Meeting the Ol’ World Wrecker, and his astonishing wife
It began with a silly picture.
I spend far too much time on a site called pulpcovers.com, which archives covers from pulp magazines and paperbacks going back to the 1920s. It’s amazing: casually excellent art is abundant, like this:
Here is a selection from a just-discovered issue of Planet Stories, a sci-fi magazine that ran 1939-1955:
It was a pretty hot magazine in its day, featuring Ray Bradbury and his mentor, Leigh Brackett, of whom more later.
Not everything is this good. Some of it is bizarre (“attacked by weasels!”), some is silly, some is just bad. It was one of the silly ones that caught my eye the other night, a slightly cartoonish scenario in which one spaceman confronts another, a weapon in his right hand, and an inverted redhead in his left:
Well, I thought, that is something. And then I noticed - in small type, at the bottom of the page - that this entire issue of Universe Science Fiction (September 1954) is available for download. It was the day after Thanksgiving, I had time to burn, and so I did.
The cover illustrates a scene from Edmond Hamilton’s story (novella?) Starman Come Home. I had never heard of the author, but that’s a fine title, so I gave it a try. And it turns out that Starman Come Home is a great story. A New York businessman is out west. He goes to take a look at his childhood home…and finds that it is not there. It’s never been there, they tell him. He protests to the neighbors and Police that everyone is conspiring against him, and as often happens in these situations, ends up in a holding cell pending psychiatric evaluation. That night a bulky stranger appears, busts him out, takes him to a waiting starship…and I was completely down the rabbit hole. Starman Come Home is fantastic! Who is this guy?
Edmond Hamilton graduated from high school at fourteen, washed out of college three years later, then devoted his life to writing science fiction. He wrote zillions of these stories for the pulps, went for years without having one rejected. He wrote Superman and Batman for DC Comics. He created Captain Future and Starwolf. He invented the term “space opera”. TVTropes tells us that he is “known as The Ol' World Wrecker, for the frequency in which planets bite the big one in his works.” Moreover, his stories “overflow with mighty Star Kings, fiery princesses, heroes who are in over their heads, assorted faithful sidekicks and galaxy-destroying super weapons.”
Starman Come Home fits the pattern. Here is the cover art for the book version, which expands the story into a proper novel. Hamilton called it The Sun Smasher:
At this moment our hero has just pointed the star-destroying weapon (hidden for 90,000 years) at the sun of the local system, and fired. The next step - depicted here - is to run like hell to the starship and jump away before that thing goes supernova, destroying the planet and taking the too-dangerous-for-humanity-to-have Sun Smasher with it. What a moment, and the novel’s not even done yet.
It’s a wonderful romp, and there are plenty more. There is a ‘best of’ collection of his works (linked below), with an introduction by his wife, Leigh Brackett (Ray Bradbury’s mentor, as noted above - try to keep up!).
Who, you might ask, was Leigh Brackett? Well, like Hamilton, she wrote hundreds - perhaps thousands - of science fiction stories and novels. There is also a ‘best of’ collection of her work, which was edited and introduced by Hamilton. There are certain parallels in their work:
For one thing, redheads seem to be trouble everywhere
But Brackett had hidden depths. She was going well beyond the conventions of the genre. According to TVTropes,
Thematically, Brackett's stories often deal with colonialism-induced clashes of civilizations as space-travelling humans settle on planets with older (or younger) aboriginal cultures and have commerce or conflict with them. Her early SF stories had a detective/noir flavor, which gradually developed into frontier stories set in space. Her later stories became more elegiac, lamenting civilizations passing away.
And she had another secret: she was also a brilliant screenwriter. Perhaps you have heard of Rio Bravo, The Big Sleep, or The Long Goodbye? Those were hers. Well, actually she only adapted half of Chandler’s novel for the screen, a guy named Faulkner did the rest. They split up the work; she said Faulkner kept to himself. Perhaps offsetting this, she actually did Rio Bravo twice, the second time as El Dorado.
Leigh Brackett in 1940. Source: Wikipedia
Howard Hawks was apparently a little embarrassed when she showed up to work on The Big Sleep. He liked her dialogue, but had thought from the tough language and androgynous name that she was a guy. He said
In walked a rather attractive girl who looked like she had just come in from a tennis match. She looked as if she wrote poetry. But she wrote like a man.
She was a pro, but she was also creative. On El Dorado she wanted to mix it up a little, but as she told an interviewer in 1976, Hawks and Wayne were having none of it. They wanted Rio Bravo again:
On one scene I said, “You did that scene. I’m not going to write those lines again.” It’s where the girl comes into town, she gets off the stage, and blah blah blah. And I said to [Hawks], “I’m not going to do it again.” And he said, “Why not? It was good once, it’ll be just as good again.” And Duke looked down at me from about eight feet high and said, “That’s right. If it was good once…it’ll be just as good again.” (Laughing) I knew I was licked right there, so all I could do was try to do it again. But, you know, the guy that signs the final check has the final say.
Late in her life Brackett got a call from an up-and-coming filmmaker who had a story and needed a script. She was sick, but took the job. She delivered a first draft a few weeks before she passed. The filmmaker didn’t like the draft, and had more work done, but most of her big moments made it into the movie.
It was called The Empire Strikes Back.
“Starman Come Home!” - pulpcovers.com (link)
“Edmond Hamilton” - Wikipedia (link)
“Edmond Hamilton (Creator)” - TVTropes (link)
The Best of Edmond Hamilton - AbeBooks (link)
“Leigh Brackett (Creator)” - TVTropes (link)
The Best of Leigh Brackett - AbeBooks (link)
“An Interview with Leigh Brackett & Edmond Hamilton” - Tangent Online (link)
“Star Wars: Leigh Brackett and The Empire Strikes Back You Never Saw” - Den of Geek (link)
Star Wars sequel” - Leigh Brackett (link)