The original use of the term space opera was as a put down for the kind of writing “The Star Stealers” epitomizes. Hamilton wrote two stories, “The Man Who Evolved” and “What’s It Like Out There?” I believe belong in retrospective SF anthologies. Hamilton was never a good writer, and it shows in “The Star Stealers,” which is little better than a comic book without pictures. For example, “The Star Stealers” is not Edmond Hamilton’s best. This has happened some, but not to the degree I assumed. But I assumed when they did include traditional SF stories, those stories would be the classics, and maybe the best example of each writer’s work.
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I thought that was an excellent ambition. In the introduction the VanderMeers tell us they want to broadening the history of the genre by including women writers and foreign-language stories in translation. Because this anthology is a retrospective of 20th century science fiction I assume the stories showcase the genre. The simplest approach is to bundle a bunch of stories you expect readers will enjoy. Anthologies usually have a design behind them. I’m still trying to discern the VanderMeers’s methodology for the stories they collect in The Big Book of Science Fiction.
The star pit delany synopsis series#
“Doc” Smith’s Skylark and Lensman series vastly overshadowed Hamilton’s space operas. Edmond Hamilton is most famous for his Captain Future series, but even those fan favorite stories from the 1940s weren’t reprinted as books until 1969, and then as cheap Ace paperbacks. Most of Hamilton’s early magazine work wasn’t published in book form until the late 1960s or 1970s. However, because it took decades for these stories to be reprinted suggests they weren’t fan favorites. All of them were republished in 2009 as The Star-Stealers: The Complete Adventures of The Interstellar Patrol, The Collected Edmond Hamilton, Volume Two, a collector’s edition from Haffner Press that’s now out of print and costs hundreds of dollars used, if you can find a copy. Five of the Interstellar Patrol stories were first published in book form in 1965 as Crashing Suns, the year before Star Trek premiered.