The Time-Raider by Edmond Hamilton

Up, up they came, a sea of ragged figures, a storm of flashing weapons.  A catlike Egyptian and a giant Chinaman were first of that mob, with behind them the massed weight of the hordes in the pit, pushing up from far below, to win up to the flying-platforms that would carry them to the loot of Kom.

It is time for another Edmond Hamilton serial!  No doubt you remember the aerial naval battles of "Cities of the Air."  And the epic adventure of "The Fire Princess," in which four spies, an America, an Englishwoman, a Soviet, and a Japanese, compete to influence the beautiful queen of a lost race of white people in Tibet who possess alien technology capable of wiping out our modern civilization.  And then there are "The Vampire Master,"  "Across Space," "The Lake of Life," "Outside the Universe," and "Crashing Suns."  Hamilton's typewriter didn't get any rest!  Today we've got The Time Raider, which, according to isfdb, is over 49,500 word and so is an actual novel, in its first appearance spread out of over four issues of Weird Tales, starting in October of 1927 and wrapping up in the January 1928 issue.  

The title of The Time Raider makes us suspect the novel is about some rascal who travels through time, stealing gold or technology or maybe history's most attractive young ladies.  We've already read some Hamilton time travel capers, like "Lords of the Morning," in which a 20th-century scientist casts his mind back to the era of the conquistadors and fights in battles between Mayans and Spaniards and between Earthers and Venusians, and "Comrades of Time," "Armies from the Past" and "The Six Sleepers," in which fighting men from diverse eras of history join forces to fight the villains.  Well, let's see what The Time Raider is all about.  Come along with us and explore the dangers that time travel inevitably entails by clicking the following links:

  OCTOBER        NOVEMBER        DECEMBER       JANUARY    

OK, The Time-Raider is a pretty straightforward adventure story full of elements we've seen in the Hamilton stories I've already mentioned above.  The narrator finds himself in another world--in this case, the world of the future, like 15,000 years beyond our own century, an Earth where two cities are at war and the narrator allies with one of the cities and gets embroiled in hand-to-hand combat and a battle between two air fleets.  As happens in so many adventure stories, he gets captured, forced to fight in the arena, makes friends with a fellow gladiator, and they escape.  His friend is one of four friends he makes, each of them an expert swordsman from a different era of history.

The stuff about The Time-Raider that is particularly interesting and a little different from other Hamilton productions is mostly concentrated in the first quarter or so of the novel.  An archaeologist is captured by a time-travelling monster, a flying blob which can switch between solidity and a sort of gaseous form, but the man manages escape.  He tells the narrator of his horrible experience, and then, in the narrator's sight, is attacked by the monster again and carried off.  The narrator's other friend builds a time machine and he and the narrator follow after their chum, planning to rescue him.  Hamilton makes all this stuff pretty exciting, but when our hero gets to the future this material fades in importance--we don't see the monster or the archaeologist again until the end of the novel--and it's the same old adventure stuff, with one exception.

The exception is that there is no princess--usually these stories have a woman in them that the narrator falls in love with and marries or who falls in love with the narrator and from whose clutches the narrator has to escape.  There are no female characters in this novel at all.  The Time-Raider instead has male relationships at its center--it is friendship among men that sends the hero on his adventure and that is instrumental in the novel's resolution and in the nature of the hero's post-adventure life.  This is kind of interesting, but Hamilton does rather little with these male relationships--The Time-Raider is no Lord of the Rings.

We might consider the ending of The Time-Raider another noteworthy diversion from standard adventure fare.  The narrator does not succeed in rescuing the man he and his comrade travelled through time to retrieve--the protagonist witnesses the archaeologist die while sacrificing himself for another friend.  And while the people of the good city are preserved and the people of the evil city are exterminated, The Time-Raider does not have a triumphal ending.  Everybody decides time travel is prohibitively risky, maybe even immoral and against the will of God, so everybody destroys his time travel device.  (This is like the opposite of the classic science fiction sense-of-wonder ending, in which we are assured the paradigm shift depicted in the story has enabled the human race to embark on a terrific adventure, the exploration and mastering of the universe.)  The friendship of the four swordsmen with each other and with the two 20th-century protagonists ends when each swordsman is returned to his proper time.  The narrator and his comrade not only do not marry princesses, they don't marry anybody--it seems their adventure in the future has changed them in such a way that they no longer have any interest in other 20th-century men and women, and they live together as bachelors on Long Island the rest of their lives, holding out the hope that they will meet the four swordsmen in the afterlife.    

I enjoyed The Time-Raider mildly; I think we'll call it the high end of acceptable.  The novel was not reprinted until our own 21st century in small press outlets, Haffner Press' 2009 The Metal Giants and Others, the first volume of their Collected Hamilton series, and a 2015 Armchair Fiction Double the cover of which (repurposed from L. Sprague De Camp's Lest Darkness Fall) gives the innocent reader the false impression this sexless and womanless novel features a gorgeous blonde.  The Time-Raider was also included in a 2022 issue of the electronic magazine Black Cat Weekly.  Are people really paying three dollars to read these old stories instead of just reading them for free at internet archive or luminist.org?  Maybe they are, maybe the format that Black Cat Weekly uses is easier on some people's eyes or something.

We'll have another novel from a magazine published before you were born next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Oh, and if you want a blow by blow description of the plot of The Time-Raider, read on!

**********    

The narrator of The Time-Raider is Wheeler, a chemist, the lab assistant to an important scientist in New York, Lantin.  Three years ago, one of Lantin's old college buddies, Cannell, disappeared, presumably killed by a tiger while investigating the ancient city of Angkor.  Cannell was a famous archaeologist who had done important work investigating ancient ruined cities in India and Africa.  Today, to the amazement of Lantin, Cannell shows up in New York, looking haggard, looking scared.  He tells the story of his adventure in Angkor, how he had had to explore the city alone, his native guides too scared to accompany him into the purportedly haunted ruins.  In the temple of Angkor Wat, Cannell was seized by a hovering, flying, translucent blob monster, carried aloft, carried forward in time so that the sun and moon shot across the sky at the speed of a meteor!  This monster is the Time-Raider of the title.  Cannell drew his pistol and shot at the nucleus or eyes of the flying blob, so that it dropped him into the ocean.  

Cannell was rescued by an oil tanker bound for Texas, finding that in the few minutes he was in the grip of the monster, three years passed!  On the trip back to America, he hears the distinctive sound made by the blob monster!  It has followed him!  He stays below decks and the Time-Raider carries off two innocent men.  The crew, having no knowledge of the monster, think the men must have somehow fallen overboard.  

Cannell made his way from the Lone Star State to Gotham to see his only friend, Lantin, and tells Lantin and Wheeler that he is living in fear that the monster will attack again.  The three men spend some time speculating on the nature of the Time-Raider and its abilities, and then, speak of the devil, the monster appears and captures Cannell again, whisking him out the window!  Lantin declares that he will figure out how to travel through time and try to rescue Cannell from the Raider, and Wheeler agrees to help.  In two months or so they have built a vehicle, the time-car, that can move through the three familiar dimensions via repulsive rays that push against the earth below, and can move through that mysterious fourth dimension we call time by accelerating or decelerating the electrons in orbit in the atoms that make up the car and everything within it.  Hovering in the air in this new vehicle, Wheeler and Lantin race forward through time, thousands of years, watching glaciers flow south and cover North America.  Fifteen thousand years in the future, they fly around and discover a valley of green in the middle of the ice, and a city within that valley.  They land and sneak up on the city, but are quickly captured by people armed with swords and spears. Within the city, where a racially diverse population of slaves trudge drone-like back and forth on their errands, Wheeler and Lantin are separated, Wheeler finding himself in a cell occupied by armed men of diverse backgrounds.

I really enjoyed this first episode of the serial--the descriptions of Angkor and of the time raiding monster are vivid and exciting, and economical, Hamilton bringing the adventure to life without an excess of verbiage.  The science talk was sort of interesting; again, not too long or complex.  But I got worried when the lead characters were captured and dragged off, presumably to fight in the arena, which happens all the time in these types of adventure stories.  The monster and the time-car felt sort of fresh, but getting captured and made to fight in the arena is kind of tired. 

The November installment of the serial begins with the armed men marched into a large room full of beautiful men and women, all blondes, who watch the prisoners called forth, two at a time, to fight to the death hand-to-hand.  The men are drawn from different ages of history--an Arab with a scimitar fights a Norseman armed with an axe, an 18th-century Englishman with a rapier fights a samurai in armor, etc.  Wheeler has no weapon, but the Englishman lends him his rapier (this is the English sense of fair play we are always hearing about) and with it Wheeler defeats a Renaissance Italian--Wheeler fenced in college.  (In grad school I played a lot of Vanilla Angband--somehow I don't think that would help me much in a life or death situation.)  After the fighting, Wheeler is put in a cell with the Norseman, who teaches him the language of their multiethnic guards and the beautifully proportioned golden-haired masters of the city, the Kanlar.  Looking out the window of his cell, Wheeler sees that Italian he slew, now a slave, walking like a robot--holy crap, the slaves are the living dead, soulless flesh robots animated by the cruel science of the Kanlar! 

A few days later, the surviving fighting men are forced to fight again, in a much larger room with a bigger audience that includes guards and slaves.  The survivors of these duels are recruited into the ranks of the guards--order is maintained in the city of the decadent Kanlar by the most successful of the warriors shanghaied from all eras of history by the Time Raider, while the losers serve as zombie slaves.  Wheeler and the 18th-century Englishman are ordered to fight, but they refuse and so are marched down a narrow spiral staircase into a vast pit.  This huge cavern, over a mile below the surface, is full of barracks and is home to soldiers and warriors of every age of the past, of every nation, from cavemen to modern fighting men of Europe, Asia, America, and Africa, who, for whatever reason, were not given the chance to be guards.  Living without supervision, these rowdy men end up fighting among themselves, and those who die in the brawls are dragged to the bottom of the stairs, to be taken back to the city of the Kanlar above and added to the population of zombie slaves. 

Among these subterranean barracks Wheeler is reunited with Lantin.  Then that friendly Englishman introduces them to his three friends, a Roman centurion, an Aztec warrior, and a soldier of 16th century France, and explains the political situation here in the world of the Kanlars and their time-travelling monster.  You see, the Kanlars are exiles from a city far to the south, Kom, and want to achieve revenge on those who exiled them, so the Time Raider--their king and god--has been collecting fighting men from across the ages to form an army with which to destroy Kom.  Soon there will be enough such soldiers, and they will be transported to Kom via a fleet of "flying platforms."

Hamilton gives the four unwilling time travelers who become Wheeler's bosom friends each a personality based on stereotypes of their culture--the ancient Roman is calm and unflappable, the Frenchman passionate, the Georgian Englishman a sort of dandy who is always patching up his clothes, which are always being damaged in the endless brawls among the barracks.  Hamilton does but little when it comes to having these characters actually demonstrate these personalities, he just describes each guy in a paragraph and that is about it.

Lantin and Wheeler explain to their new pals that they can get to Kom and even get to other eras of time with their vehicle and so the six men plot an escape.  As the November installment ends, they are about to put their plan into action.

The plan involves the 20th-century men using a grappling hook to get onto the narrow miles-long spiral stairway up above the guards, whom the four men of the past will distract by starting a riot.  In the December issue, the plan works and Wheeler and Lantin make their way up to the city of the Kanlar.  They knock out two of the zombie slaves, put on their distinctive attire, and use this disguise to navigate the city streets, leave town, and get to their time car just as guards are catching up to them. 

Down south in Kom, which lies beyond a wall a mile thick, a mile and a half high and thousands of miles wide that keeps the glaciers from advancing any further south, Wheeler and Lantin talk to the Council.  The Kom have a brain reading machine and learn all that Lantin and Wheeler know by hooking them up to it.  They also tell our 20th-century heroes all about the history of Kom, of the Kanlar and of the Time-Raider.  Then the Kom council plots how to launch a preemptive strike on Kanlar and their time-traveling monster god and starts building an air fleet of war craft equipped with the time travel device invented by Lantin as well as an array of weapons of their own devising.

The attack is launched in the January 1928 installment of the serial.  The air fleet of the Kanlar intercepts the air fleet of Kom and they have a big air battle, using various weapons.  The people of Kom begin to win but then the Time-Raider appears and whisks much of the surviving Kanlar fleet away through time.  The bulk of the Kom fleet pursues them through time, leaving Wheeler and Lantin in their time car behind.  Our two heroes head to the city of the Kanlar, where they find that the hordes of warriors are trying to escape the subterranean barracks, now that the guards are all away participating in the air battle.  The warriors have been told for ages about how Kom is a rich city ripe for plunder and they are eager to get to plundering; if they manage to get to the surface city they will go to Kom themselves and loot the place, seeing as the defenders of Kom are also busy, chasing the Kanlar through time.  (Hamilton's plot here only works if we accept that both the Kanlar and Kom neglected to leave a small garrison equipped with firearms in their cities, and it takes a lot of generosity on the part of the reader to accept this.)  So it falls to Wheeler and his four chums, Englishman, Frenchman, Roman and Aztec, to stand athwart the narrow spiral stair that leads from the barracks to the surface and fight the ravenous hordes hand-to-hand.  Lantin, an old man, has had the foresight to bring a pistol and helps out by shooting people a few times when things get hairy.

The five swordsmen walk backwards up the long long stairway, killing multitudes of attackers while only suffering minor wounds themselves.  Hamilton comes up with long list of reasons of how this is possible--our heroes wear armor they stole from guards; the enemies have to stand in the slippery blood of their comrades while our guys are on clean steps; the horde is ill-disciplined, the guys in back pushing and jostling the front rank so the men in direct contact with the heroes can't fight their best, etc.

In a dramatic moment, Cannell, the man Lantin and Wheeler came forward in time to find, comes to the front rank of the horde to attack the men who sought to rescue him from the Time-Raider.  Cannell has a scar on his head and is obviously out of his mind.  But he comes to his senses and pus down his axe when he sees Lantin, his old buddy.  A Malay tries to stab Lantin with a kris whike he is distracted and Cannell tackles the assassin, and both Cannell and the Malay fall off the stairs down over a mile to the pit below.

Our guys are pushed up, up, up, all the way to the hangar where the flying troop transports await the horde.  Even worse, the time-travelling flying blob monster appears!  Luckily, the Kom air fleet also appears.  With special weapons they kill the Time-Raider and annihilate the city of the Kanlars, exterminating the Kanlars and all the men--guards, warriors, zombie slaves--who wittingly or otherwise served them.

The 20th-century men and the Kom agree that time travel is a no-no, so promise to destroy all the time-travel engines.  Wheeler and Lantin take their four friends back to their times and places, Ancient Rome, the Mexico where Cortes battles the Aztecs, 16th century France, and New Jersey during the American War of Independence.  Do Wheeler and Lantin tell their Aztec friend and their English friend they are fighting for lost causes?  I don't know.

Back in the 20th century, Wheeler and Lantin find they can no longer identify with our society, and so retire from social life to live together quietly on Long Island, often talking of their adventure through time when they killed dozens of people with their own hands and were instrumental in the genocide of the evil Kanlar and the preservation of the mind-reading Kom, often looking over the souvenirs of their adventure, four swords from four eras of history which they witnessed in action in the hands of their friends, whom they hope to meet in the next world.