Edmond Hamilton

Edmond Moore Hamilton was an American writer of science fiction during the mid-twentieth century. US author, married to Leigh Brackett from 1946 until his death. With E E "Doc" Smith and Jack Williamson, he was one of the prime movers in the development of US sf, sharing with those writers in the creation and popularization of classic Space Opera as it first appeared in Pulp magazines from about 1928. His first story, "The Monster-God of Mamurth" for Weird Tales in August 1926, which vulgarized the florid weird-science world of Abraham Merritt, only hinted at the exploits to come, though Hamilton found Science Fantasy a fertile vein, collecting this story and others in his first book, The Horror on the Asteroid & Other Tales of Planetary Horror (coll 1936); his early work is also assembled, more comprehensively, in The Collected Edmond Hamilton, Volume One: The Metal Giants and Others (coll 2009). But his importance to sf was only properly signalled two years later, with the publication of "Crashing Suns" (August-September 1928 Weird Tales), one of the founding texts of the kind of Space Opera with which he soon became identified: a Universe-spanning tale, often featuring in early years an Earthman and his comrades (not necessarily human) who discover a cosmic threat to the home Galaxy and successfully – either alone, or with the aid of a space armada, or both – combat the Aliens responsible for the threat; it would be left to E E Smith to transform adventures of this sort into larger-scale narratives involving Galactic Empires and their seemingly inevitable concomitant: structures based on (and presuming to comment upon) human history.