The best of Edmond Hamilton [Hardcover]

Edmond Hamilton (Author), Leigh Brackett (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1977

Here is a collection of some of the finest short fiction penned by one of  "fathers" of modern science fiction. *** These stories were selected (and edited) by his wife Leigh Brackett, an author and a screenwriter. Her screen-writing credits include works on such films as The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, The Long Goodbye and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. I*** This collection spans nearly half a century of Edmond Hamilton's work and was selected from a repository of hundreds of stories that he had written over that period.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 334 pages
• Publisher: N. Doubleday; First Hard Cover Edition edition (1977)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0006CUWB4
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,271,741 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An star-spanning master of science fiction, October 2, 2007

By 

William Timothy Lukeman - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Best of Edmond Hamilton (Paperback)

Edmond Hamilton isn't as well-known as he deserves to be, and that's a shame. From the earliest days of the Golden Age, to the dawn of more complex & literate science fiction, his was always a name & imagination to be reckoned with, a guarantee of good reading.

The stories from his first decades are raw & wild, bursting with ideas & spectacular images. If the science was wrong even then, it really doesn't matter. Like his contemporaries, Hamilton was playing with Ideas & Archetypes, giving them a space-age makeover. The phrase "sense of wonder" rightfully applies to those years! Just consider the chilling "Fessenden's Worlds," for example.

Yet even in those early stories, with the emphasis on the immense, he was already casting a dubious eye on the image of the triumphant, conquering spacemen. Earth doesn't always come off so well, and he makes the reader aware of the dark side of the heroic, colonizing human, as in "A Conquest of Two Worlds."

As the years continued, he developed greater depth & sensitivity, as demonstrated the elegiac "Requiem," the somber "Day of Judgment," and especially in his lovely, lyrical tale, "He That Hath Wings." This is still one of the finest parables about the fate of the non-conforming outsider in modern society that I've ever read, retaining all of its bittersweet emotional power to this day.

In his later years, he intertwined stellar adventure with astute psychological character study, giving us stories such as "What's It Like Out There?" that were not only gripping, but philosophical as well. Yet he never lost his ability to create powerful, stunning images. He had all the virtues of the pulp writer, without any of the flaws; as a result, his work remains strong & worth reading to this day, and definitely in need of reprinting!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pulp story master, often at his best, May 12, 2003

By 

Steve Reed "Greybird" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Best of Edmond Hamilton (Paperback)

Hamilton mastered the "pulp" thrust of science fiction, and its virtues, almost before that term for the genre was coined. He could put more drama into a short story than many writers at greater length would manage in a full-length novel. And all of these stories, originally published in "Analog" and other SF magazines, retain that punch.

The science is far from perfect, and occasionally diverges from what was known even in the 1930s and 1940s. "Thundering Worlds" is full of passion and plot, but the physics of planetary bodies is inaccurate enough to be distracting to an informed reader ... yet, still, it's one helluva story.

The Del Rey mass-market paperback edition (also available, and different from what's currently pictured) has a striking illustration on its cover of the best story of the lot, "He That Hath Wings." You'll shed a tear for the fate of the protagonist even if you don't envy him his mutation, as I do.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable Early Golden Age Science Fiction, May 15, 2000

By 

"dlsander9" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Best of Edmond Hamilton (Paperback)

This collection is an excellent look at the development of one of the old writers of the Golden Age. The stories begin weak, and then become progressively stronger througout the book, until at the end the stories are highly literate. On the other hand, some of the earlier stories are so entertaining (yet corny) that one will overlook the weak writing because the stories are just flat-out entertaining. About two-thirds of the way through the book, there is a story called "Easy Money" that is the most hilarious comedy I've ever seen in science fiction.