear of Overstreet type impacts on their wallets.

His 1947 novel The Star Kings is said to be typical of his space opera stuff, although I've never read it.

One of the cool things is Hamilton's ability to write widely different types of stories. This is exemplified by two stories I read this afternoon.

"Easy Money" is a comedy about about a former prizefighter who volunteers for a scientific experiment which teleports him to a faraway planet, which he thinks is Egypt. It features a gorilla with a mind-control helmet!

"He That Hath Wings" is a rather tragic tale about a mutant born with wings and the power of flight. Things are pretty cool until he falls in love with a woman who wants him to give up his wings in order to marry her. It's actually pretty heartbreaking.

Just noticed this groovy collection!

Check out the publisher, Haffner Press , who have already published three volumes of Hamilton's stuff, plus who are reprinting tons of other classic sci fi writers works!

Killing time in a bookstore the other day, I found a scrappy old paperback edition of The City at World's End - and, inspired by this thread, bought it.

A few Legion-y connections: a character named Lal'lor and the highly competent female Administrator, described as "an ice-cold blond".

The science was pretty dated - 1951 - but the question of whether humans are innately explorers of the new or clinging to the familiar old way of life was pretty interesting. The protagonist's girlfriend blames technology for all their problems; it struck me as unusual for someone to be questioning science back in the 50s. Unfortunately, Hamilton didn't explore that idea much; it was just an aspect of the girlfriend's old thinking.

My review of "City at World's End". I can't believe I missed the Lallor connection!