The Weapon From Beyond by Edmond Hamilton

"I can't go back to Varna now.  'Damn Earthspawn!' Ssander called me.  Me, as Varnan as he was in everything but blood.  But I can't go back."

It's adventure time!

On a road trip across America's great Middle West in August of 2015 I purchased a copy of the 1982 omnibus edition of Edmond Hamilton's Starwolf trilogy at The Book Rack in Davenport, Iowa.  The three Starwolf novels were originally published in the late 1960s; today let's experience Starwolf #1, 1967's The Weapon From Beyond.  Like A. E. van Vogt and Barry Malzberg, over the course of this blog's life Edmond Hamilton has become one of those writers I am perennially interested in, any specimen of whose work I will read with attention out of curiosity, but, as always, I will strive to give a fair assessment of The Weapon From Beyond's merits, judging the novel without fear or favor!*

*If for some morbid reason you want to hear me slag some Hamilton stories, check out what I said about "Child of the Winds" and "Alien Earth."  "Alien Earth" was praised by SF icons Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg, so you know I was going against the establishment in expressing my antipathy towards it!

Morgan Chane is a dangerous criminal, one of the space pirates known as Starwolves who blast off from planet Varna in their needle-shaped ships to plunder peaceful inhabited planets throughout the galaxy.  "...to come down in a surprise swoop on the fat little planet with the fat little people who squeaked and panicked when he and his comrades hit their rich towns...."  Whoa, these Starwolves aren't just murderers and thieves, they also commit hate speech against people of size!

As The Weapon From Beyond begins, Chane's life has taken a dramatic turn.  There was a dispute over how to divide some loot and shots were fired (who would have thought you couldn't trust a bunch of pirates to settle their differences amicably?), and now Chane is all alone in a small ship, on the run from his erstwhile comrades.  Taking refuge in a cloud of dust, the power generator of Chane's ship is wrecked by a meteoroid, and he has to go out into space, propelling himself with hand held "impellers," just like Jack Gaughan depicted on the cover of the first edition of the novel and some Swede did on the 1970 Swedish translation.

Most Starwolves are native Varnans, and Chane is a pure-blooded Earthman (though he has never seen Earth, one of the poorest inhabited planets), but the captain of the ship that picks him up out of space is not fooled--one look at his superb muscles and John Dilullo, mercenary commander, knows Clane has been spending lots of time on high-gravity planet Varna!  Instead of handing Chane over to his crew for summary execution for crimes against galactic civilization, Dilullo blackmails Chane into joining the mercs, promising to not expose the pirate if he follows orders and contributes to the success of the merc's current mission.

That mission concerns a war between two planets in the same star system.  The blue-skinned humans of Kharal are arrogant and wealthy thanks to the valuable gems and minerals their planet's mines produce, and the white-skinned and white-haired Vhollan of planet Vhol are trying to take over Kharal.  The Kharali repelled a conventional Vhollan space fleet, but have intelligence suggesting the Vhollan are hiding a super weapon of some kind in the nearby nebula.  The Kharali have hired Dilullo and his team of Earthling mercenaries (Earth, being poor and having a history of warfare, produces some of the most courageous, resourceful and desperate men in the galaxy) to find and destroy this super weapon.  The first half or so of The Weapon From Beyond's 150 pages consists of Dilullo's team, most prominently Chane, talking to people and sneaking around behind their backs on Kharal and Vhol, looking for clues as to the nature and location of the super weapon, with people breaking and entering and getting captured and escaping, like in so many adventure stories.  In the second half of the novel Chane and compatriots fly into the nebula, and we get space chases and space battles involving both Vhollan and Spacewolf ships.  The "super weapon" turns out to be the wreck of an extra-galactic starship of tremendous size, the product of a mysterious civilization which crashed on a barren planet ages ago.

The mercs capture the Vhollan scientists studying the mile-long artifact, who tell them the extra-galactic aliens, whom they call the Krii, were pacific scientists with no weapons who were studying our galaxy.  (As he did back in 1929 in Outside the Universe, Hamilton blurs the distinction between "galaxy" and "universe," suggesting that maybe in other galaxies the laws of physics are different; the Krii, as one character puts it, "don't even have the same atomic table.")  In the kind of coincidence that happens all the time in fiction, right during a gun battle between the mercs and Vhollan soldiers, after thousands of years, a Krii rescue ship finally arrives to revive the crew of the crashed vessel, who were in suspended animation.  The Krii pacifists employ a field that causes all merc and Vhollan equipment and weapons to cease functioning, but otherwise they ignore the violent Milky Way natives.  The Krii take everything of scientific value out of the wreck, then disintegrate it and leave.  Dilullo has the disintegration filmed so he can tell the Kharali that the Vohllan secret weapon has been eliminated and collect the mercs' fee.

As the story ends Chane agrees to stick around with Dilullo's mercenary company for the time being.
       
There is nothing particularly new or special about The Weapon From Beyond, but it is competently written, the characters all have their little conflicts and quirks, and there are plenty of cool alien creatures and cool high tech devices, scanners and detectors and weapons and things.  The danger-in-space scenes and action scenes all work.

A sort of theme of The Weapon From Beyond is race and ethnicity and relations between different intelligent life forms and branches of humanity.  Like a lot of SF settings, Hamilton's Milky Way galaxy in the Starwolf books posits that many planets in the ancient past were seeded with human life, so that scores or hundreds of planets have human populations.  These populations have had over a million years to evolve separately, so on Varna people are super strong and covered in hair and on Kharal they are tall and blue and on Vhol white as a sheet of paper.  These different strains of humanity have different politics and cultures and personalities and express dim views of each other--as perhaps is fitting for an action adventure series, Hamilton seems to focus more on interethnic conflict than cooperation.

Chane's own character reflects this conflict.  Like Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan and Leigh Brackett's Erik John Stark (Brackett was Hamilton's wife and Burroughs was Brackett's hero and inspiration), Morgan Chane is a cross-cultural figure, raised by people of a different race in a harsh alien environment, and this gives him special abilities.  But before the start of this novel Chane has been rejected by the people who raised him, the Varnans, and now they hunt him.  The third book in the Starwolf series is titled World of the Starwolves and I wonder if Clane returns to Varna to mend fences and rejoin the amoral supermen who reared him and taught him all he knows, or to cement his relationship with mainstream galactic civilization by wiping out the pirates.

I enjoyed The Weapon From Beyond, and it was apparently a big success for Hamilton; the novel was published in at least six foreign languages, giving artists from around the globe the opportunity to draw men in space suits and space ships, though Karel Thole for the Italian publication chose to present a striking and surreal image that I am having trouble linking to any specific scene in the novel.  (Maybe Thole was illustrating the short story accompanying The Weapon From Beyond in Urania 481, Miriam Allen de Ford's "The Colony.")

We'll read the second Starwolf novel, The Closed Worlds, soon, but first, some horror tales from famous and important horror writers in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.