Customer Reviews

The Haunted Stars (a torquil book)

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4 star:		(4)
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2 star:		(1)
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Edmond Hamilton started out as a pulp sf writer and never entirely shed some of its attributes. That being said, this novel (Haunted Stars) as well as "Star of Life" written around the same time have memorable and believable characters although they are not deeply portrayed (see first sentence). Also, the plots of these books, despite routine elements, are by no means as stereotypical as the first reviewer states - they have a darker tone than many comparable books of the time and what romance and sex is in there is mostly unsentimental and plausible. These books are short enough and cheap enough to try out. I think as many will like them as dislike them.

Many years ago when I was a teenager I strictly read science fiction novels, many by the well reputed giants of the craft, names like Heinlein, Asimov, Clark, Van Vogt and Simak. One very consistent SF writer that I always thought was as good but never got the recognition some of the others got was Edmond Hamilton.

His book, The Haunted Stars has stayed with me through the years and so I picked up and read a used copy of it last month. First published in 1962, writing styles have morphed over the years and with the advent of the word processor, novels became longer but this 159 page novel still stands on it's own. This book was written during the cold war and it reflects a competition between those conflicting ideologies.

America and the Soviet Union have both reached the moon, albeit in separate missions landing in different locations. Both are setting up bases for lunar exploration but American explorers stumble across a lunar space station which is intact but has been damaged by a space battle. There are no corpses, no weapons, no spaceships. The only thing they know is that the station is its age - thirty thousand years old! Older that the recorded history of mankind.

The Americans see this discovery as a way to get a leg up on the Soviets. They create, as quickly as possible, an interstellar ship, by combining technology they find at the station with what they already know. Then they send a small crew on a mission to a portion of space that has been ascertained as the home solar system of those who built the Lunar Space Station.

They know not, what they'll find when they get there, if they get there, but what they do find is certainly not what they expected.

Conclusion

The Haunted Stars is one of the few books that I have gone back and read, which was as good as I remember. In 1962, when Haunted Stars was written, The Lord of the Rings had recently been published and the Fantasy genre, which later seemed to decimate the sci-fi genre had yet to become established. Then science fiction meant science fiction and most sci-fi novels took place in space, or in the future.

These were heady formative times for science fiction and some of the great science fiction of all time were penned in the fifties and sixties: Frank Herbert's masterpiece - Dune, Issac Asimov's classics - Foundation and Robot series, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and many more. Of course everyone has read Arthur Clarke's 2001 Space Odyssey or seen the movie but he wrote a dozen good books before that 1968 publication including the classic - Childhoods End.

I enjoy a good fantasy novel but it seems everybody is writing Fantasy now and hardly anyone is writing good science fiction anymore.

Haunted Stars is a short concise novel of only 159 pages. It is a quick read but the characters, mostly out of necessity, are not well developed. This is something that have noticed in older books, which tended to be shorter. Either the story was shorter of there was much less detail. Of course now days we are spoiled since with the advent of word processors and computer a four hundred page book is now the norm instead of the rare exception. I have read three books by Edmund Hamilton and though the plots and stories are great, his writing is succinct and to the point, without much humor. This particular book which actually attempts to explore a possibility for the beginnings of the human race is a very well done captivating read which I heartily recommend.

As a teenager, I too read a lot of Heinlein, Norton, and many of the greats.
I've never figured out why, but this is one of those books (along with Starship Troopers, and The Lensmen Series)that I never get tired of reading. I had given my original copy away many years ago and then started wishing I hadn't. Thank goodness for the Internet and Amazon! I was able to find a copy in good shape and restore this short but delightful book to my collection.

Is it Grade AAA writing? No... the book is somewhat dated but so what? Its still a good yarn and with all the renewed interest in "Ancient Astronauts" and such, it makes you wonder once again... "Where did we come from?"

I recommend this book for anyone with an hour or two to kill who wants to forget his/her troubles and escape into a pretty good (if dated)Sci-Fi yarn!

Just my two cents.....

It's true that Edmond Hamilton began as a pulp writer -- but there were strengths in that sort of background, and they come to the fore in this short, moody novel. By the time he wrote it, Hamilton had matured, both as a writer & as a human being, becoming more reflective & perhaps a bit more melancholy. All of that is brought to a fine focus in these pages.

The story: humanity has discovered the ruins of a vast fortress on the Moon, dating back some 30,000 years. It soon becomes apparent that the aliens who built it were our own ancestors, and that humanity is descended from a once-proud starfaring race. But what happened to them? Who destroyed that fortress & plunged the human colony on Earth back into ignorance & savagery?

Enough equipment has survived to enable the building of a starship, and an expedition to the alien homeworld is soon launched. But what humanity eventually finds there is far different from what they'd expected. It's ultimately an existential shock, one that forces them -- and the reader! -- to take a cold hard look at human nature & human frailty.

This is a clear-eyed, decidedly unromantic portrait of the human hunger to conquer & possess, one that remains all too relevant today. A look at the nightly news is all the reminder you need that Hamilton was writing something eternally & sadly truthful about us. Highly recommended!

This dated, routine, pulpy SF adventure relates the discovery of an ancient ruined spaceport on the Moon. A crack linguistic team has a surprisingly easy time translating the 'alien' language -- it's similar to Sumerian. Shortly afterwards, an exploration team is racing towards Altair, the home of the Vanryn, in a quickly-reproduced Vanryn starship. Oh, and those Vanryn turn out to be regular homo saps, defeated by the the powerful, shadowy Llorn way back when....

The SF Encyclopedia rates this as Hamilton's best novel, which is why I hunted down a copy. I found it pretty bad: clicheed, predictable, overwrought and pulpy. At least it's short. I don't think I'd have much liked it in the 60's, either. Not recommended.

Happy reading (something else!),
Peter D. Tillman

Well written and well thought out novel with Cold War over tones.