Edmond Hamilton: "The Comet Doom" and "Cities in the Air"

Let's check out more Edmond Hamilton stories from the 1920s, not from Farnsworth Wright's Weird Tales, but from Hugo Gernsback's titles.  Just two today, but they are kind of longish.  I almost had us deal with three stories today, but then I realized I had already blogged about a 1968 printing of 1929's "Locked Worlds," the saga of an embittered scientist who tries to help spider people conquer the Earth but is foiled by bird people and his former assistant, a couple of years ago.

To read along at scans of the original magazines in which today's stories debuted, try the following links:

"The Comet Doom"             "Cities in the Air: Part 1"             "Cities in the Air: Part 2"

"The Comet Doom" (1928)

The cover of the January 1928 issue of Amazing Stories illustrates "The Comet Doom," thrilling and chilling us with the sight of two men in chains, menaced by a square-headed robot wielding a phallic symbol, but Hamilton's name is not on the cover, nor is the name of the story.  The marketing of magazines is sometimes mysterious to me.  As a consumer, I like when there is a picture of something interesting on the cover and next to it the words "See Page XX!"  But I guess the editor figures that if you have to hunt through the magazine to find something, maybe you'll stumble upon something else of interest along the way and feel the need to actually buy the magazine and not just read one article while standing there in the store.

The cover does advertise some of Gernsback's other magazines, including French Humor.  You can read an issue of French Humor at this link; it looks like the magazine offers (in the language of Voltaire as well as in translation) ribald jokes and one-panel gag comics from French periodicals.  Gernsback claims that the jokes in the magazine are not smutty, that humor is humor all the world round and no matter where they come from, people laugh at the same jokes, and that this magazine is dedicated to building understanding between the USA and France.  I'd take all these claims with a grain of salt, myself.  Here are some sample gags:

“He says that if I’m false to him, he will kill himself.”

“Is your conscience clear?“

"Oh, yes! I hid his revolver."

*

“This is the first time I've gone out without my husband.”

“Really?”

“Yes.  The first time today.”

*

"What!  He really tried to kiss you the first time he met you?  I hope you were firm."

"No, he was."

The Jan '28 ish of Amazing also reprints H. G. Wells' "The Stolen Body," a story we recently read in the November 1925 issue of Weird Tales. 

Alright, on to the main event, Edmond Hamilton's "The Comet Doom," fourteen densely-packed pages of text.  Like some other Hamilton productions*, parts of "The Comet Doom" read like a popular history or magazine feature written in the further future about a cataclysm that takes place in the near future; the story then transitions into a more typical adventure type format.  A green comet appears in the sky, gets closer and closer to the Earth, but the scientists calculate it will pass by our planet, never getting closer than a million miles.  But then, when the comet is only a few days away from that nearest approach, the Earth's own speed and direction of movement through space change, bringing us into an intercept course with the comet.  Spectrographic measurements a day or so later indicate the comet's tail is made of poison gas--we'll all die when the comet tail touches our atmosphere!

*"A Conquest of Two Worlds," and "The Polar Doom" are prime examples.  

The personal story of "The Comet Doom" concerns Canadian hiker Marlin.  He has walked from Ontario around Lake Erie into Ohio.  From Ohio he takes a boat across the lake for home.  He is on this fishing boat with its owner when the announcement is made about the poison gas, and so is ignorant of it.  The boat is passing an island when a disintegrator ray from the island annihilates half the boat, including its owner.  Marlin is not hit, and swims to the island where he meets an entomologist, Coburn, who has been camping on the island with his roommate from New York City and fellow biologist, Hanley, looking for rare insects.

The bug guy tells Marlin an insane story.  After spending a few quiet weeks on the uninhabited island, four fifty-foot-high black cones landed near their cabin and the metal figures who emerged from the ships, tall machines with four skinny spider legs and four tentacles, took them captive with a stun ray and chained them up in their cabin.  Gifted with perfect memory, the aliens learn the English language quickly from the biologists, and then tell the two captive humans their own crazy story.  

The aliens evolved on the comet, just as we humans evolved on Earth.  (It seems the comet is bigger than Earth, more like a planet that doesn't orbit a star than what I think of as a comet.  Hamilton's stories are of course full of planets and stars on the move in this way--see "Thundering Worlds" and "The Star Stealers.")  The comet peoples science far surpasses ours, and they were able to dispense with much of the trouble of acquiring food and getting rid of bodily wastes as well as that time-waster of all time-wasters, sleep, by building robot bodies powered by nuclear reactors and implanting their brains within them; they just have to replace the fluid their brains float in every week.  Thus the comet people achieved immortality.

Or so they thought.  Eventually the fuel their nuclear reactors require became scarce on the comet.  Uh oh.  Luckily, they would soon (in a few centuries) pass through our solar system, and so they planned to capture the Earth, where there is still lots of radioactive material.  The four cone ships landed on this island to set up a device the size of a house that would neutralize the effect of the Sun's gravity on the Earth--the Earth would then fall within the gravitational field of the comet and be carried off, a new source of natural resources and living room for the comet people.

The comet people proposed a deal with the two scientists--they would remove the two humans' brains and put them in machine bodies, thus conferring upon them immortality.  Of course, in return the traitors to Mother Terra would be expected to use their knowledge and expertise to help the comet peeps exploit the newly depopulated Earth.  Coburn the entomologist was disgusted by this scheme, but his colleague Hanley signed up with the metal-skinned planet pirates!  The entomologist watched as his friend's brain was removed and installed in a black robot body--Hamilton's science fiction adventure stories often include these kinds of scenes of horror.

Hanley the traitor helped build the machine that freed Earth from the gravity of Sol and sent Terra hurtling towards the comet and universal death.  Of the whole human race, only the two scientists would survive, one as a traitor, the other as the subject of experiments!  Through luck and pluck, Coburn escaped the cabin and has now run into Marlin the Canadian hiker. 

The two of them are the only loyal human beings who know about the alien attack and the only people who can do anything about it.  Unfortunately, Marlin didn't pack a Thompson submachine gun or a 3-inch mortar in his haversack when he left Ontario for his hike, so our guys have to try to knock out the gravity neutralizer with their bare hands.  They attack separately, and futilely; Coburn gets disintegrated by a ray, and Marlin is seized.  But their heroism, apparently, makes Hanley, in his immortal mechanical body, regret his treachery.  Just moments before the Earth is seized by the gravity field of the titanic comet, Hanley grabs a dial or something, makes the big machine neutralize not the gravity of the Sun, but of the Earth under the machine.  The machine, the four cones, Hanley, and all the aliens (those who held Marlin left the Canadian to help their metallic comrades when they saw Hanley up to some shenanigans) are hurled into space.  The Earth, again feeling the pull of old Sol, begins moving away from the comet.                  

This story offers an important life lesson that has nothing to do with gravity or brain surgery or immortality or any of that.  Don't expect a person who betrays his or her party or people to join yours to remain loyal to you--he will betray you just as blithely as he betrayed the last institution he was aligned with.

"The Comet Doom" is not great, but it isn't bad.  All the science stuff is fun, and Hamilton's style is, as usual, pretty good--he's not at the Gene Wolfe or Tanith Lee or Jack Vance level, obviously, but he does a good job of balancing the quasi-literary descriptions of the sky and the water, the investigations of people's emotions, the science lectures, and the action and horror material.  The problems have to do with the fact that we keep hearing the story through one or two frames, from a narrator who heard it from another guy or even yet another guy.  In my opinion, this story would have been better told from the point of view of Hanley, a memoir or testimonial from Hanley after his immortal body is picked up from space by the comet people immediately after the events of the story or by an American space program decades after the events of the story.

So, I moderately recommend "The Comet Doom."  The saga of Hanley the serial traitor has been presented to the SF-reading public quite a number of times, for example, in a German Hamilton collection, a 1939 British magazine that offered several reprints of stories by American weirdies like Jack Williamson and Clark Ashton Smith, and an issue of Amazing from 1965 full of reprints--back in 2018 we read Chad Oliver's story from that one, "Final Exam." 

"Cities in the Air" (1929)

This is a long one, 38 pages of text, 68 lines per page, spread over two issues of Air Wonder Stories, the November and December 1929 issues.  Gernsback really packs the words into his magazines--by way of comparison, a page of the November 1926 issue of Weird Tales, in which we just read E. Hoffmann Price's "The Peacock's Shadow," has like 52 lines.  And I think the margins in Gernsback's magazine are smaller!  Look for yourself:

It is 2069!  Earth is divided into three polities.  We've got the American Federation that consists of the entire New World--capitol: New York City.  We've got the European Federation of Europe and Africa--capitol: Berlin.  And we've got the Asiatic Federation of China, Japan, Russia east of the Caucasus, Australia, etc.--capitol: Peking.  These three alliances have gone to war with each other again and again, and, during the era of Air War Three, the great cities were moved to the sky!  New York City, like all human habitations, now rests on a disk five miles in diameter that hovers five miles above the ground.  The land below, once densely populated, is today green wilderness!  The cities can move slowly, to respond to weather events and enemy attack, and are each defended by air forts armed with heat guns and fleets of flying warships similarly armed.  

After thirty years of peace, the Euros and Asiatics have formed an alliance and are attacking America.  Our narrator is Captain Btrant, skipper of one of America's air cruisers, a torpedo-shaped warship capable of speeds in excess of 1000mph, like the air cities and air forts powered by the "electrostatic or atmospheric electricity surrounding the earth," an inexhaustible resource.  His ship joins the fleet of 2000 massing at New York, and then they battle the Euro fleet of 4000 air ships over and under the Atlantic, the ships being capable of travel underwater as well as in the air.  Hamilton often includes fleet actions in his stories, battles reminiscent of naval battles but in three dimensions, and he expends a lot of ink here as elsewhere talking about the formations of the fleets and their maneuvers.  (The aforementioned "Locked Worlds" includes just such a fleet action between aircraft, and there are several large scale naval battles set in space in the Interstellar Patrol stories we read back in 2015, 2016, and 2021.)  I'm going to have to tell you that Hamilton's repeated use of "detonate" instead of "discharge" as in

Slowed and halted there in two great masses of cruisers in mid-air, our own to the west and the European one to the east, and then, with every heat-gun detonating and with the air between them seemingly filled with shining, hurtling shells, they were hanging motionless in a mighty death-grip!

got on my nerves.  I also kind of object to "heat-gun" for a gun that fires shells--in SF, a heat gun is generally a heat ray projector or something of that nature.  These guns just fire a shell that generates tremendous heat when they explode upon hitting the target, enough heat to melt the hull and inner workings of a ship.  Presumably these guns could fire shells that were not heat shells, so the name is a little inappropriate.

The battle drags on for page after page.  Finally, the Americans trick the Euros into falling into an ambush--air forts dispatched from New York are hiding in a huge artificial cloud bank.  (Didn't Kuttner and Moore in "Clash by Night" resolve a naval battle with a similar gag, luring the enemy into range of some kind of monitor or mobile fortress?)  The Euros turn tail, having lost half their fleet, but the American fleet has similarly been reduced to half size.

The next day, Brant is given command of a task force of 250 airships.  Intelligence reports indicate that at Berlin a superweapon is being developed, and the narrator's task force is to attack Berlin and do whatever can be done to prevent the completion and use of this secret weapon.

Brant's squadron makes its way to Berlin, avoiding European patrols and navigating fields of air mines along the way.  They drop heat-bombs on the military installations of the big airborne city, causing considerable damage, but suicidally vengeful Euros ram the narrator's ship after his bombing run.  (There is a lot of kamikaze behavior in these 1920s Hamilton stories, and multiple instances in this very story.)  Brant and the rest of the bridge crew, two other guys, survive the crash within the city and are captured; all the lower deck officers and ratings are killed. 

The narrator and his two comrades are imprisoned in the same cell as an American secret agent they knew a few years ago when he was a fellow air naval officer.  The spy tells a wild story, as people you meet in prison are apt to do.  In disguise, he infiltrated berlin and over a course of months joined the Euro air navy and eventually got himself assigned to the secret project.  That project: the development of a new kind of propellor system that will allow their cities to move much faster than the American cities.  Fast cities can be used as super-dreadnaughts and gang up on the slow American cities and destroy them piecemeal.in an overwhelming sneak attack.  

So ends the first part of the two-part serial.  Part Two, in the December issue, starts off with some psychological stuff and some little insight into life in the late 21st century.  Imprisoned in a skyscraper 1000-feet above the streets of Berlin, our heroes are in a black despair, "a state of half-lassitude," knowing that within weeks the new city propellors will be ready and the Euro and Asiatic forces will attack America and destroy all human life in the New World.  Hamilton describes their routine in the prison and we get this bit of gastronomic horror:

Twice each day, at dawn and at dusk, our door was opened by the guards that brought our food, that food being as in our own air-cities the paste-like synthetic compounds of artificial proteins and fats and carbohydrates which had decades before replaced the old natural foods. 

Hamilton doesn't in "Cities in the Air" draw any distinctions between life and culture in the American Federation and the European Federation--these two societies' technology and food and the way their militaries are organized seem to be the same, and there is very little suggestion that one Federation or another has more religious freedom or less free speech or more tax-payer funded handouts for the poor or a less democratic government than either of the others or anything like that.  The Europeans, we are told, have a "European tongue...[a] Latin-Teutonic combination of languages which was universal throughout the European Federation," their service members where green uniforms unlike the American black, and the TV screen in the control center of Berlin is a sphere while that in New York is flat, but that is about it.   What are these people fighting for in a world in which everybody is totally deracinated and every single meal consists of disgusting artificial goop?            

The youngest and least discouraged of the four men comes up with a desperate scheme to help the spy and one other man escape to get back to New York to warn America about the new propellor and help build an American version of this war-winning device.  The two men get away from the building, hijack a Euro air vessel, but are dramatically shot down in view of the cell window.  Even greater depression sets in among the survivors!

Like ten days later the props are ready and the European cities, 100 of them, mass to attack the East Coast of America.  Brant comes up with a desperate scheme of his own!  He makes grappling hooks out of pieces of metal torn from a bed and the belts of their uniforms and he and his fellow officer rappel down 1000 feet to the street and hijack a Euro air ship themselves.  Nobody locks the doors to these heavily armed ships--maybe 2069 is a period of low crime.  Pursued across the Atlantic, our guys are rescued by American air cruisers.  Amazingly, they find that their friends were not shot down but faked being shot down--the spy got to New York and the American cities have new advanced propellors of their own and will be able to mass together to fight the massed European cities on an equal footing.

The final cataclysmic struggle near the Great Lakes, in which the densely packed skyscrapers of many cities are reduced to molten slag by heat shells and then those cities fall to Earth when their propulsion systems are damaged by succeeding bombardments, takes up like nine pages.  Our narrator has a front row seat to the action, he having been given command of the flagship American city, New York.  America is outnumbered two to one, our 100 cities facing 100 Euro cities coming from the East and 100 Asian cities coming across the Pacific from the West.  (Maybe they should have hurried East to fight the Euros before the Asians arrived?)  Hamilton describes the various formations adopted and maneuvers attempted by the three fleets and the monotonous fusillade of heat shells, lists off the names of world famous cities as they crash down to the Earth.  The European and Asiatic cities carry only military personnel, those aggressors having left their civilian population behind in newly built shelters on the vacant surface, but the American cities still carry their ordinary citizens and when St. Louis, Seattle, and Miami are reduced to melted wrecks and crash, millions of people are slain, never to enjoy their goop again.

Atlanta and Cleveland and Mexico City were whirling downward, giant masses of lights in which glowed countless great fusing craters of metal, gyrating insanely down through the darkness to crash in awful destruction on the surface of the affrighted earth far below!

So severely outnumbered, it doesn't look like the New World can beat the Old in this slugfest, so Brant gives up his post as pilot of New York City to lead the last ditch attack of a squadron of cruisers he has held back in reserve.  They fly to Berlin, only like 20% of the cruisers surviving the brief flight, seeing as the air is full of crisscrossing heat shells, and Brant and his men commando-style jump from their ships into Berlin's central tower, where they kill everybody they encounter with their heat pistols.  Again and again Hamilton reminds us that the rounds from the pistols reduce those hit by them to "scorched, burned heaps of flesh."  Brant seizes the controls of Berlin and intentionally collides with the other Euro and Asiatic cities, wrecking their superstructures with the German city's base--those superstructures house the apparatus that collects static electricity and powers the cities, and its destruction sends the cities, one after the other, crashing to earth.  (This apparatus is immune to heat shells, by the way, so you can't just shoot it.)  The narrator, having destroyed all the lesser foreign cities, sets the controls of Berlin to crash and he and his crew jump out into their cruiser and escape moments before impact.    

The Asian and European cities are wiped out, while fifty American cities survive.  (The Upper Midwest is now carpeted with the melted wreckage of 250 cities, each 5 miles in diameter.)  The final lines of "Cities in the Air" suggest that this was the last Air War, that the American Federation will make an enduring peace with the grounded peoples of the Old World.  One hopes that, stuck on the ground, the Europeans will rediscover the joys of bangers and mash, spaghetti and meatballs, and lamb gyros, while the Asians reacquaint themselves with chicken fried rice and pork gyoza. 

This story is long, and the characters and societies depicted have almost no personality or relationships to each other.  Hamilton tells the story with enthusiasm and there are cool images (lots of stuff that happens in this story reminds you of stuff that happens in the first Star Wars movie or in the Space Battleship Yamato material I saw as a kid under the Starblazers moniker) but we get the same images of thundering artillery and crashing cities, of aircraft whizzing here and there and then getting crumpled and falling inert to Earth, again and again, and it gets stale.  Shortening the story by making the battles briefer or having fewer battles would have been an improvement.  The best section of the story is the stuff in the cell, where we get some human feeling.

We're judging "Cities in the Air" acceptable.  The epic of the Last Air War would have to wait until the 21st century to see reprint in the third volume of Haffner Press' The Collected Edmond Hamilton and in a double novel (paired with Harl Vincent's The War of the Planets) put out by Armchair Fiction.  John Betancourt included "Cities in the Air" in the genre fiction internet magazine Black Cat Weekly in 2022.  Maybe people besides me really are reading these things in the current era.