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

So, "Outside the Universe" features our galaxy under attack by weird serpent beings from another galaxy! The fleets of the Interstellar Patrol fall before the might of the invader. The only hope lies in human captain Dur Nal and his two lieutenants: Korus Kan of Antares, whose metal flesh guards his internal organs and prevents him from needing rest, and Jhul Din of Spica, whose large Crustacean body is quite imposing. These three and their crew must travel in a stolen serpent-ship to the Andromeda galaxy to seek the aid of its inhabitants, who have already beaten the serpent-folks once, before the invaders can complete their super-weapon, which will ultimately allow them to dominate all three galaxies!

Coolest bit in this story: the serpents have this creepy "museum of the living dead" in which they keep specimens of vanquished races in a kind of conscious suspended animation!

In "The Comet Drivers", our galaxy is once again threatened by a danger from outside! This time it is in the form of a giant comet headed straight towards our galaxy, big enough to seriously disrupt the gravitational balance of the galactic system. It turns out that this comet actually houses a whole solar system of strange disc-worlds orbiting its nucleus and protected by its coma, on which weird liquid-beings live and intentionally drive their comet-system into other galaxy to absorb the energy of their suns. It's up to the chief of the interstellar patrol with his three sub-chiefs, Gor Han (a giant, shaggy eight-limbed creature from Betelgeuse), Jurt Tul (an amphibian-man from Aldeberan), and Najus Nar (one of the insect-men of Procyon), to find some way of diverting the comet from it's immanent course of destruction! And not all of them will survive!

Cool bit in the story: I'm guessing the scene where all of the liquid-creatures unite into one single being to share their thoughts as well as to rest is probably the first of its kind.

In "The Sun-People", we find the Council of Suns, governing body of the Federation of Suns, meeting in desperation. It turns out that some strange force is negating the gravitational pull that attracts the stars together and binds them into our galaxy. Already, solar systems have begun drifting away from the galaxy, and soon they will begin to fly off into outer space. It has been discovered that the source of the problem are strange vibrations coming from within Canopus, the giant star around which the capital world of the Federation floats and which is located near the center of the galaxy. And so the Interstellar Patrol has put together a new ship that is capable of entering Canopus to investigate. And so Nort Norus, human Chairman of the Council of Suns, J'Han Jal, birdlike Sirian Chief of the Interstellar Patrol, and Mirk En, Chief of the Science Bureau, together lead the mission into Canopus.

There they find that, surprisingly, the star is in fact hollow, and there's a whole solar system inside the sun! And there they find a race of cube-people who are desperately trying to save themselves from the destruction caused by the fact that the gravitational force of the other stars in the galaxy has been slowly pulling their worlds outward into the sun. Thus their attempts to neutralize this gravitational force.

And, of course, our heroes set about destroying the mechanism whereby this force is being projected, thus keeping the stars of the galaxy together and projecting a message of peace and unity of a variety of different species coming together to work for the common good, even if they have to commit genocide to achieve it!

Cool bit in the story: I actually really liked the cool vacuum sheath method of protecting them from the sun. And the generator that projects vibrations to neutralize heat is totally reminiscent of early explanations of Polar Boy's power!

I have to get my hands on these stories, they sound amazingly cool!

How many decades was this before Deep Space Nine did the same thing with it's Changeling Founders and their 'great link?' Way, way cool!

These stories were published around 1929-1930, so that's, like, 65-70 years before DS9?

Whatever weaknesses Hamilton has as a writer at this point in his career, these stories are incredibly fascinating from the point of view of how much stuff he must be inventing practically from scratch. This has to be one of the first, if not the first, continuing sci-fi universe, so it really is the ancestor of Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. According to the Introduction, Hamilton was the first to introduce the idea of a space suit, which seems like such a fundamental concept that I wouldn't have even thought about it being something new if it weren't pointed out.

So, in the hundreds of thousands of years of space travel, no one who has ever entered "The Cosmic Cloud" at the center of the galaxy has ever returned from it. In fact, some years before this story opens, famed Denebian Bat-scientist Zat Zanat had tried to explore the cloud, but had never been heard from again! The cosmic cloud is an area of darkness where no light-vibrations can exist. So, the interstellar trade routes have to be routed around this cloud.

Then, suddenly, one day a strange force begins compelling ships that come near the cosmic cloud to fall into the cloud! After this happens for the third time, the Interstellar Patrol sends one of their bravest crews to investigate. This crew consists of Dur Nal, Korus Kan, and Jhul Din of "Outside the Universe" fame! Apparently Hamilton decided that maybe these stories would be even better with recurring characters!

Anyway, of course it turns out there's a race of aliens living inside the cosmic cloud who are causing the problem as part of a plan to invade the rest of the galaxy. These aliens apparently live their lives entirely by sound, with no light to see by. And so our heroes, with the help of Zat Zanat, have to foil the invasion plan.

Cool bits of the story: the most interesting part of this story really is Dur Nal's attempts to simply maneuver around/evade capture/figure out what the heck is going on while in total darkness. I don't quite buy the fact that the aliens could get along with only a sense of hearing. At one point it's suggested that have some limited echolocation ability, which makes a lot more sense, but also defeats the point of Dur Nal's hiding from them by being very quiet. And, oddly, the bat-folk of Deneb apparently don't use echolocation, which surprised me. Kind of a short and underdeveloped story, but an interesting idea, nonetheless.

Dur Nal, Korus Kan, and Jhul Din return once more for "Corsairs of the Cosmos", the last of the Interstellar Patrol tales (there are, however, two non-IP stories in this volume). The plot of this one kind of revisits the territory of the "The Star-Stealers", only this time there's twenty dark stars that are intentionally driven to our galaxy to steal our suns for another galaxy. The other galaxy is inhabited by machines whose builders have long since died out.

It seemed to me that Hamilton was trying to add a bit more characterization to the main players in this story, and, maybe it's just me reading stuff into it, but I definitely got a Kirk/Spock/McCoy vibe from the trio of Nal/Kan/Din this time around. The Star Trek comparison was heightened by the evil robots freakish love of telling them that "resistance" would not accomplish anything (they never quite say "resistance is futile", but they do seem to really like the word "resistance"!).

Anyway, this was another story that seemed too brief for the actual scope of the plot. Choice dialogue: "By the suns, this is better than driving ships!... Driving dark stars to battle!"

Groovy Legion-esque thing: We are briefly introduced to young pilot Jan Allon, who really seemed like he was going to play a bigger role in the story than he did!

Okay, so moving on to non-Interstellar Patrol stories, we have "The Hidden World", which features four adventurer-scientists investigating a series of strange beams of lights that have been appearing at regular intervals around the equator. They soon discover that these lights are the prelude to an invasion by ancient flesh-things from inside the Earth! Which, of course, they have to stop!

Among the cool things about this novel-length story were the fairly elaborate pseudo-scientific explanations of how the flesh-things's world worked in relation to ours and the cause of its imminent destruction. Definitely stuff that would make Jules Verne proud!

Apparently Hamilton must've been a fan of the Battle of Thermopylae, because this is the second time he's used the motif of a small band of warriors defending a "pass" against overwhelming odds!

Groovy Legion-esque thing: the flesh-things travel in transparent spheres, though, unfortunately for them, they don't travel through time!

So, I finally read the last story of The Collected Hamilton vol. 2, "The Other Side of the Moon".

So, we open up with the scientist from Midwestern University named Howland who is traveling to the Yucatan to gather evidence of his theory that there used to be a series of islands in the Atlantic Ocean which allowed human and animal life to migrate from Africa/Europe to the Americas. This idea, while pretty cool on its own, plays no role in the story, however. Instead, Howland and his party come across turtle-men from the moon who kill most of them, except Howland who they kidnap and take back to the moon, and another man, Carson, who escapes.

So, what does Carson do? Call in the army, perhaps? No way! He does what any main character in a Hamilton novella would do... he travels back to Midwestern University and recruits the aid of two fellow college professors to help him rescue Howland and discover and thwart the no doubt nefarious plans of the moon-turtles!

This story actually has a lot of cool stuff, with the elaborate explanation for the craters on the moon as the result of an ancient Earth-Moon war, and the groovy airtight city that the turtle-men live on, which covers the entire dark side of the moon. And even though it's pretty full of what were becoming cliches in Hamilton's writing by this point, it's still an exciting tale, and another one that I could just see being adapted into a movie (at least a cheesy SyFy movie or something!).

Hmmm... I suppose I should do a summary review of the second volume, so here goes...

Summary Review of The Star-Stealers: The Complete Tales of the Interstellar Partol

It's totally awesome! Hamilton's still playing with set formulas, though the longer stories especially give him the chance to branch out, with "Outside the Universe" being probably the strongest. The characters are still pretty much stock, and the aliens pretty much massive hordes of invaders, but, hey, there still a lot of fun!

Next up: Vol. 3, in which it looks like we finally start getting a more diverse set of stories, the first one of which features groovy floating cities!

I *must* get ahold of these. Now that I have work again, and, soon, teh monays, I have to order these books. I love silver age-y sci-fi goodness!

This sounds so groovy. And your reviews are as fun to read as anything else I've been checking out!

I really want to delve into Hamilton's early work. Its amazing that, as you pointed out a few posts earlier, so much of this he was making up for the very first time in sci-fi!

Volume Three opens up with "Cities in the Air".

So, by the mid-21st century, after a series of "air wars" has left the surface of the earth "unsafe" for human habitation, all of humanity has moved to into giant flying sky-cities! Also, the world now consists of three great nations: the American Federation (consisting of both North and South American air-cities); the European Federation (consisting of European and African air-cities); and the Asian Federation (consisting of Asian and Australasian cities). A delicate balance of power is struck between these three, given that each fears to attack another, lest it make itself vulnerable to the third. However, recently the European and Asian Federations have reached an alliance, and together have declared all out war on the American Federation! Not only do they outnumber the Americans two-to-one, but they are rumored to have developed a new secret weapon that will give them a massive advantage in the upcoming "Last Air War"!

This is a fairly long story, and also very action-heavy, with chapter after chapter detailing the battles between the airfleets and eventually the flying cities themselves. Hamilton's descriptions of battles in other stories have tended to get a bit tedious, but it seems to be getting better at it here, with the huge final battle being especially cool. There's a fairly typical Hamilton-sequence where the heroes are captured by the enemy, and have to make a daring escape to warn everyone about the evil army's secret plans.

Definitely another story that I could see being used as the basis for a Hollywood summer action movie. The images of, for example, Chicago flying around shooting at London is all kinds of awesome!

"The Life Masters" is up next, and it is a pretty awesome little story!

Protoplasm, the stuff from which life originated, suddenly washes up on coastlines all across the globe one day. Scientists argue over where it came from, and the rest of the public are annoyed about not being able to go to the beach. And then one night the protoplasm begins slowly moving inland, grabbing people with tentacle arms and absorbing them into itself! Police and soldiers are helpless to fight it off!

Anyway, it turns out there's a group of mad scientists who are responsible for it, and fortunately there's a standard Hamilton device of a button that can be pushed to destroy the menace once and for all if only some imprisoned heroic young scientists can get to it and push it in time!

Hamilton is definitely growing as a writer at this point. Though it's got some pretty standard Hamilton cliches in it, his description of the horror of the protoplasmic slime slowly encroaching into New York city is especially terrifying.

The whole plot of "Space Visitors" is based on an analogy. The atmosphere of Earth is kind of like an Ocean. And just as we sail upon the ocean, and our fishing trawlers drag the ocean bottoms to collect valuable stuff, so aliens "sailing" upon the ocean of our atmosphere might drag great shovels down upon the surface of the Earth to search for stuff they need! And in doing so they would cause great havoc on our civilization! So, assuming there were intelligent life forms at the bottom of the ocean who were annoyed at us for disturbing them, how would they fight us? And how can we adapt that method to fight the aliens?

Overall, this is a pretty weak story. Definitely a let down after the last two.

By contrast, "Evans of the Earth Guard" is completely awesome!

In the early 21st century, travel, both commerical and for pleasure, between Earth and the domed cities and mines of the Moon has become commonplace. This travel is regulated by the Earth Guard, who, among other things, protect travelers from space pirates who strike from hidden bases on both the Earth and the Moon! While many of the brutal pirates have been eliminated, the dashing Hawk, anti-hero of the public, remains at large.

Enter Evans, captain of an Earth Patrol vessel which saves a small, one-man ship that is under assault by the Hawk. It turns out that the ship contains a special agent who is supposed to be apprehending the Hawk on the Moon, but is currently en route to Earth to rendezvous with an ex-employee of the Hawk for info on where he is based. So, Evans agrees to escort him to Earth and then back to the Moon. After the informant disappears after giving his information, Evans's commander warns him that the Hawk may try to take his vessel in order to eliminate the special agent, which would be the first time in history an Earth Guard vessel has been taken by an enemy! So, Evans has to ferry the special agent back to the Moon, not knowing when or how the Hawk might strike! There's a groovy twist ending, and the whole thing is excellently told in a very short story!

Some random groovy things:

--Humans started launching rockets to the Moon in 1954 per this story, and it apparently took them twenty-two tries to get there!
--Earth travel is restricted to visiting the Moon because the natives of Venus and Mars have destroyed anyone who approached their planets!

In summary, lots of groovy stuff in this little twenty-pager!

"The Planet Revolt!" is another pretty solid story.

So, apparently, plants need nine basic elements to survive, three of which they get from the air, and the remainder of which they have to get from the soil. If, however, the six elements they normally get from the soil were somehow introduced into the atmosphere, this will cause the plants to rapidly evolve in such a way that they loose their roots, become mobile, and eventually grow into giant man-eating creatures.

Or, at least that was the theory of Dr. Mandall, a leading botanist who disappeared two years earlier. Amazingly, his theory is proven true when said elements start appearing in the atmosphere and plants all over the place start revolting! Hmm... I wonder who could be responsible?

The premise of this story may be a bit hokey, but it's got some fantastic scenes. The narrator's narrow escape from becoming plant-food in a small town that's being overrun is the sort of thing you can just visualize as a groovy B-movie scene. And the villain's whole "plants are superior to animals!" spiel does a nice job of establishing him a completely crazy.

Just perusing an old issue of Starlog (#115) from the 1980s. There's a Julius Schwartz (with Bob Greenberger) article remembering Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett. While the text is below there's a picture of Julie, Mort and Ed together in the article. I always like reading about the connections between all of the early comics writers. It never fails to make me appreciate their talents, their consistency, hard work and their boundless creativity under pressure. There's another article in this issue regarding Hamilton's work. I'll get to that one shortly.

The Solar Sales Service:
Remembering Leigh Brackett & Edmond Hamilton

After Mort Weisinger and I decided to go into the science-fiction agenting business, we started a company called Solar Sales Service. We were young and naive in 1935—1 was still in college— and sent out letters to all the writers we knew offering to handle their work—plus a one dollar reader's fee. Edmond Hamilton was one of the people to respond and we immediately began selling his scripts. After we sold his first one, we said, "This is ridiculous" —charging a fee to a professional —and returned his
buck.

At the time, Ed lived in New Castle, Pennsylvania and we worked mainly by mail although he could always be counted upon to visit New York every April and spend some time at the Blue Ribbon Restaurant, on 44th Street. I eventually learned that it was because Bock (dark) Beer was distributed only in the spring. The Blue Ribbon was one of the few restaurants in the city which carried it.

When Mort became an editor, at Standard Magazines, he hired Ed to write the Captain Future series. We plotted the first few stories on the open air bus, riding up and down Fifth Avenue. Sometimes, Otto Binder participated in these plotting sessions.

Ed became a very dear friend of mine and we stayed in touch constantly. While we were both bachelors, we drove out to California in 1941 . We got a cottage in Los Angeles which, coincidentally enough, was down the block from where a young Ray Bradbury was selling newspapers to passing automobile drivers. He came over to pick our brains every day. We encouraged him and he kept coming by to show us his stories. I became Ray's first agent and sold his first 70 stories.

Hamilton would write something every day, usually between nine and noon. While he was writing, I was resting or reading the paper or dozing off on the couch. One day, when the typewriter bell rang, I yelled, "Hey, Ed, I just made a penny!" Every time, he finished typing a line, which averaged 10 words, at a penny a word, that was another dime he earned, minus one penny agenting fee for me. (I mentioned this to Anthony Boucher who used the anecdote in his science-fiction mystery novel, Rocket to the Morgue. I was the demon agent in that story.)

It was during our 1941 cross-country trip that we stopped in Iowa to visit another science-fiction writer, Edwin K. Sloat. We were at his local club and had drinks. I was drinking scotch along with them. . .and I don't even like scotch. By the time we got back to the motel, we were both plastered. I had the key but neither one of us could manage to fit it into the doorlock. In desperation, we had to call a bellboy for help. Ed later said to me, "Be sure to tell this to Manly Wade Wellman, he'll be very proud of you."

Since I was an agent and had no business office, my clients and I used to meet regularly at Steuben's Tavern on 47th Street. From time to time, most of the big SF writers showed up there— Hamilton, Mort, Binder, Wellman, Horace Gold, Alfie Bester, David Vera, Robert Heinlein, Henry Kuttner— and

I collected their latest manuscripts and handed out checks. We would hang around for several hours and, in a way, these really were the first professional SF conventions! In the late '30s, a young California-based woman named Leigh Brackett was determined to become a writer. She knew Henry Kuttner, a very good pulp writer of those days, who worked for a California-based agent named Laurence D'Orsay. Leigh submitted a few stories to him but since D'Orsay didn't know much about the science-fiction market, he couldn't agent them. Henry, who, incidentally enough used me as an agent, recommended that Leigh contact me. She sent me some stories and I was fortunate enough to sell them.


I invited Leigh to visit me during that Los Angeles trip in 1941 . She accepted. Naturally, Ed Hamilton was there and I introduced them. It was all very casual and they didn't start their romance until later. Just last year, I was astonished to find out by reading Jack Williamson's autobiography, Wonder's Child, that Jack, a close friend of Ed's, was also romantically interested in Leigh. He had dated Leigh a few times but Ed was the one who slipped the marriage ring around her finger. Ray Bradbury was the best man.

I stopped agenting in 1944 and joined what eventually became DC Comics when I was hired as an editor by All-American Comics that February. I remained in constant contact with Ed and Leigh. My wife Jean and I visited them frequently in their Kinsman, Ohio home. On one occasion, in 1955, they had to cut our visit short to attend the World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland. Jean and I decided to go along—a trip made memorable because it was there that I first met this brash kid named Harlan Ellison.

Later, Ed began writing for DC Comics. While he mostly wrote Superman and Legion of Super-Heroes stories for Mort, I did persuade him to do some SF stories for my magazine, Strange Adventures, and he created the series Chris KL-99. On several occasions, Leigh ghost wrote stories because Ed was ill. One was a Batman, and the other, a Strange Adventure. Ed and Leigh had the same storywriting ability as their close friends Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore. Kuttner was a better plotter than Catherine but she was the better writer. The same holds true for Leigh and Ed. She was a finer literary writer, but Ed was a better plotter.

The next to last time I saw Ed and Leigh, I was visiting my daughter and son-in-law in Canoga Park, California. Just before I left New York, Ed and Leigh visited me in my office, just having returned from England.

They were very disappointed to learn about our leaving the next day for California because they were planning to stay in New York for a week. Nevertheless, they asked for my daughter's phone number so they could call us later. I wasn't in my daughter's home an hour when Ed and Leigh phoned and invited us to visit them in their California retreat. They had decided to follow us out there!

They lived in Palmdale at that time, in the very epicenter of the San Andreas Fault. Before leaving for our visit, I got the wild idea of calling Ray Bradbury and having him come along. Ray was regarded by Leigh as her mentor. Ray and Leigh had even collaborated on a story together, that I sold to Planet Stories, called "Lorelei of the Red Mist."

We arrived at the house, honked the horn and Leigh came out. She did a triple-take when she saw Ray sitting in the back, for she hadn't seen him in a year. Ed had started to fail, by then, and couldn't get around. Leigh later told me that it was one of the happiest days of Ed's life as we reminisced for hours.

The last time I saw Leigh Brackett was in 1978, some time after Ed died. Leigh had come to New York for a piano recital by a relative and I invited her to lunch. When she came into the office, her face was very flushed and excited. I asked what was up and she said, "I'll tell you in the restaurant." We ordered a cocktail, clinked glasses and she said, "Congratulate me. George Lucas just called and wants me to write The Empire Strikes Back.

She finished the first draft, but passed away before revising the script. A one-time collaboration between Ed and
Leigh was purchased by Harlan Ellison for his collection, The Last Dangerous Visions. I eagerly await its publication because there is one more story by them to read. These were two extremely talented writers, and two very close friends. I miss their stories and more importantly, I miss their presence. Seeing them receive recognition, years later, is quite fitting; an appropriate tribute to their rare and tremendous talents. &

JULIUS SCHWARTZ is credited with being
the co-founder of science fiction 's first fanzine, The Time Traveller, in 1932 with his lifelong friend, Mort Weisinger. In 1935, he became the first literary agent specializing in science fiction. In 1944, he began his career as a DC Comics editor. Now DCs Senior Editor, Schwartz edits special projects such as graphic novel adaptations of genre classics and movie adaptations. Robert Greenberger assisted in the preparation of this article.

The Once and Future Captain by Will Murray.
From Starlog 115, February 1987

The early history of science fiction chronicles a galaxy of space-busting heroes. Long after modern technology has made their science quaint, the adventures of Doc Smith's Kimball Kinnison, Philip Nowlan's Buck Rogers, Jack Williamson's Legion of Space, Anthony Gilmore's Hawk Carse, and others, are still in print. That's not true of one of the greatest of those characters, the legendary Captain Future. He was the only American space opera hero ever given his own pulp magazine.

Although his adventures were recorded by the equally legendary Edmond Hamilton, Captain Future was not the creation of the writer nicknamed "the World-Saver." Popular belief is that Captain Future was born in an appropriate place: the First World Science Fiction Convention, which was held in New York City in July 1939. Attending out of curiosity was one of the premier pulp SF publishers, Standard Magazines' Leo Margulies.

Margulies, a diminutive man with a notoriously foul temper, was nevertheless impressed by the small but historically
important gathering. "I didn't know you fans could be so damn sincere!" he blurted out at one point, and there and then, the story goes, he suddenly announced a new magazine he claimed to have conceived on the spot. Margulies already had two SF titles, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories, so he decided that this new title would feature the exploits of a single hero, like his own company's Phantom Detective and Lone Eagle magazines.

Margulies kicked the idea around with his top SF editor, Mort Weisinger, who later became the guiding genius who revitalized the Superman line of comics during the '50s and '60s. Together, they developed a prospectus for their character, a telepathic mutant named Curtis Newton who fights interplanetary crime, circa 2015, as Mr. Future, Wizard of Science. His three assistants were an automaton duplicate of himself, an autistic human encyclopedia named Simon Wright, and Otho, a crystalline alien masquerading as a jewel set in Future's insignia ring.


...more to follow

bah some editing problems here.

Man, I need to get back to my Hamilton reading! There's a new volume of his collected works (along with a new volume of Captain Future) coming out later this month from Haffner!

In fact, the prospectus was dated June 1939- indicating that Margulies had the magazine in mind before the convention. Even if he did slyly take advantage of convention excitement to announce an existing title, his choice of an author was sincere.
The logical person to write the magazine was 34-year-old Edmond Hamilton, one of the chief proponents of space opera.
Hamilton, who pioneered the now-cliche Planet Police concept, had just written "The Three Planeteers" for Startling Stories, the story of an Earthman and two aliens fighting planetary injustice. It was a forerunner to Captain Future-not the character Margulies had offered Hamilton, but the version that emerged in the first issue, dated Winter 1940.
"I had to go to New York and argue with them for days before they would let me change their proposed set-up," the late Hamilton once recalled. "I convinced Leo and Mort that these three characters would be very hard to use in a story. Simon Wright became an aged scientist who, about to die, had his living brain transferred into an artificial serum case, and was known as the Brain. Otho became an android, a living man of synthetic flesh created in their Moon laboratory by the Brain and Captain Future's father. And the automaton became Grag, the intelligent robot, who wasn't very brilliant, but was immensely strong and very faithful."
Future's History
As explained in the first novel, Captain Future and the Space Emperor, Curt Newton was born in the Moon laboratory of his biologist father. Roger Newton was in hiding from would-be dictator Victor Corvo, who coveted his artificial life project. Newton's experiments had succeeded in creating, in succession, the Brain, Grag, and finally the android, Otho. But Corvo had the Newtons assassinated, leaving the infant Curt Newton to be raised on the Moon by the unhuman trio.

When Newton reached manhood, he vowed to fight the kind of super-criminals who had killed his parents and who threatened the stability of the nine worlds. A brash redhead who wore a grey synthesilk zippersuit and a phaserlike proton-pistol at his hip, Captain Future- Margulies had ordered Hamilton to change the name from Mr. Future to the more romantic form in the middle of writing the first novel- was part scientist and part space cowboy.

"You will be fighting for the future of the Solar System, "the Brain told Curt Newton. "For the future?" repeated Curt. The humor came back into his grey eyes. "Then, I'll call myself- Captain Future."

It was an origin inspired by Street & Smith's Doc Savage, as were many other trappings of the Captain Future series. Operating from his father's secret lunar laboratory and flying a cyclotron-powered art deco spaceship, the Comet, Captain Future battled interplanetary criminals like the Wrecker, the Life-Lord and the Captain's recurring foe, Ul Quorn, the so-called Magician of Mars and son of Victor Corvo.

The first issue of Captain Future met with enthusiastic newsstand reception.
It also caught the attention of two important writers. One was humorist S!J.
Perelman, who parodied that first novel in one of his New Yorker columns, a deadpan recitation of the story's plot.

Hamilton's feelings might have been hurt, but he knew he was writing space opera, not literature. Later, he admitted his initial Captain Future novels were not exactly his best work.

"To tell the truth," he said, "so little was paid me for the early ones that they were all written first draft right out of the typewriter. After the first six, they paid me more, and I then did two drafts and they improved a bit."

The other writer who noticed Captain Future was Lester Dent, who as Kenneth Robeson, wrote the Doc Savage series. Dent, recognizing Hamilton's creditable handling of his own ideas, offered Hamilton a job ghosting Doc Savage novels.

"I was flattered," Hamilton recalled, "but had to say I was too damn busy with Captain Future to think of more work."

In fact, Hamilton's adventures writing Captain Future sometimes rivaled his hero's whirlwind escapes. Because the magazine was a quarterly, Hamilton had to turn in a 12-page synopsis of the next novel with each manuscript. The editor used that to write a teaser for the upcoming issue. Once, the synopsis didn't arrive in time, and the editor wrote a blurb promising an imaginary story, The Face of the Deep. Hamilton was obliged to write the next novel from that hasty teaser. And he pulled it off. He was a professional. Just when Hamilton had settled down to the regularity of series work, fate intervened.

"I wrote all of the Captain Future novels until Pearl Harbor in December 1941," Hamilton recounted. "As I was then a bachelor and figured I would soon be in the Army, I notified Leo that I wouldn't be able to write any more, so he got two other writers and changed the authorship of the magazine to the pseudonym, 'Brett Sterling.' But, in 1942, the army ruled they would not accept men over age 38, so, on the verge of being inducted, I was ruled out, and went back to writing Captain Future again. Some of my stories then appeared under the Brett Sterling byline, and others under my own name.

"The other two writers were William Morrison (in real life, Joseph
Samachson) and fantasist Manly Wade Wellman. Between them, they only produced three novels. Some readers, at first upset by the change, later wrote in to claim they thought "Brett Sterling's" novels superior to Hamilton's-never realizing they were comparing stories by the same writer!

The editorial juggling of multiple authors once led to a minor crisis for the conscientious Hamilton.

"In '42 or early '43," he related, "I submitted a synopsis for a Captain Future novel called Outlaw World. The main idea of the novel was that Captain Future would lose his memory and wouldn't know he was Captain Future. The editor approved the synopsis and I went ahead and wrote the novel. Then- I think it was spring 1944-appeared the Captain Future magazine with one of Morrison's novels, Days of Creation. I was horrified to read it and find that it had the same plot idea. . . that of Captain Future losing his memory.'

'The editor had OKed my plot, forgetting that he already bought the same idea from Morrison! I was terribly upset, for everyone would think Hamilton was imitating Brett Sterling's story. So, I sat down and rewrote about two thirds of Outlaw World and sent it to the editor, explaining that there had been a mistake on his part and that I had rewritten the story so that the same gag wouldn't be used. The editor never even answered my letter. But when they printed Outlaw World later, they did use my rewritten version."

Captain's Quest

During the war, when paper shortages killed pulp magazines, faithful readers of Captain Future jumped to the conclusion that their favorite magazine had fallen victim to insufficient paper when the Fall 1944 issue failed to appear in drugstores all over America. They never suspected the true story.

"In winter '43, 1 lived for a few months in Monterrey, in old Mexico,"
Hamilton related. "I wrote there the Captain Future novel called Magic Moon.

When I returned to the States, the wartime customs inspection of all papers and written materials was very strict. Now, I always did two departments of the Captain Future magazine . . . one called 'Worlds of Tomorrow,' with a map of the planet on which the action took place. The customs men seized upon my map of a totally imaginary world, and with it, the whole novel manuscript and sent them to Washington for closer examination. It was months before I got them back."

There had been no time for Hamilton to write a replacement novel, so the issue was simply skipped. Magic Moon finally saw print in the Winter 1944 issue. Not content with guiding Captain Future and his Futuremen through the Solar System, Hamilton expanded the series' scope in later issues, sending Newton on his first deep space mission in Quest Beyond the Stars, back through time in the classic Lost World of Time, and into another dimension in Planets in Peril. Along the way, a new facet of Curt Newton emerged - the serious scientist seeking the origins of the universe.

In The Star of Dread, clues in earlier novels culminated in Newton journeying to the star Deneb, the home system of an extinct race which had seeded human life throughout the universe. In Quest Beyond the Stars, Newton first learned of the so-called Birthplace of Creation, the source of all cosmic matter.These scientific quests, rather than the interplanetary manhunts, marked the Golden Age of Captain Future magazine.

Eventually, the paper shortage did kill Captain Future. The character continued for a short time in Startling Stories, including Manly Wade Wellman's The Solar Invasion, pitting Newton against his arch-enemy, UI Quorn, in a final, decisive encounter.

Hamilton found that five years of writing Captain Future had damaged his reputation as a serious SF writer. This was the era of John W. Campbell's editorial tenure on Astounding Stories, and the emergence of the Campbell school of writers. Never a part of that school, Hamilton toiled for the pulpier Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder, branded as a hopelessly juvenile writer even as he examined more mature themes.

Almost perversely, he revived Captain Future in the pages of Startling Stories in 1950. Although the first story, "The Return of Captain Future,"
with its classic Earle Bergey cover showing Grag clutching a buxom brunette, promised old-style space opera, it was not.

The new stories - all novelettes -dwelled on sensitive characterization, not formula adventure. "The Harpers of Titan" showcased Simon Wright in a poignant tale in which he briefly regains, then renounces, human form. Grag romped through the humorous "Pardon My Iron Nerves." But it was Hamilton's portrayal of Curt Newton as a somber, inquisitive scientist which showed that Hamilton had risen above blasters and bug-eyed monsters. In the final Captain Future story, "Birthplace of Creation," Newton at last reached the Birthplace-and passed the ultimate test of his character and humanity. It was a fitting end for the ultimate space opera hero. Captain Future took his final bow in 1951.

A year later, Edmond Hamilton finally shook off his unjust reputation as space opera jockey with the publication of "What's It Like Out There?," a grim and unromantic story of space exploration in Thrilling Wonder Stories.
Fans and critics alike hailed the "new" Edmond Hamilton, and Hamilton's own editor went so far as to pronounce that "Now, Science Fiction has grown up.
And so has Edmond Hamilton."

In fact, Hamilton had written the story nearly 20 years before, but no pulp magazine would take it. Hamilton had been ahead of his time. For the rest of his career, Hamilton divided his hours between writing SF and scripting the comic-book adventures of Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes for his old Captain Future editor, Mort Weisinger.

Interest in Captain Future faded in the '50s, but in the '70s, Captain Future flew again. In America, Paperback Library - a division of CBS which had acquired Leo Margulies' old Standard Magazines-reissued the series.
Without any attention to sequence, uniformity of byline or even packaging, they reprinted 13 of the best Captain Future novels. The better covers were by Frank Frazetta and Jeff Jones, but most were uncredited reprints from German editions of a latter-day descendant of Curt Newton, Perry Rhodan.

In Sweden, similar reprints triggered a Captain Future fan club. In Japan, the novels led to a short-lived Captain Future animated TV series. The Japanese took their Captain Future very seriously. Although they made cosmetic changes in the characters, they adapted several of the novels - among them Calling Captain Future and Lost World of Time-as faithful four-part serials. The show is available on video in America.

Interest in the character hasn't been as strong in his native country, and any thought of a Captain Future revival ended with the untimely death of Edmond Hamilton on February 1, 1977.

But Captain Future did not die. His spirit lives on in Star Trek, Star Wars and every other modern space opera vehicle. The earlier explorer's corny name aside, the gap between Captain Future and Captain Kirk is not very wide. And according to Captain Future and the Space Emperor, the baby who would grow up to be the Wizard of Science entered this world in the year 1990. That's only three years away. Captain Future cannot die. He hasn't been born yet!

EDE, have you by any chance read Hamilton's mid-1960s Star Wolf trilogy of novels? I just found out through Wikipedia that they influenced a Japanese TV series of the same name from the late 1970s. But that's not the best part. Episodes of said series were condensed, dubbed into English, and turned into the feature films "Fugitive Alien" and "Fugitive Alien 2", both of which were roasted on Mystery Science Theatre 3000!

I don't think I've ever read anything of the Star Wolf series.