Customer Reviews

The Star-Stealers: The Complete Tales of The Interstellar Patrol, The Collected Edmond Hamilton, Volume Two

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this is what reading is all about, beautiful book, great stories,great bargain,all these Edmond Hamilton books are worth your time. Don't miss out or you will be sorry

The editorial reviews above are a pretty good summary of what is in this book, and what makes it good. Go give them a read if you haven't already.

This collection is the second volume in the collected Edmond Hamilton, and includes all 7 of the tales of the Interstellar Patrol of the Federation of Suns, as well as 2 novellas in Hamilton's more traditional world-wrecking ouvre at this early point in his career. The Interstellar Patrol stuff is edge of the seat space opera, with great voyages of exploration, massed space-battles, hurtling suns, aliens (friendly and not) aplenty and - gasp! - a woman*, the only one the whole collection so far. If all that sounds a little familiar**, well, as Walter John Williams says in his introduction, that's because people have been ripping it off for years. We have cyborgs, machine-men, and really alien beings here: all the big themes of sci-fi are touched on, if not fully developed. The reason they are not fully developed is that it is more important to save the universe/galaxy from some overwhelming threat, leaving little time for philosophy, or character development for that matter.

Hamilton could write a battle scene, whether it is a massed armada of star cruisers or a fantastic brawling fist- and tentacle-fight on a forsaken world, and he gives us plenty of opportunities to read both. To be honest, you have to read a little sympathetically, translating in your head from "space-door" to "airlock" and "space-gangplank" to "docking tube", for example. It's a bit like watching the original Star Trek now - it's a little dated in places, one has to admit, but still classic. Well, this is to original Star Trek as Star Trek is to us today, but the theory holds true: this is classic stuff, and enjoyable if you aren't too uncompromising.

The Intersteller Patrol stories are collected together a little out of published order across Hamilton's body of work, but work well presented together in this fashion. The last two stories in the book are novellas continuing the stories out of Vol.1 - a sudden threat to the Earth that must be averted by men of science.

Lastly, once again there is a collection of old pulp illustrations and letters to the editor in respect of Hamilton's works. Really, this is cultural-artifact stuff: you see the readers of Weird Tales were not what you expect, or rather, a lot more than you expected. There are letters here from future sci-fi luminaries, and not all the letters praise Hamilton: one Margaret St.Clair really rips into him, only to be assailed in turn by another reader a month or so later. If you love classic sci-fi and well made books, and have a flexible budget, this is the collection for you.

* As it turns out, you find out on the last page of the book, in a reprinted letter from Weird Tales to Hamilton, that they took the liberty of changing a male character to a female in order to put a damsel in distress on the cover (yes, the cover reprinted as the cover of the book). Superb work there by the publisher.

** Except for the girls, who seem a little better represented in sci-fi these days.