Seekers of Tomorrow (11 page)

The favorable reaction of readers to Laurence Manning's three-part novel
Wreck of the Asteroid,
which began in wonder stories for December, 1932, a story stressing real-ism rather than romanticism in projecting what the world of Mars might be like, prompted Hamilton to try the same tack. While wintering in Key West with Jack Williamson in 1933, he pounded out
What's It Like Out There?
which stressed man's weaknesses, the heartbreak, the pettiness, and the political expediency, which might be part of the first expedi-tion to Mars. Editors drew back from Hamilton's approach and the story remained buried in his trunk for nearly twenty years.

Then, at the urging of his wife, he dusted it off, did some revision and sent it to thrilling wonder stories. Editor Samuel Mines waxed poetic about "the new Edmond Hamil-ton" who rose, "phoenix-like, from the ashes of Captain Future." The story was acclaimed a modern masterpiece and it was said: "Now science fiction has grown up. And so has Edmond Hamilton."

"Give a dog a bad name ..." Hamilton was no longer the "World Saver," and in the early thirties was not only writing stories of outstanding merit, but stories far in advance of the time.
The Island of Unreason
(wonder stories, May, 1933) deservedly won the Jules Verne Prize Award for the best story of the calendar year 1933;
A Conquest of Two Worlds
took a similar award as the best science-fiction novelette of 1932. In the future, as Hamilton saw it in
The Island of Unreason,
American society has an island to which are sen-tenced all antisocial men and women who must live there for varying periods, unguarded, with their fellow malcontents, so they can experience the problems of life and survival where no law and order exist. The sociological and psychological implications of the story make it an early milestone in the maturation of magazine science fiction.

Nor were Hamilton's talents applied only to science fiction.
The Man Who Returned
(weird tales, February, 1934) has forced his way out of his tomb where he has been premature-ly laid to rest and seeks to return to his family, friends, and business associates; this is at once a tale of horror and of philosophical insight. Hamilton used his real name for this one, but when the spirit moved him he was prone to spin terror yarns for weird tales under the nom de plume of Hugh Davidson.

To supplement his science-fiction writing income, Hamilton tried his hand at detective stories, selling his first to Street & Smith's detective story magazine in 1932, then the leader in the field. The same year he introduced the mystery ele-ment into
The Space-Rocket Murders
(amazing stories, October, 1932), prophetically using Braun as the name of the leading German rocket scientist, who was appropriately con-ducting liquid hydrogen fuel experiments in Berlin. Braun is merely one of eleven savants involved in rocket research who is mysteriously murdered. The culprits prove to be Venusians disguised as earthmen; they have achieved controlled atomic power, enabling them to project their rockets across space. No Hamilton story before 1933 had any love interest whatsoever. Very few even mention women. Hamilton was frequently quoted as being cynically against marriage. Per-haps the preponderance of sisters who outvoted him in his youth had jaundiced him; perhaps it was his mother's favorite quip whenever a man of the town got married: "Ah, he'll get his wings clipped now."

His mother's remark, however, gave him the idea for
He That Hath Wings
(weird tales, July, 1938). A child born of parents seriously affected by radiation develops wings. When he grows to maturity, the only terms under which the girl he loves will agree to marry him is if he has his appen-dages surgically removed. He does so and their marriage appears to be happy. Soon a child is on the way, but he notes that his wings have begun to grow back. Shortly after the birth of the child he is determined to have his new wings removed but succumbs to the desire of feeling the exhilara-tion of flying one last time. Airborne, he compulsively starts south, even though the long-unused pinions are rapidly tiring. Over the water his strength gives out and he finds himself "glad to be falling as all they with wings must finally fall, after a brief lifetime of wild, sweet flight, dropping con-tentedly to rest."

In 1940, by prearrangement, Hamilton met Jack William-son in Los Angeles. Julius Schwartz, Hamilton's agent since 1934, was also in town with Mort Weisinger, then editing thrilling wonder stories, startling stories, and captain future, to all of which Hamilton was a regular contributor. They introduced him to Leigh Brackett, a young lady who had joined the fraternity of science-fiction authors only that year with
Martian
Quest
(astounding science-fiction, February, 1940). Hamilton and she found that they had a number of things in common: there were strains of Mohawk and Sioux in the Brackett family line; she, too, had read Edgar Rice Burroughs avidly, as early as the age of seven. Edmond returned to Los Angeles the next summer and met Leigh almost weekly at a salon presided over by Robert A. Heinlein and attended by Ray Bradbury who would eventual-ly collaborate with Brackett in
The Lorelei of the Red Mist
(planet stories, Summer, 1946). She would write the first 9,000 words and Bradbury the remainder of a long novelette of a man who dies to find himself on Venus in the superb body of a character named Conan. But despite mutual attraction, nothing happened between Hamilton and Brackett because he was expecting momentari-ly to be inducted into the armed services. Two days before his induction was scheduled to occur, a ruling was passed exempting men 38 years or older. Then both his mother and father became ill, to remain practically invalids until 1945.

When Hamilton arrived in Los Angeles in 1946 he was greeted warmly by Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury, and, on December 31, 1946, Hamilton and Brackett were married in San Gabriel, California. Among their close friends were C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, another notable marriage of science-fiction personalities with whom they motored back east in 1949, "debarking" at Kinsman, Ohio, where Hamilton had some relatives. There they became enchanted with a 120-year-old farmhouse set on 35 acres, and made it their permanent home.

Had Leigh Brackett continued writing science fiction, her achievement would have been great because she possesses unusual ability. Her forte was swashbuckling, romantic ad-venture set on another world, a kind of story much appreci-ated by readers. Parenthetically, the writer who at present is most popular for the same type of story is also a woman, Andre Norton, probably the outstanding science-fiction writer currently writing in the romantic tradition. One of the last important things that Brackett did in science fiction, before Hollywood claimed her, was a novel for Doubleday titled
The Long Tomorrow
(1955). This was a serious work on the struggle against reaction in the post-atomic world which J. Francis McComas, reviewing it in the new york times of October 23, 1955, characterized as coming "awfully close to being a great work of science fiction."

Her screen work made her and Hamilton virtual com-muters between Kinsman, Ohio, and Hollywood, where her credits include collaborating with William Faulkner on the screen adaptation of
The Big Sleep,
as well as
Rio Bravo
and
Hatari!

While Hamilton's personal life had eventually arrived at a happy beginning, he had permitted his writing career to take a direction which was destined to put off almost indefinitely the creation of a new image for him as a quality writer of science fiction.

It came about this way. While attending The First World Science Fiction Convention in New York City, July 2, 1939, Leo Margulies, editorial director of Standard Magazines, after listening to the proceedings for a few hours, emitted his now famous line: "I didn't think you fans could be so damn sincere." He followed it with action, plotting on the spot a new science-fiction magazine. It was to be called captain future, a pulp aimed at the younger teen-agers, each issue to feature a novel about the same character. There must be a superscientist hero. There must also be aides: a robot and an android and, of course, a beautiful female assistant. Each story must be a crusade to bring to justice an arch villain; and, in each novel, the hero must be captured and escape three times, captain future was the pure distillation of stereotyped science-fiction gimmicks brought to bear on a single-character magazine.

Hamilton, asked to do the stories, wrote all but three of the 21 novels and novelettes in the series to a hard-and-fast formula. Thus, during a period when a new type of science fiction was coming into vogue and creating reputations for Heinlein, van Vogt, Sturgeon, and Asimov, Hamilton found himself labeled a specialist in blood-and-thunder juveniles.

Even when two Hamilton pulp novels
(The Star Kings,
1949, and
City at the World's End,
1951), were published in hard covers by Frederick Fell and got surprisingly favorable reviews, including the new york times, it was all dismissed as an inexplicable occurrence by hard-core scientifictionists who could not keep from thinking of Captain Future when they read the name Edmond Hamilton. Most of them were not aware that a collection of Hamilton's short stories from weird tales and the science-fiction magazines had gone into book form as
The Horror on the Asteroid and Other Tales of Planetary Horror
as far back as 1936, a period when such distinction was rare.

Throughout the fifties, Hamilton continued to turn out a variety of science fiction for thrilling wonder stories, startling stories, imagination, universe science fiction and other titles, primarily action stories written with an originality and care atypical of the type. Since the action story in science fiction was going out of vogue, there was little comment re Hamilton until the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club began to make his inclusion a habit, his full-length titles began to appear in paperback, and his new work for amazing stories received top reader endorse-ment.

The invitations to Hamilton and Brackett to appear as guests of honor at the regional Metropolitan Science Fiction Conference in New York in 1954 were extended more out of affection than as tokens of literary achievement. The reverse was true when the two were offered and accepted the same role at the 1964 World Science Fiction convention held in Oakland, California.

In these modern times, men in the arts and the industries are honored for many unusual achievements. Few can claim to have been eulogized, as Edmond Hamilton was at the 1964 World Convention, for precedents as striking as "pio-neering the concept of interstellar adventure, the notion of a galactic empire and galactic police force, the use of complete darkness as a weapon, employing a time machine to recruit an army from the past, and introducing Fortean themes."

It is a pity that the quality of Stewart's writing is such that this "space opera" ranks only slightly above that of a comic strip adventure.

That section of a review of
Seetee Ship
by Will Stewart was brought to the attention of the editors of the new york sunday news. The review, by Villiers Gerson, appeared in the Sunday book-review supplement of the new york times in September, 1951. The management of the news had been seriously worried about the effect of television on circulation and advertising revenue and were exploring various means to offset this probability. One possible solution was to feature an exclusive, nonsyndicated comic strip, but they wanted a writ-er a cut above average to handle the continuity. In Portales, New Mexico, Jack Williamson's telephone rang. It was Ama Barker of the news. The editors had decided, on the basis of the review, that he was just the man to write their new comic strip. They had discovered that Will Stewart was his pen name and called long distance to see if he would work for them.

Williamson gasped, but at last, in a leisurely Southwestern drawl, he managed to choke out his agreement.

He flew to New York where it was decided that a Sunday page to be called
Beyond Mars
would be constructed from the background of his books
Seetee Ship
and
Seetee Shock,
adventures in the mining and utilization of contraterrene matter (substances repelled by ordinary matter) in the as-teroid belt. The cartoonist, Lee Elias, had previously worked with Milt Caniff on
Terry and the Pirates,
and he now employed the same style for
Beyond Mars.
Three times annually Jack Williamson would arrive in New York and work out the story line with the editors and the artist. Each week he would receive a handsome check.

The editors of the news must have checked and been aware that they were employing the services of one of the most distinguished names in science fiction. In Williamson they were getting an author who had earned a half-dozen reputations for outstanding performance in various aspects of science fiction and who had powerfully influenced several major trends. And this, the most lucrative assignment of his life, had come not on the basis of accomplishment, but as the result of hostile criticism. John Stewart Williamson (the origin of the pen name Will Stewart is obvious) was born in Bisbee, Arizona Territory, April 29, 1908. His mother, Lucy Betty Hunt, was the daughter of a slaveholding aristocrat ruined by the Civil War. She was teaching school when she married Asa Lee Williamson, a graduate of the University of Texas, a descen-dant of Revolutionary War stock, who was then also teaching.

The land lured Asa Williamson and he quit teaching short-ly after his marriage to take up ranching with two of his wife's brothers in Mexico. The ranch was located in such forbidding terrain on the headwaters of the Rio Yaqui in Sonora that the closest wagons could come was a day's travel away. Though Apaches raided the ranch, mountain lions preyed on the pigs, and scorpions made foot travel uneasy, it took the uncertainties of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 to send the Williamsons scurrying back across the border. Failing to make an irrigated farm in Pecos pay, Asa Williamson packed the family belongings into a covered wag-on in 1915 and, with the livestock straggling along behind, headed for the Llano Estacado, in eastern New Mexico. They were latecomers, the best land had already been taken, and life for the family became an endless bout with poverty. The crops, if not destroyed by drought, were subject to choking sand and hail. Animals died from eating poisonous vegeta-tion. During desperate periods Asa Williamson would take up teaching for a time or even turn to mining to see him through.