Best of Edmnd Hamilton

by Edmond Hamilton

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345259009
• ISBN13: 9780345259004
• Release Date: January 1978
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Length: 381 Pages
• Weight: 0.48 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Was sent the incorrect book

I ordered The Best of Edmond Hamilton but instead was sent The Best Of Leigh Brackett. Granted, that is a great book of its own merit, but it's still not the book that I had ordered.

Not Free SF Reader

A collection put together by Leigh Brackett, and he details how. Here's my files, there's 300 or so here. Seems she didn't look thrilled by going through all that. It's not so bad, a lot of novels and novelettes there that are too long for this book - which is all short stories. There are sf stories, horror stories, fantasay stories, as Hamilton also wrote for Weird Tales, etc., as well as sf mags. Brackett gives an introduction, along with a jibe or two, and Hamilton's afterword also talks about how he came to do some early writing. A lot of stories from the thirties are to be found here. Certainly a selection that is higher quality than what I have read of his in general, and comes out at 3.38. So a solid book. Best Of Edmond Hamilton : The Monster-God of Mamurth - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : The Man Who Evolved - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : A Conquest of Two Worlds - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : The Island of Unreason - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : Thundering Worlds - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : The Man Who Returned - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : The Accursed Galaxy - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : In the World's Dusk - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : Child of the Winds - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : The Seeds from Outside - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : Fessenden's Worlds - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : Easy Money - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : He That Hath Wings - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : Exile - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : Day of Judgment - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : Alien Earth - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : What's It Like Out There? - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : Requiem - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : After a Judgment Day - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : The Pro - Edmond Hamilton Best Of Edmond Hamilton : Castaway - Edmond Hamilton Hidden temple horror. 4 out of 5 Big Head Pollard is a monster. Well, briefly, anyway. 3.5 out of 5 Nuking Martians and Jovians is not nice, boss. 3.5 out of 5 I kinda like it, I think. 3.5 out of 5 Solar system space drive sun planet smash. 3 out of 5 Coffin cosy but longterm. 2.5 out of 5 Organic space is gross. 3 out of 5 Zombie breeding no good, time traveller breeding no good. World creation, ok, as long as you don't nap too long. 4 out of 5 They want to blow me down, woman, even if I don't believe it. 3.5 out of 5 Man-plant's gonna get me. 3 out of 5 No more mini-universe massacres for you. 4 out of 5 Heavyweight punching my head in is more fun than your other worlds, Doc. 3.5 out of 5 David, not Jenny, and he picks a bad woman. 3.5 out of 5 Stuck in this barbaric figment. 3.5 out of 5 Mutant dogs and cats, living together. With a couple of monkeyboys. 3.5 out of

An star-spanning master of science fiction

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!

Pulp story master, often at his best

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.This Del Rey edition 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.

Enjoyable Early Golden Age Science Fiction

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.