Battle for the Stars

By Edmond Hamilton and Karl Wurf

Kirk had never seen the distant planet called Earth, yet his squadron was now ordered there—to stem the outbreak of a galactic war! Classic space opera by the author of The Star of Life, The Valley of Creation, City at World’s End, and The Haunted Stars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: Dec 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781479479832

Edmond Hamilton

Edmond Hamilton (1904-1977) was an experienced pulp science fiction writer as well as a comic book writer who scripted many issues of Superman.

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Table of Contents

BATTLE FOR THE STARS

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

BATTLE FOR THE STARS

by EDMOND HAMILTON

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2021 by Wildside Press LLC.

Originally published in Imagination, June 1956.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

INTRODUCTION

Edmond Moore Hamilton (1904–1977) was born in Youngstown, Ohio. He grew up there and in nearby New Castle, Pennsylvania, where he graduated high school at age 14. He then enrolled in Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, but failed academically and left at age 17 before graduating.

Hamilton’s career as a science fiction writer began with the publication of the short story The Monster God of Mamurth in the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales magazine. Hamilton quickly became a central member of the writers assembled by editor Farnsworth Wright—a group that included H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, E. Hoffmann Price, and many others. Ultimately, Weird Tales published 79 stories and novels by Hamilton between 1926 to 1948, making him (with Seabury Quinn) one of the magazine’s most prolific contributors.

However, it was for the science fiction pulps that Hamilton made his greatest mark. Through the late 1920s and early 1960s, Hamilton wrote science fiction prolifically, popularizing (with E.E. Doc Smith) the action-oriented space opera genre. His story The Island of Unreason (Wonder Stories, May 1933) won the first Jules Verne Prize (the first award voted on by science fiction fans, a precursor of the Hugo Awards) as the best science fiction story of the year.

In the later 1930s, in response to the economic strictures of the Great Depression, he also wrote detective and crime stories. Always prolific, Hamilton sometimes saw four or five of his stories appear in a single month. The February, 1937 issue of Popular Detective featured three Hamilton stories, one under his own name and two under pseudonyms.

In the 1940s, Hamilton was the primary force behind Captain Future magazine, a science fiction pulp designed for juvenile readers that won him many fans, but diminished his reputation in later years as science fiction readership aged and the focus of the field shifted away from space opera, which felt dated and simplistic. Despite his talent and wide range of writing styles and genres, Hamilton never managed to disassociate himself from the extravagant, romantic, high-adventure style of science fiction, perhaps best represented by his 1947 novel The Star Kings.

Like many leading science fiction pulp writers, Hamilton was lured into the comic book field in the 1940s with promises of quick and easy money. For DC Comics, he began to write Superman and Batman scripts. His first comics story was Bandits in Toyland in Batman #11 (June–July, 1942). He also wrote the short-lived science fiction series Chris KL-99 in Strange Adventures, which was loosely based on Captain Future. He and artist Sheldon Moldoff created Batwoman in Detective Comics #233 (July, 1956). He also co-created Space Ranger in Showcase #15 (July–Aug., 1958) with Gardner Fox and Bob Brown. Hamilton was instrumental in the early growth of the Legion of Super-Heroes feature as one of its first regular writers. He introduced many of the early Legion concepts, including the Time Trapper in Adventure Comics #317 (Feb. 1964) and Timber Wolf in Adventure Comics #327 (Dec. 1964). Hamilton retired from comics with the publication of The Cape and Cowl Crooks in World’s Finest Comics #159 (August 1966).

* * * *

On December 31, 1946, Hamilton married fellow science fiction author and screenwriter Leigh Brackett and moved with her to Kinsman, Ohio. Afterward, he would produce some of his best work, including his novels The Star of Life (1947), The Valley of Creation (1948), City at World’s End (1951) and The Haunted Stars (1960). In this more mature phase of his career, Hamilton moved away from the romantic and fantastic elements of his earlier fiction to create some unsentimental and realistic stories, such as What’s It Like Out There? (Thrilling Wonder Stories, Dec. 1952), his single most frequently-reprinted and anthologized work.

Though Hamilton and Leigh Brackett worked side by side for a quarter-century, they rarely shared the task of authorship; their single formal collaboration, Stark and the Star Kings, originally intended for Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions, would not appear in print until 2005. It has been speculated that when Brackett temporarily abandoned science fiction for screenwriting in the early 1960s, Hamilton did an uncredited revision and expansion of two early Brackett stories, Black Amazon of Mars and Queen of the Martian Catacombs—revised texts were published as the novellas People of the Talisman and The Secret of Sinharat (1964).

In the year before his death, Toei Animation had launched production of an anime adaptation of his Captain Future novels, and Tsuburaya Productions adapted Star Wolf into a tokusatsu series; both series were aired on Japanese television in 1978. The Captain Future adaptation was later exported to Europe, winning Hamilton a new and different fan base than the one that had acclaimed him half a century before, notably in France, Italy, and Germany.

Edmond Hamilton died in February 1977 in Lancaster, California, of complications following kidney surgery.

—Karl Wurf

Rockville, Maryland

CHAPTER I

It was well called the Dragon’s Throat, thought Kirk. Throat of fire, of burning suns, a cosmic blind-alley into danger!

You made your decision. You threw a ship, a hundred men, your officers, your friends, your own Commander’s badge you threw them all down on the gamble. But when the stakes were stars….

He said to himself, The hell with it, we’re committed.

He said aloud, Radar?

Joe Garstang, standing on the bridge beside him, answered without turning. "Nothing has been monitored yet. Not yet."

Kirk’s palms itched. If they were running into an ambush, if Orion heavy cruisers were waiting for them, they’d soon know it. There could be ships all around them. Radar wasn’t too dependable, in the howling vortices of force-field energy flung out around this jungle of stars.

Through the broad bridge-windows—the windows that were really scanners cunningly translating faster-than-light probe rays into visual images—there beat upon his face the light of a thousand