Edmond Hamilton was a busy man in 1933! We've already blogged about his 1933 serial, "The Vampire Master," which appeared in Weird Tales, as well as three other Weird Tales pieces from that year, "Snake-Man," "The Fire Creatures," and "Horror on the Asteroid." And then there were the science fiction stories from Wonder Stories, "Island of Unreason" and "The Man Who Saw Everything" AKA "The Man With the X-Ray Eyes." But there are still 1933 Hamilton stories for me to read and blog about!
"Kaldar, World of Antares"
For five years the nine greatest of the world's astronomers and astrophysicists have labored. And today their great work is complete--they have created a device that can separate a man's body into its constituent electrons, project this packet of particles any distance, to a point where they can be reassembled. This way they can send a man to another planet with relative ease!
Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson might be willing to travel into space via the device they and their colleagues constructed, but not these nine eggheads! Their lives are too valuable to risk! So they put out an ad, requesting the services of a young man in need of money who has no family ties. And our hero, Stuart Merrick, answers!
The scientists propose to project our man Stu to a planet of the red giant Antares. The brainiacs have no idea what is going on on this planet--for all they know it is covered in lava or poison gas and Stu will be instantly killed. But if, in three days when they activate the projector in reverse, it brings Stu back to mother Earth alive, they will pay him $100,000! I know that is peanuts to my upwardly mobile readership, but 100K was real money 90 years ago, and Stu is one impecunious mf'er and he signs on to this insane caper!
Stu materializes on Antares in the center of a city of ziggurats; above him is the burning red globe of Antares, which fills up a third of the sky, around him is a huge crowd of people. He is standing on a dais, and, fortunately enough, this dais is associated with the city's elective monarchy, and, thinking his appearance must be the work of fate, the crowd acclaims the Earthman king! One man is dismayed at Merrick's sudden arrival and elevation to the throne: Jhalan, the candidate who was minutes away from election when Stu came out of nowhere to ruin his political career. Everyone is thrilled to have this guy as king, except for the guy who was about to be elected king, Jhalan. One of the perks of kingship here in the city of Corla, Merrick learns after they hook a machine up to his brain that teaches him the language of this planet, Kaldar, is that newly elected kings are given as a wife the daughter of the last king; and Stu's lucky streak isn't over yet--the daughter of the previous king, Narna is gorgeous!
Corla, Merrick is told, is the only human city on planet Kaldar. There are plenty of other cities on Kaldar, but they are all inhabited by monster people and each city is perpetually at war with every other city. The biggest threat to Corla in this Hobbesian environment has been the city of spider people, whose aircraft regularly raid the city to capture slaves. In fact, soon after Stu is crowned, in their flying boats the spidermen come. The humans resist the attack with their "light-swords" which can "annihilate instantly" anything their "shining blades" touch--anything except another light-sword--and "light-guns," which shoot "small charges of shining force." In the middle of the fight it is revealed that Jhalan is in cahoots with the spider-men, and he grabs Narna and flies off in a spider boat!
Hoping to rescue the princess, Stu and ten men pile into a Corlan aircraft and head for the spider-city, passing over a forest of ambulatory and carnivorous fungus on the way. They meet a spider-man flyer and shoot it down; the spider-men survivors are devoured by the fungus.
"Kaldar, World of Antares" is an acceptable Burroughs pastiche, with fun settings, monsters and alien technology. However, it bears the marks of being a rush job, and is not one of Hamilton's better stories. There are an unacceptable number of unlikely coincidences and plot holes, and some of the sentences are clumsy and should have been rewritten. Hamilton tries to stuff a novel's worth of material into fewer than 40 pages, so the story feels rushed; you can tell Hamilton tried to give the Corlan characters distinct personalities, but didn't or couldn't take the time to really flesh them out. Stuart Merrick is perhaps the worst drawn character; all we know about him at the start of the story is that he is impoverished, and then on Kaldar he offers all kinds of war-winning military and scientific advice as well as wielding a sword like a master fencer. The story would have made more sense if we had been told Stu was a disgraced soldier or a scientist drummed out of his university for punching a corrupt colleague or something like that--not only would this make Stu's grasp of science and the military arts more believable, but it would have reinforced one of Hamilton's themes, that Stu doesn't belong on Earth, that Kaldar is his true home. (Robert E. Howard in Almuric deals with this sort of theme in a more effective way.)
"The Snake Men of Kaldar"
Stu returns to Kaldar and immediately gets bad news from the people of Corla, his subjects: Jhalan, who was assumed to be dead after the spider-man aircraft in which he was a passenger crashed, is not only alive, but has seized Narna again and is flying with her to the city of the snake-men! Stu leads a squadron of airboats after them. They fly over the radiation barrier that surrounds the land of the snake people and they immediately get involved in a skirmish between snake-men and some humans. The locals fight with ray guns that have a range of merely six feet (these radiation projectors consist of a shielded box within which is a radioactive rock of the same mineral as that which which emits the border barrier; opening an aperture in the box allows the radiation to escape in a narrow cone that is deadly, but only for a short distance) so the light-guns of Stu and crew make short work of the serpent people.
The humans Stu has rescued are fugitive slaves who escaped the city of the snake men; for as long as anybody can remember, this race of human beings, the Dortas, have been the slaves of the snake men--they didn't even know other nations of humans existed! Stu and the Corlans have arrived at an opportune time: the Dortas have been planning a revolt and the escaped slaves have hand made an arsenal of those little radiation guns. The snake men have no aircraft, and so it is child's play for Merrick and his men to, under cover of darkness, fly over the city wall and into the outer ring of the circular city, the slave quarter, to distribute the radiation projectors.
Among the slaves our heroes find the treacherous Jhalan--the snake men didn't welcome him as he had hoped. He leads Stu through the middle ring of the city, the industrial section, to the city center, the residential core where Narna is some snakeman's personal servant.
The Terran and the traitorous Corlan find Narna, and then are discovered by the snakemen. They fight off the snakemen until the slave uprising is underway and the rebelling Dortas reach them. But then Merrick realizes that in the confusion of the battle Jhalan has seized Narna and carried her off to the Corlan airboat he used to get here. Stu catches up to them just in time, and he and Jhalan fight to the death on the deck of the flying boat. With Jhalan dead and the snake people exterminated, the story ends happily.
My assessment of this second Stuart Merrick of Kaldar adventure is the same as that of the first--it is an acceptable Burroughs pastiche. The snakemen and their circular city are fun, but I feel like more could have been done, though I guess Hamilton lacked the space to do much more. "Kaldor, World of Antares" and "The Snake Men of Kaldar" would perhaps work better as films or comic strips than they do as short stories; Hamilton more vividly describes the sight of the moons of Kaldar in the sky than he does people's emotions and seems to have put more thought into the geography of cities than he has into people's motivations.
In 1998 Haffner Press published a collection of all three of Hamilton's Kaldar stories. The third story appeared in Weird Tales in 1935, and no doubt we'll be reading it soon!
"War of the Sexes"
The plot of "War of the Sexes" is surprisingly similar to that of "Kaldar, World of Antares." Allan Brand answers an ad calling for a young man with no family connections. The mad scientist who placed the ad binds Brand and tells him he is going to remove the young man's brain to prove that a disembodied brain can survive indefinitely if kept in a serum!
When Al wakes up he is in a different body, twenty thousand years in the future! He learns that for eight thousand years the human race has been split into two warring nations--Male and Female! A woman scientist figured out a method of creating babies in a lab from "human gamete-cells," and began mass producing female babies with the idea that if women outnumbered men they could achieve political power over them. Then a male scientist figured out the same process and started mass producing baby boys! Violence erupted, and for like 80 centuries men and women have lived in different countries, constantly at war, reproducing via ectogenesis.
So, whose body is Al inhabiting? Well, the women were starting to win the war, and the only thing holding the men together was their heroic king. (Oy, as if a world without sex wasn't bad enough, our poor pal Al has found himself in a world without representative government in which Western liberalism has fallen to fanatic identity politics!) When the king died in an aircraft accident, the Male elites thought all was lost! But science came to the rescue! The king's body was mostly intact, so scientists shoved into the royal skull the handiest brain they had laying around--Al's! (Yes, over the course of twenty thousand years scientists kept Al's brain alive in that serum, nobody ever knocking over after a night of drinking or feeding it to his dog during an economic downturn or anything like that.)
Al walks out onto the balcony of the royal palace to assure the Male populace that their king is alive, and seconds later there is a Female air raid, and Al jumps into the gunner position on a flying boat and participates in a dogfight over the Male capitol city. Well, he doesn't really participate--when he gets some women in his sights he can't bring himself to pull the trigger. And when the Queen of the women, Nara, is shot down and emerges from the wreck of her flying machine, Al insists that she be taken captive instead of summarily executed, as is the usual practice in this genocidal war between the sexes.
In an effort to end the war, Al tries to introduce Nara to the idea of love by kissing her. This is the first kiss in thousands of years! The Queen agrees to help him make peace, so he frees her and guides her to an aircraft so she can return to the women's country and try to convince them to seek peace while he will similarly work on the men here. But Nara tricks our hero--she klunks him on the head and throws him into the flyer and takes him to the capitol city of the Females to be publicly executed!
At the last moment, just as he is about to be slain before a cheering crowd of bloodthirsty women, Nara decides to spare Brand. But her subordinates refuse to follow orders, and, in fact, declare their Queen a traitor and announce they will execute her along with Al!
But then Al wakes up back in the 20th century. His adventure in the future was all a dream! The mad scientist did not remove his brain, he just anesthetized Brand--all that brain removal talk was playacting designed to gauge Al's spirit! If Al had cried or begged for mercy, the scientist would have rejected him as a job candidate, but since Al cursed the scientist with his last conscious breaths, Al has been hired for an expedition to South America! Why would Al sign on to leave the country with such a creep? Because the woman he fell in love with in his dream looked like the scientist's daughter, whose picture he saw on the brainiac's desk before he was anaesthetized, and she is coming along! Oh, brother!
I have to give this one a thumbs down--the trick ending that throws the entire adventure plot into the trash is very irritating. And the adventure itself is lacking in the monsters and fights that make the Kaldar stories entertaining. I applaud Hamilton for tackling a social issue--the relationship between the sexes--but he doesn't actually explore the topic. Instead of speculating on what an all-male civilization or society might be like, and its all-female counterpart, he doesn't really describe them at all, other than to make the two societies totally identical. Why bother?
"The Star-Roamers"
It is the future! The human race has explored all the solar system, and there is a steady traffic of spacecraft between the planets. Humanity has also developed telepathic ability so everybody can communicate with everybody else with ease.
Three spacemen found that travel within our system did not offer enough excitement to satisfy their desire for adventure, so they invented a FTL drive and set out for Alpha Centauri. As our story begins these three buddies are approaching that double-star system. They discover that the binary star has three planets, and approach the outermost. A squadron of alien spacecraft attacks, but when things are looking bleak a friendly squadron of similar vessels comes by and saves the day.
The Terrans are escorted to the surface of Alpha Centauri III by their new friends where they learn all about the political--and evolutionary!--situation in this star system. On Alpha Cen I, the planet closest to the binary star, live the Rhels, people with liquid bodies! Long ago these fluid people built a modern civilization and colonized Alpha Cen II. Over the centuries the colonists, due to the different environment on Alpha Cen II, evolved semi-solid human-like bodies; these people with translucent protoplasm for flesh are called the Threns. Some of those jokers colonized Alpha Cen III, where people over time evolved fully solid bodies, quite like a Terran's--these people call themselves the Kerts. Nowadays, the technologically advanced Rhels of Alpha Cen I have almost no intercourse with the other races, while the Threns of Alpha Cen II are at war with the Kerts of Alpha Cen III. The Kerts are losing the war, and would like to make peace, and a majority of the population of Alpha Cen II would also like to end the war, but the Thren rulers are bent on conquering Alpha Cen III and ignore the appeals of the public.
After this history lesson there is a Thren air raid on the Kert capitol, and one of the top Kert officials, as well as one of the three Terrans, is seized and carried off. On Alpha Cen II they are put in a cell with a Rhel who was captured in a Thren raid on Alpha Cen I; they make friends with this guy, an important personage among the Rhels. Meanwhile, the other two Earthers fly to Alpha Cen II, managing to elude detection and land near the palace where their fellow Terran is imprisoned. The three prisoners escape, and meet up with the two Terrans, and then split up, one party stealing a Thren ship to fly to Alpha Cen I to arouse the isolationist Rhel to join the war on the Thren, the other party returning to Alpha Cen III.
A Rhel spacefleet joins a Kert fleet and battle is joined with the Threns. The Rhel have far superior weapons than the Kert and Thren, and make short work of the Thren space fleet. On the surface of Alpha Cen II a revolution breaks out against the leadership that started this immoral and disastrous war. The story ends with the three races of Alpha Centauri at peace and the Rhel promising to abandon their policy of isolation and share their superior technology (like weather control) with the Thren and Kerts, and the three Earthers heading off in their FTL ship to explore Sirius.
I guess because of the FTL drive and the space battles "The Star Roamers" is a space opera, not a planetary romance/sword and planet adventure like the Kaldar tales, and it is also a little more believable, relying less on incredible coincidences. But it still has the same basic plot as "Kaldar, World of Antares" and "Snake Men of Kaldar." Unfortunately, the weapons, alien landscapes and peoples, and fights in "The Star Roamers" are less interesting than those encountered by Stuart Merrick, so the story is less entertaining. I have to judge "The Star Roamers" barely acceptable.
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These four stories are all mediocre or poor examples of Hamilton's fiction, but still characteristic of his work and career. In his correspondence, H. P. Lovecraft often complained that Hamilton used the same plots over and over again, and we can certainly see evidence that supports that charge in this sample of four 1933 stories. Numerous times in the past we have seen themes of evolution and radiation in Hamilton's work, and they come up again here. In "War of the Sexes" and "The Star-Roamers" we also find ideas that would turn up in Hamilton's far superior space opera The Star of Life, like a guy waking up in the future and strange and difficult relationships between a race of people and their startlingly evolved descendants.
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