Crashing Suns by Edmond Hamilton (Ace Books, 1965). Cover by Ed Valigursky

Edmond Hamilton, who I’ve mentioned here before as Leigh Brackett’s husband, wrote mostly Science fiction and I consider him one of the first generation of Space Opera writers. And one of the best of the bunch. You might wonder what Space Opera is and how it differs from Sword & Planet fiction, as well as from more mainstream SF. Well, let me explain.

Space Opera was coined to be used pejoratively, to denigrate a certain type of SF in which action and drama were king. This type of story supposedly only used the trappings of SF to tell an adventure tale rather than engaging with futuristic ideas. And the trappings included such things as ray guns, faster-than-light travel, and space battles.

[Click the images for planet-sized versions.]

I never found the term pejorative; I sought out this kind of fiction, and I never linked it with “soap” opera, which it was supposed to reflect, but more with opera in the grand sense of classics like Macbeth. (If you think Shakespeare didn’t write melodrama, I don’t know what to tell you.)

In movies and TV, Star Wars is space opera. Star Trek, my favorite TV franchise, pretty much obliterates the line between Space Opera and straight SF, although my favorite episodes lean toward the space opera side.

My introduction to Space Opera came as a teenager when I read Crashing Suns by Edmond Hamilton, which featured five stories of the “Interstellar Patrol.”

The included stories were,

“Crashing Suns” (Weird Tales, August 1928)
“The Star Stealers” (Weird Tales, February 1929)
“Within the Nebula” (Weird Tales, May 1929)
“The Comet Drivers” (Weird Tales, February 1930)
“The Cosmic Cloud” (Weird Tales, November 1930)

These had been published in the late 1920s in Weird Tales, but I read them in the 1965 book shown above, from Ace Books. And I adored them.

Hamilton also wrote Sword & Planet fiction, however, and I’ve read it and enjoyed it. In one of my early posts here at Black Gate on June 10th, I wrote about an anthology called Swordsmen in the Sky, which helped ignite my lifelong love of Sword & Planet fiction. The last story in that collection was “Kaldar, World of Antares,” by Edmond Hamilton.

Magic Carpet Magazine, April 1933, containing “Kaldar, World of Antares.” Cover by Margaret Brundage

I didn’t find out until many years later that there were two other stories in the series. I managed to find and read them online.

They are,

“Kaldar, World of Antares” (Magic Carpet Magazine, April 1933)
“Snake-Men of Kaldar” (Magic Carpet Magazine, October 1933)
“The Great Brain of Kaldar” (Weird Tales, December 1935)

Covers of all these mags are shown above and below, though I don’t own these.

Magic Carpet Magazine, October 1933, and Weird Tales, December 1935. Covers by Margaret Brundage

There is a hardback that collects the three tales, along with an introduction by Ray Bradbury and an afterword by Hamilton himself, which was published by Haffner Press in 1998.

However, this routinely runs into the hundreds of dollars for a copy so I haven’t pulled the trigger on buying it. 1998 wasn’t that long ago so I hold out hope I might find it at a library book sale sometime for considerably cheaper. I’ve read the stories but would be interested in the introduction and afterword.

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Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for Black Gate was a look at Flash Gordon.