Customer Reviews

Crashing Suns

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Yes, we think of _Weird Tales_ as that magazine that was filled with ghoulies and ghosties and slavering batrachian monsters. But _Weird Tales_ ran its share of old-fashioned space operas as well; and one of the most consistently popular practioners of this genre was Edmond Hamilton, who produced such rip-roaring _WT_ adventures as "Crashing Suns" and "The Star Stealers" (in this collection) and "Thundering Worlds" (collected elsewhere). Hamilton's wife, Leigh Brackett, once wrote that if suns don't crash and worlds don't thunder, "then they by God ought to!" (xi).

_Crashing Suns_ (1965) is a collection of five _Weird Tales_ space operas published between 1928 and 1930. The title story was a two-part serial, but the stories are really all novelette length pieces. The last four stories are all Interstellar Patrol stories. The first is not, but the plot formula is still much the same. The science is either dated or preposterous. Some stories were written before the discovery of Pluto and refer to only eight planets in the solar system (though since the "demotion" of Pluto, this might not be that dated after all!) and outer space is filled with ether. There are "holes" in the ether where no light can exist. Space craft make impossible turns to the right or left and make sudden stops at the drop of a space helmet.

And Brackett's sentiments notwithstanding, it is hard not to smile at lines of dialogue such as these: "_The planets of our system will perish like flowers in a furnace, in that titanic holocaust of crashing suns!_" (11); "There is but one chance... and that is to turn this onward-thundering dark star from its present inward-curving path..." (60); "That accelerating spin of the huge nebula must result, inevitably, in the doom of our universe" (95); "Onward toward our universe this mighty comet is thundering, and but one chance remains for us to turn it aside" (132). Hamilton tended to use "solar system," "galaxy," and "universe" as roughly synonymous terms.

And yet, you know, there is a kind of gee-whiz, breathless fun at the bigness or outrageousness of it all: a dark sun that will rip apart a solar system as it passes by, the deadly(!) fires of the Orion nebula, a comet that threatens to smash an entire galaxy, or a pitch black cloud that engulfs spaceships by the thousands. There are several epic space battles against dastardly aliens in exotic settings. There is the scarlet planet orbiting the scarlet sun of Alto, the giant Council chamber of Canopis, the lovely gardens of Alpha Centauri, the multitude of alien races throughout the Galaxy, and the swarms of Galactic spacecraft: ore traders, passenger liners, mail ships, patrol yachts, battered tramps, and space tugs. Oh, yes _sir_!

Perhaps a few words might be appropriate about the origin of these space operas. Hamilton writes that while walking at night in the wintertime, he was struck by the beauty of Orion and the Pleides "burning in frosty splendor above the roofs" (_The Best of Edmond Hamilton_, 1977, 378). He imagined them as suns, and the Interstellar Patrol was born:

I could not get this, to me, staggering vision down on paper fast enough. I well remember that, working on a big old flat-top desk on a small portable typewriter, my feverish banging on the keyboard when I came to the space-battles made the little machine "walk" all over the desk... (378)

Hamilton wrote his space operas much more rapidly than did Doc Smith. But there is no reason to assume that he wasn't serious about them as well. Think back. When was the last time that the lights in the sky sparked a vision for you?

_Note_: If you can, get the Ace paperback with the Edward Valigursky cover. It depicts an Earthman coming out of a space hatch and facing a bulbous, pinkish, tentacled alien sporting a blaster. It is somehow a perfect complement to the stories in this book.

The orange globular being on the right side of the front cover is an alien filled with ooze. The spacecraft behind him travels through space -- filled with ether -- at tremendous speeds. Yes some of the premises in the stories of the book are dated and (judged by our current knowledge) incorrect. However the characters are just as human as they are today. This book happened to be one of my first SF experiences. I recommend it for similarly nostalgia-driven readers.