Seekers of Tomorrow (9 page)

Then, in 1942, several short stories by Murray Leinster appeared in astounding science fiction. Those in the "know" passed these off as fillers made possible by the war-time shortage of writers. Then, Murray Leinster lowered the boom with
First Contact.
A novelette appearing in astound-ing science-fiction for May, 1945, it approached from an entirely new angle the idea of earthmen meeting aliens of high technological status. An interstellar Earth ship meets another ship of comparably advanced design in the great vastness between star systems. The crew does not dare ignore the contact, for the alien ship may trail the Earth ship back to Earth, and there is no way to be sure if it constitutes a menace to mankind. The alien ship is in a similar dilemma. The situation is eventually resolved by an exchange of ships so that both groups can benefit from new knowledge without revealing their locations.

This aspect of the problems of meeting another intelligent race had never previously been examined or evaluated. Every top writer in the field stood at attention and saluted. Anthol-ogy appearances began to multiply and the story was quickly accepted as one of the great classics of modern science fiction. An entire anthology titled
Contact,
leading off with Leinster's story, was edited for Paperback Library by Noel Keyes (pen name of David N. Keightley, contributor of fiction to the saturday evening post) in 1963. The story penetrated the Iron Curtain and was discussed in the text of
The Heart of the Serpent,
a novelette by Ivan Yefremov, published in Russia in 1959. Yefremov, a Russian fossil hunter, as well as the author of several science-fiction novels, contended that Leinster's thinking was that of a decadent capitalist and that races advanced enough to have spaceships would be beyond primitive fears of war and vio-lence. From Leinster's attitude he derived his title "Heart of the Serpent," contending through the mouth of one of his characters that "... in the writings of those who sought to defend the old society, proclaiming the inevitability of war and the eternal existence of capitalism, I also see the heart of a poisonous snake." But, to display how truly harmonious, filled with sweetness and light, a first space meeting between two different intelli-gent races would actually be, Yefremov postulates a fluorine-breathing species on a fluorine-atmosphere planet; such a race could not conceivably covet anything possessed by earth-men. The year
First Contact
was published, argosy, now a slicked-up men's magazine, ran a Murray Leinster two-part short novel.
The Murder of the U.S.A.
This story, which followed the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, was one of the most remarkably accurate short-range exposi-tions ever to appear in science fiction. The United States of the near future is armed with batteries of intercontinental ballistic missiles, propelled by rockets and possessing nuclear warheads. These are situated in bombproof underground bunkers, held in reserve as a war deterrent. Then, one third of the population of the U.S.A. is destroyed by a sneak attack. Since many countries have the capacity to deliver such a blow and the rockets came over the poles, not impli-cating any one nation, the United States works to find out who is the international "murderer" while the whole world sweats. If the country that sent the bombs tries to follow up its advantage with an invasion, it will immediately expose itself to the retaliatory effect of the hundreds of American nuclear warheads.

The plot had initially been approved by look and a tenta-tive agreement to pay $4,000 for the completed story had been made, but when look saw the final manuscript they refused it. After its appearance in argosy, John W. Campbell convinced Crown Publishers to publish the short novel as a book, but they avoided calling it science fiction and instead issued it in 1946 as a murder mystery!

Leinster's thinking on modern lines proved seminal. With the age of the computer fast moving in, he wrote and had published in the March, 1946, astounding science-fiction (under the Will F. Jenkins byline) a story titled
A Logic Named Joe,
dealing with the time when a device would be present in every home, linked in with a central Univac-type "tank," which would contain all man's knowledge and would dispense information to subscribers. Naturally, there would be automatic censors. What happens when a faulty machine gets around the normal blocks, and dispenses information ranging from how to murder your wife and not be detected to the easiest way for a bank president to embezzle, makes for a brilliant and probably prophetic story.

When considering the potentialities of computers in its educational film "The living Machine," released in 1962, the National Film Board of Canada Incorporated certain observations from
A Logic Named Joe,
mentioning it by name.

Symbiosis,
a Jenkins story, with the unique concept of an entire nation being infected with a disease to which they had been immunized, but which would kill other human beings with whom they came in contact, was published in collier's for January 14, 1947.

The Strange Case of John Kingman,
astounding science-fiction, (May, 1948), dealing with the discovery of a man who has been locked up in an insane asylum for 162 years—a paranoid alien from another planet—and the attempts to cure him, is a masterpiece of the short story form and has been since widely imitated.

A complete change of pace was
The Lonely Planet
(thrilling wonder stories, December, 1949). An entire planet is covered by a single organism, called Alyx, which gradually gams consciousness from its association with men, whose most complex orders it follows blindly. Though it eventually becomes more intelligent than humanity, its mo-tivating drive is companionship. Fearing its powers, mankind futilely attempts to destroy the creature. Its eventually suc-cessful efforts to arrive at an accommodation with the human race are touchingly and ingeniously related by Leinster.

Like the alien in
The Strange Case of John Kingman,
the science-fiction fraternity awoke one day in 1962 to the reali-zation that Will F. Jenkins alias Murray Leinster was an unusual phenomenon. Here was a man who had again and again proved that he was leader, if not master, of the field in all its transformations and nuances. On September 1, 1963, he was Guest of Honor of the 21st World Science Fiction Convention, held at the Statler-Hilton, Washington, D.C. For more than a decade they had called him "The Dean of Science Fiction Writers"; now they had decided to make it official.

"The Dean of Science Fiction Writers" is undeniably Murray Leinster, but who is heir apparent? Most certainly it must be Edmond Hamilton, one of the most underestimated (though not unappreciated) writers of science fiction.

Since 1926, not a year has passed that has not seen as many as a score of Hamilton stories appear in the science-fiction and fantasy magazines. Nor is his a fading talent which should be recognized "for
auld
lang syne."
Three recent years running, science-fiction novels of his were Dou-bleday Science Fiction Book Club selections:
The Star of Life
(1959),
The Haunted Stars
(1960), and
Battle for the Stars
(1961). His short story
Requiem
(amazing stories, April, 1962) was, by far, the most acclaimed story of the year in that magazine. Its hymnlike mood is expressed by the spaceship commander, the last man to tread the surface of the earth before it spirals from its orbit into the sun, and culminating in his sense of outrage at the commercial profes-sionalism of the camera crews and commentators on hand to record the mother planet's final plunge. Only slightly less applauded were
The Stars, My Brothers
(amazing stories, May, 1962), involving a dramatic choice between sentiment and rationality by a man of the present restored to conscious-ness in the distant future, and
Sunfire!
(amazing stories, September, 1962), where a man's pride is humbled by con-tact with creatures of living flame. All three stories displayed a refinement of technical skills and a maturity of outlook that added full dimension to Hamilton's long-acknowledged mas-tery of action and adventure.

Edmond Hamilton made his first appearance as a writer with
The Monster-God of Mamurth
back in the August, 1926, issue of weird tales; he has remained constantly on the science-fiction scene ever since. When Hamilton's first story appeared, science-fiction mag-azines were only six months old; amazing stories, April, 1926, was the first. The hotbeds in which good science fiction was nurtured were argosy and weird tales (which periodi-cals usually ran at least one, and sometimes as many as six, science-fiction tales an issue).

One of the "greats" of argosy's fantasy writers was A. Merritt, and his works became literary icons for young Ham-ilton's worship. Using as his inspiration, Merritt's classic
The People of the Pit
(all-story magazine, January 5, 1918), a masterpiece about a lost city in an Alaskan cave, Hamilton made his first attempt to become a professional writer with a short story,
Beyond the Unseen Wall,
weird tales' editor, Farnsworth Wright, rejected it because of an unclear ending, but almost a year later, rewritten as
The
Desert God,
it was accepted by him and appeared under the title
The Monster-God of Mamurth.
By a remarkable coincidence, weird tales ran it in the same issue with the only story Merritt had ever submitted to them,
The Woman of the Wood,
weird tales rated its stories according to reader preferences and printed a monthly report on the favorite. As a head-swelling beginner's achieve-ment, Hamilton's story scored second only to Merritt's, beat-ing out even H. P. Lovecraft's contribution that month.
The Monster-God of Mamurth
was above average for its period. An explorer in the North African desert discovers a legendary city protected by walls of invisibility. The long-departed inhabitants of that city worshipped a gigantic spi-derlike creature, transparent as air, which, it turns out, is still alive and roams through the city's deserted buildings. Some incidents are singularly effective: one in which the hero stands visually unsupported on a 100-foot-high temple stairway; another where he gropes his way along walls and corridors he cannot see, stalked by the monstrous "god"; and, finally, the vivid imagery of his throwing a huge but optically nonexistent building block in the direction of ap-proaching noises to pin down the menace which gradually takes shape as it splatters itself with its own blood in its desperate thrashings to escape. Even before
The Monster-God of Mamurth
was published, Hamilton had sold to Wright
Across
Space,
a three-part novel, which began in the immediately following September, 1926, weird tales. In this novel, the Easter Island statues are found to be images of Martians, still living in a city underground, who are pulling Mars close enough to earth so that overcrowding on the Red Planet can be eased by emi-gration. The writing and background are absorbing, but the science (reminiscent of Andre Laurie's
Conquest of the Moon,
1889, in which that satellite is magnetically drawn down to earth) is embarrassingly crude.

The Metal Giants
followed and was illustrated on the cover of the December, 1926, weird tales. Despite the fact that it used the old Frankenstein theme (an artificial brain turns on its creator and builds tremendous atom-powered robots which devastate cities and gas their inhabitants into extinction), it received
three
times as many reader votes as its nearest runner-up. Corny but effective, it was later mim-eographed in an abbreviated version by Jerome Siegel, corre-spondent of Hamilton's, for the Swanson Book Co., Washburn, North Dakota, who for many years dispensed the pamphlet as a premium to buyers of Swanson's mail order science fiction.

The Atomic Conquerors
(weird tales, February, 1927) again was first choice of readers; it tells of a war between creatures of the micro-universe (subatomic) and of the macro-universe (of which we are but an atom) with Earth as a battleground. In the following issue,
Evolution Island,
an imaginative
tour de
force,
about a ray that speeds up evolu-tion on an island and its bizarre effects upon all life forms, including the emergence of intelligent, mobile plants, missed first place by only a few votes. At the age of 23, Hamilton was off to an auspicious writing start.

Edmond Hamilton was born in Youngstown, Ohio, on October 21, 1904, at a time when that part of the country still possessed a New England village air. His father's side of the family was Scotch-Irish and Presbyterian, and had moved into Ohio from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in 1820. There was also some Welsh ancestry, and a strong American Indian strain is reflected in Edmond Hamilton's features. His father, Scott B. Hamilton, the youngest of six sons of Homer Hamilton, who owned a small steel mill, was a newspaper cartoonist. Maude Whinery, his mother, from Quaker stock of New Castle, Pennsylvania, had been a schoolteacher prior to her marriage.

The family fell upon difficult days shortly after Edmond was born, and his father tried running a farm outside of Poland, Ohio. The boy's earliest memories were of a home with no electricity, water, or gas. Automobiles were a rarity on the dirt roads. "The cows, the chickens, the sugar camps in the snowy woods which we children hung around, gave the whole feel of an old, tranquil, unchanging rural America," Hamilton recalls.

Two older sisters, Esther and Adeline, and one younger sister, ran the odds against the one boy. He found himself unmercifully bossed around.

The mother was the strength of the family, while his father was the romantic, enlisting for the Spanish-American War almost immediately following his marriage in 1898 and being shunted to Alaska for three years to build telegraph lines during the gold rush period. His mother taught school while the "man of the house" was gone.

Farm life was left behind when the family moved to New Castle, Pennsylvania, a town of 40,000, in 1911 and his father landed a job on a local newspaper. The young Hamil-ton was far from a recluse, enjoying a fishing, fighting, fun-raising childhood along with his schoolmates. As a stu-dent he was exceptional, entering high school in 1914 when only 10 years old and graduating, without difficulty, at 14. The family, convinced they had a genius on their hands, rushed him into Westminster College in the fall of 1919. The tests of the freshman class rated him tops in I.Q. and expectations were high. "I started out my sophomore year as an intellectual of 15," remembered Hamilton. "I smoked a briar pipe and read Shaw, O'Neill, and Ibsen. I majored in physics. But after my first year I got bored with classes." The difference in age between him and other students soon told. He became increasingly introverted and began collecting old books, the beginning of a lifelong passion. He had had only a minor interest in fantasy heretofore, but now all-story magazine and argosy began to take on a new sheen. The marvelous fancies of A. Merritt, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Homer Eon Flint, Austin Hall, George Allan England, and Victor Rousseau quickly supplanted the more earthbound O'Neill and Ibsen. In his newfound interest was a magazine world of escape from the drag and routine of academic life. When he consistently began cutting chapel, Westminster, a Presbyterian school, expelled him during his third year. Though bitterly disappointed, the family stood by him as he abandoned all hope of ever contributing to the advance-ment of physics by accepting a job on the Pennsylvania Railroad as yard clerk. He had worked part time in similar posts during summer vacations and was enthralled by rail-roads. When the position was eliminated in late 1924, he sat down to write his first story, never to work for a salary again. The fecundity of Hamilton's ideas and their high degree of originality won favor with weird tales'