The Star of Life by Edmond Hamilton

He had risked death and he had died, almost, to win the freedom of the stars for men.  Not if he could help it was anyone going to abridge or limit that freedom.

There was a 50% off sale at Second Story
 Books, so I snagged this beauty for $1.50.

For my recent exercise in Malzbergian studies, the results of which appeared in my last blog post, I wanted copies of Harry Harrison's early 1970s anthologies Nova 1 and Nova 2.  I went to the vast and labyrinthine Second Story Books warehouse store in Rockville, MD to dig through boxes and shelves of SF paperbacks in the search for these two volumes, but came up empty.  This expedition was not a waste, however, as I laid eyes upon a dozen or so beautiful books I'd never seen before, and I even purchased one, the 1959 Crest paperback edition of Edmond Hamilton's The Star of Life.  This edition has a Richard Powers cover that features not only the characteristic Powers abstractions and weird buildings and spaceships, but human faces.  I very much admire Powers' depictions of the human form--check out his illustrations for Robert Heinlein's Number of the Beast and the cover of Fredric Brown's Star Shine  if you are only familiar with his more abstract work.

The Star of Life first appeared in 1947 in Startling Stories; isfdb has two distinct entries for the novel, one for the magazine version that went on to be included in Brian Aldiss's anthology Space Opera and one for the books that appeared in 1959--there was a hardcover as well as my paperback edition.  A quick look at the magazine version does suggest that the texts are substantially different.  My paperback is like 180 pages of text, and the version in Startling takes up like 55 or so pages, while, according to isfdb, only 15 pages of Space Opera is devoted to The Star of Life.  Maybe Aldiss only included an excerpt?  (isfdb clearly indicates that the contribution to Space Opera from Hamilton's wife, Leigh Brackett, is just an excerpt (from the MPorcius-approved The Sword of Rhiannon.))  Whatever the case, The Star of Life appears to have been liked by editors--the novel version was translated into French, German and Italian, and the version in Space Opera would appear in Croatian.

Let's see what one of Ohio's greatest SF writers and a particular fave of the MPorcius staff has in store for us this time.

Kirk Hammond took off from Earth in the middle of the Cold War in a three-stage rocket--he had been chosen to be the first man to see the dark side of the moon!  But the third stage of the rocket fired at the wrong time, and he found himself not about to swing around Luna and then back to Earth, but hurtling past the moon on a one-way trip to deep space!  As our story begins, Hammond makes a terrible decision: rather than wait long agonizing hours for his oxygen supply to run out, he commits suicide by cracking open the hatch and letting the cold of interplanetary space kill him!

But our man Kirk does not kick the bucket!  Instead he is flash frozen and preserved like those peas in your freezer your wife asked you to buy when you went to the store to stock up on Ovaltine!  Hammond wakes up when reentry into Earth's atmosphere heats up his little vessel and defrosts him!  How long has he been flying in a long comet-like orbit before one of his trips brought him within the loving embrace of Mother Terra's gravity?  A little over 10,000 years!

There is a long history of SF stories in which somebody sleeps for hundreds or thousands of years and then wakes up to confront a future world; this is apparently the plot of H. G. Wells's 1910 The Sleeper Awakes, which I have not read.  I have read a number of such stories over the course of this blog's career (immediatly coming to mind are Neil R. Jones's 1930s stories about Professor Jameson and the Zoromes, Hamilton's own "In the World's Dusk," Cordwainer Smith's 1957 "Mark Elf," and Clifford Simak's Cosmic Engineers) and I expect to read still more before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

Hammond lands on Earth, weak as a kitten, and is nursed back to health by a motley crew of weirdos living in an underground complex, hiding from dangerous enemies.  Hammond's new friends teach him their lingo and he learns all about life on Earth in the year 12094.  His rescuers call themselves the Hoomen, and are a multiethnic bunch whose members include people with blue or grey skins as well as people with classic skin colors like yours and mine.  Mankind conquered space and colonized planets that orbit other stars long ago--the blue and grey people are humans whose bodies, over many generations, evolved to suit their extraterrestrial environments.

But all is not well for humanity!  Around the year 10000 some humans exploring the Trifid Nebula discovered a means of attaining immortality and instead of sharing it with all the galaxy kept it to themselves!  For centuries now they have comprised a small elite of super-scientists known as the Vramen, and their long lives have enabled them to develop super weapons that have made them practically invincible.  These jokers control the entire galactic civilization, in particular maintaining a firm grip on all space travel to keep anybody else from going to that Trifid Nebula.  Most Hoomen have grudgingly accepted Vramen domination--though they keep immortality to themselves they have produced much technology that has made life better for everybody--but the group of people Hammond has fallen among are independent-minded types, a band of rebels!  Their leader is Jon Wilson, a man whose look of fanatic dedication to his cause reminds Hammond of pictures he has seen of John Brown!  (Wilson also has a pretty daughter named Iva who quickly develops a crush on our astronaut hero.)  Wilson's band of conspirators are secretly building an illegal star ship that won't have the mandated Vramen surveillance and control apparatus, and you already know where they want to fly that ship, don't you?  To the Trifid Nebula to snag that immortality for themselves and for all mankind!

"It's a suicide attempt, Hammond.  We all know it...But if we should succeed, we will have given all mankind indefinitely long life, freeing them forever from the tyranny of the Vramen and the vastly greater tyranny of time."

Despite the fact that Hammond's last space trip was a total disaster, he volunteers for this dangerous operation, seeing as, all his life, he has believed in human freedom and aspired to give the human race untrammeled access to the stars!  Another thing that sticks in his craw is the Vramen practice of using a ray projector device to control the minds of rebellious mortals--"He had an old-fashioned ingrained notion that a man's mind, and the freedom thereof, was an inviolable right."

Before the rebel star ship is completed there is a skirmish with the Vramen, and the rebels capture one of the arrogant elitists' top brainiacs--a gorgeous blue-eyed blonde named Thayn Marden!  The rebels are thrilled--this chick can guide them through the Trifid Nebula to the planet of immortality, Althar, warning them of any dangers on the way.  "You are children," Marden warns them, "You talk of things you do not know.  If you knew what really lies at Althar...."

The Star of Life includes large helpings of human drama and emotion.  Hamilton does a good job of describing Hammond's despair when he is in the doomed space capsule in the first chapter, the Hooman resentment of the Vramen, and the contempt the centuries-old Thayn Marden has for mortal humans, who are like ignorant children to her.  This is a space opera, but a space opera in which the author tries to get into the heads of people in futuristic and alien situations and portray their motives and feelings for us readers, and I think he succeeds in a way that is entertaining.  I have complained that SF novels I have read recently--Simak's Cosmic Engineers and Arthur Sellings's The Power of X--lacked human feeling, and Hamilton here shows us how much painting characters with believable relationships and emotions can help bring to life an alien milieu (how much respect would you accord a 30-year-old engineer if you had been studying physics and inventing machinery for 200 years? how would you feel if your child or spouse contracted a terminal illness and you knew there was a way to make your loved one immune from disease and a haughty smartypants was keeping it from you?) and make you care about a more or less traditional adventure plot.  The moment Thayn Marden stepped onstage I wanted to learn more about her and see what her relationship with Hammond would be like, and I was eager to find out what the hell was going on in that Trifid Nebula.

The presence of Marden spurs doubts in Hammond about the rebels, largely because the Hoomen conspirators are willing to use a high tech brain reading device to get information out of the Vramen genius, and the device threatens to damage her brain.  Marden, for her part, is eager to talk to Hammond, ostensibly to learn all about the 20th century.  Jealous, Iva Wilson warns Hammond about Marden: "The Vramen are loveless and childless, caring only for knowledge and power.  Don't be deceived by her beauty."  Despite this warning Marden exploits Hammond's attraction to her and tricks him into exposing the conspiracy so all the rebels end up arrested, on trial, and then sentenced to life on a penal planet orbiting Spica!  This mishap sours Hammond's relationship with the rebels, who consider him a traitor, but also gives him (and us readers) a chance to see mainstream Hooman society, its beautiful cities and its legal system and its star ships, and its uneasy relationship with the Vramen, who dominate the galactic society while disdaining to hold any official government positions.

Internment on the single planet of the Spica system marks the mid point of the novel.  Imprisonment there is not harsh--the prisoners all have nice houses and challenging productive work clearing away the native jungle with bulldozers.  Security is light because there's nowhere for the prisoners to go--the whole planet is their prison and they are hemmed in by the deadly jungle.  But it is rough for Hammond because all the other prisoners hate him--at one point they even leave him to die in the clutches of a native jungle monster!  He decides to get back in their good graces (and "make them eat crow") by leading an escape attempt; he has the guards contact Thayn Marden, who comes to Spica in response to Hammond's offer to help the Vramen in their historical researches (the 20th century lies within a gap in their historical knowledge resulting from the destruction of archives in an interplanetary war that broke out soon after man colonized Mars and Venus.)  Hammond catches Marden off-guard by professing love to her (there is a lesson here for all you ladies!) and knocks her out and deactivates the forcefield protecting the spaceport.  So Jon Wilson's crew, along with Hammond and Marden, blast off for the Trifid Nebula.

After a challenging trip through the Trifid Nebula the rebels land on Althar, where they find that the Vramen inhabit only a small fortified mountain base; the rest of the planet is in the hands of the Vramen-hating natives known as the Third Men.  Despite Marden's warnings about them, Wilson tries to make friends with these tall humanoids, and our cast ends up in their black cubic city of Vonn.  The Third Men, like the Vramen, are immortal--the source of immortality is radiation from Althar's sun.  Althar is odd in another way--it has no metal, which has kept the otherwise scientifically advanced Third Men from building space craft and nuclear reactors.  The ship Wilson's rebels have brought to Althar has been wrecked, but enough material from it has been salvaged to allow the Third Men to build all the nuclear reactors, super weapons and star ships anybody could ever need.  (Once they have a nuclear reactor they can just create metal.)

Wilson commits himself and his friends to full support of the Third Men, but when Hammond learns Wilson has handed over not only all that valuable material but also Thayen Marden to these mysterious characters, he finally admits to himself the thing all of us readers and all the other characters in the book have known since page 52--he is in love with Thayen Marden, the smartest, strongest, most beautiful woman he has ever met!  Hammond rescues Marden, and the two of them flee Vonn for the Vramen fortress.  Despite all the complaints we hear about women in magazines like Startling being ineffectual damsels in distress, it is Marden who does all the brain work involved in this escape and journey: she figures out how to outwit the Third Men's security robots, she pilots a jet aircraft, she thinks up the ruse by which they evade the pursuing Third Men aircraft, etc.  As the two lovers march through a moss forest to the fortress, their stolen aircraft a crumpled hulk sunk in a lake behind them, Marden reveals to Hammond the horrible truth about immortality and the origins of the Vramen, the Third Men, and the still more mysterious Fourth Men!   

As we have seen before, over his entire long career, Hamilton has been interested in radiation, mutation, and evolution.  The Third Men are the children of the Vramen, smarter and stronger still than their parents, thanks to changes to their parents' DNA wrought by the same radiation that made the Vramen immortal.  Unfortunately, the genetic changes to the Vramen also resulted in their children being amoral and ruthless, determined to conquer the universe.  And they won't be kind masters--they consider Hoomen to be nothing more than animals!   The Vramen have kept the Third Men bottled up on Althar--despite their superior abilities, the Third Men have been unable to take the Vramen fortress because they have lacked metal and atomics...the very things Wilson just gave them!  If something isn't done soon, the Third Men will take over the planet and build a space navy that will enslave the galaxy! 

The Third Men's children, the Fourth Men, are even more intelligent than their parents, and you will be relieved to hear that they have no worldly ambitions, and live in a hermit city where they live the life of the mind.  They are also sterile.  In the final pages of the novel Hammond has to go to their hermit city to ask them for help against their parents.  The Fourth Men use their astonishing mental powers to bring the Third Men to heel, but not before they have demolished the Vramen fortress with their super weapons, inflicting many casualties on their parents.  Among the casualties is beautiful genius Thayn Marden--the love of Hammond's life dies in his arms!

The Star of Life is a great space opera, for the reasons I have already enumerated and because Hamilton is a skilled professional writer: the pacing is good; there is a balance of violent or tense action scenes and more chatty scenes; the characters and settings are described enough to produce a memorable image and tone without overburdening the reader with excessive superfluous detail.

An Italian omnibus edition including
The Star of Life as well as two other novels

The novel also includes themes we see in SF all the time.  SF is full of minorities of superior people who are envied and resented by the normies--A. E. van Vogt's Slan are an early example, and the X-Men a more famous one.  Such people are better than the rest of us, so even though they contribute to our society they are subject to suspicion because they are different, envy for their superiority and fear of their power.  SF is also full of elitism, with many stories by the foremost practitioners in the field (Asimov, Heinlein, Sturgeon, etc.) about how the smarter people should manipulate the common man because the common man is too dumb to know what is good for him.  The Star of Life has both of these elements.  Early in the book Hammond is lead to believe that the Vramen are keeping the secret of immortality to themselves out of pure selfishness, but it turns out that these geniuses have been keeping it out of the hands of the masses because if everybody was immortal the human race would be on the road to cultural and biological sterility and finally extinction.  Marden asserts, and Hammond is moved to agree, that just explaining to people the dangers of immortality would not be enough, that the vast majority of people would selfishly seek immortality and say to hell with the future of the human race.

Minor themes of the novel include disappointment and doubt.  I appreciate serious adult themes like these in my adventure stories, and Hamilton deploys them well here.  Immortality is a disappointment, and the Vramen and the Third Men are disappointed in their offspring.  Hammond not only has doubts and changes his mind about the various characters he meets and the justice of the actions of both Wilson's rebels and the arrogant Vramen, but more than once he even doubts, Malzberg style, the wisdom of the space program for which he has devoted and risked his life:

"Was it such a good thing to conquer space?  We thought it would be, back in the Twentieth Century.  But was it?"  

A fun and satisfying space caper--once again I offer kudos to Edmond Hamilton and recommend one of his books to fans of classic SF adventure.  The Star of Life is the real deal.

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My copy of The Star of Life has five pages of ads at the back--none of these ads are for SF books.  But they are still kind of interesting.  In the coveted "If you liked this space opera about inter-mutant rivalry you'll want to read our novel about a teenaged girl who gets raped" spot is Lost Summer by Christopher Davis, which was admired by John Wain, whose idiosyncratic biography of Samuel Johnson I found interesting.  Then we have (at last in paperback) James Gould Cozzens's By Love Possessed, a best-selling and award-winning novel about a small town lawyer.  The wikipedia articles about By Love Possessed and Cozzens's relationship with the literati of his day are actually pretty interesting.

Next up is a book of fairy tales endorsed by Woman's Day magazine and introduced by Dr. Joyce Brothers; I was interested to learn that Woman's Day is still alive (and full of articles about the British royal family and Oprah, who I guess, in the absence of any notable female Kennedys, is sort of like America's Queen) but Brothers, who used to pop up on TV all the time in my youth, is dead.  The Bystander is, I think, a novel by a Texas-born Harvard prof about a young Frenchman who chases an older woman.  Finally we have the movie-tie in edition of Alan Le May's The Unforgiven, which I guess is about the relationship between white settlers and native Indians in the Southwest.

I was curious to see the cover of the movie-tie in edition of The Unforgiven, which apparently features a color photo of Burt Lancaster and Audrey Hepburn, but couldn't find one online, just a description.  Images of the sex novels are readily available, however; unfortunately they are not nearly as interesting or even as sexy as Powers's cover for The Star of Life.  Yet again, SF beats the mainstream!