1. Otto Binder
***
Otto Oscar Binder (1911-1974)
Otto Binder was born on August 26, 1911 in Bessemer, Michigan, the youngest of six children born into a family who had emigrated from Austria a year earlier. The family settled in Chicago in 1922, during a period rich with science fiction, which enthralled Otto and his brother Earl. The two began writing in partnership, and sold their first story, "The First Martian" to Amazing Stories in 1930; it saw publication in 1932 under the pen-name "Eando Binder" ("E" and "O" Binder).
Not earning enough to live on, Binder and his brother "worked at many jobs" in addition to their writing work, Earl ultimately finding work at an iron works, after which Otto took over "most of the writing," although keeping the nom de plume for his science fiction writings throughout his life. In 1935, Binder was hired by author Otis Adelbert Kline "as an agent in charge of his New York literary office," although business was bad enough that "they called it quits two years later." At the same time, however, Binder was writing for Mort Weisinger (then editor of Thrilling Wonder Stories and Ray Palmer (editor of Amazing), for whom he created the Adam Link series, and particularly the short story "I, Robot" which inspired Isaac Asimov's positronic robot Robbie.
Binder is best known for his comic book work, an area he entered in 1939 thanks to another brother, Jack, who moved to New York to "join the Harry "A" Chesler shop as an artist." Shortly thereafter, (in 1940) Fawcett Comics began its comics line, and Binder started writing features including Captain Venture, Golden Arrow, Bulletman and El Carim. Binder is best known for his 12-year stint on Fawcett Comics's Captain Marvel (1941 to 1953), writing "986 stories... out of 1,743 - over half the entire Marvel Family saga." During this time, he co-created, with Marc Swayze and C. C. Beck, such characters as Mary Marvel, Uncle Dudley, Mr. Tawky Tawny, Black Adam, and Mr. Mind, as well as Dr. Sivana's four children: the evil teens Thaddeus Sivana Jr. and daughter Georgia, as well as the disappointingly good and kind Beautia and Magnificus.
Binder also wrote and created characters for other publishers, including Timely Comics (the fledgling Marvel Comics), for whom "he [co-]created Captain Wonder, The Young Allies, Tommy Tyme and Miss America," (a female version of Captain America) and also wrote for Captain America, the Human Torch, Sub-Mariner, Destroyer, Whizzer, All-Winners Squad and others. For Quality Comics, Binder co-created Kid Eternity, and wrote for Blackhawk, Doll Man, Uncle Sam and the Black Condor, and for MLJ Comics (subsequently known as Archie Comics), he wrote for Steel Sterling, The Shield, The Hangman and The Black Hood. Binder also produced work for Gold Key.
In 1948, Binder began working for National Periodical Publications (DC Comics), swiftly creating "Merry, Girl of 1,000 Gimmicks in the Star-Spangled Kid strip", whose place Merry soon took in Star-Spangled Comics, before moving on to his best-known DC work on the Superman titles. In addition to writing the first Legion of Super-Heroes story, Binder "introduced Jimmy Olsen's signal-watch in the pages of the first issue of Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen. In issue 31 Binder also introduced Jimmy's Elastic Lad identity. He also wrote the first tales featuring the supporting Superman characters Lucy Lane, Beppo, the Super Monkey, Titano, the Super Ape and "most important of all - Supergirl" with artist Al Plastino.[2] He also created Brainiac, the Phantom Zone -- highlighted regularly on the Smallville television show -- and Krypto the Superdog, recently featured in an animated series of the same name.
Bridwell credits Binder as creating the first "Imaginary Tale, for Lois Lane," and of writing "most of the early" Bizarro stories including (at least) the first Tales of the Bizarro World feature. Binder also scripted the "classic [storyline] "Superman's Return to Krypton."
Showing posts with label Nineteen-Oughts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nineteen-Oughts. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
SF authors born 1904-13: 1910
1. John W. Campbell Jr.
***
John W. Campbell Jr. (1910-1971)
American SF editor and author.
To get a sense of the discourse surrounding the so-called Golden Age of SF and what preceded it, read anything written about Campbell.
Campbell attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he befriended Norbert Wiener, one of the godfathers of computers. He began writing science fiction at age 18. By the time he was 21 he was a well-known pulp writer of super-science space opera but had been dismissed by MIT: he had failed German. He then spent one year at Duke University, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in physics in 1932. Asimov notes Campbell's presence at Duke and speculates that Duke was "best known in my youth for the work of Joseph B. Rhine on extrasensory perception, and that may have influenced Campbell's later views on the subject."
The 1940s saw a great wave of science fiction writers, the first to grow up reading the pulps and then writing stories of their own. "Astounding was at the heart of this explosion of writers, and John W. Campbell, Jr. was the heart of Astounding." Effective October 1937 Campbell took over Astounding; he remained there until his death. With the March 1938 issue he changed the title from Astounding Stories to Astounding Science-Fiction. He made the magazine the leader in the field, with its zenith probably being in the early 1940s. He introduced Asimov, Heinlein, del Rey, Sturgeon, and van Vogt to SF.
Campbell had strong ideas about what made good science fiction and he wasn't afraid to make writers do it his way. According to Theodore Sturgeon, "Writers who always sold their stories to editors were suddenly faced with an editor who sold stories to them instead ... and could he sell!" In particular, Campbell stressed scientific plausibility, telling writers, "If you can't make 'em possible, make 'em logical. If you can't research it, extrapolate it!" Those who could adapt did -- Jack Williamson is one who made the leap easily, and his classic 1938 serial The Legion of Space was only one highlight. Meanwhile, Campbell was always hunting for new writers who would do the stories he wanted. The summer of 1939 was the watershed moment. The July issue featured "Black Destroyer" by A.E. van Vogt as well as "Trends", the first Astounding story by a skinny Brooklyn kid named Isaac Asimov. The August issue included "Life-Line", Robert Heinlein's first story, and September served up "The Ether Breathers" from new writer Theodore Sturgeon.
Other magazines began to emulate what was happening in Astounding while Campbell preached his approach to science fiction through the editorial columns. Over the next decade, he would shape the careers of every major SF writer except Ray Bradbury. "Before Campbell, magazine science fiction was brash, exciting, violent, and so lurid that most of it is unreadable today." — Chris Aylott, Space.com "The genre was bug-eyed monsters, exploding galaxies, stories written like engineering diagrams, and the occasional Wellsian or Stapledonian meditation. Campbell didn't change all of this, but by 1949, the excesses were toned down, the science made more sense, and sometimes even style would grace the printed page."
CAMPBELL'S RADIUM-AGE SF
* "When the Atoms Failed" (Amazing Stories, January 1930). Campbell started out as a writer, making his debut in 1930 — while a student at MIT — with the short story, "When the Atoms Failed". He was only 20 at the time, but before long he was second only to E. E. "Doc" Smith as a smasher of galaxies.
* "Piracy Preferred" (Amazing Stories, June 1930). The first of the Arcot, Morey, and Wade series (future inventions).
* "Solarite" (Amazing Stories, November 1930). The 2nd of the Arcot, Morey, and Wade series (future inventions).
* "The Black Star Passes" (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall 1930). The 3rd of the Arcot, Morey, and Wade series (future inventions).
* "Islands of Space" (Amazing Stories Qaurterly, Spring 1931). The 4th of the Arcot, Morey, and Wade series (future inventions).
* "Invaders from the Infinite" (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Spring/Summer 1932). The 5th of the Arcot, Morey, and Wade series (future inventions).
POST-RADIUM-AGE SF (not a complete list):
Campbell later changed his writing style and gained new popularity as "Don A. Stuart" in Astounding Stories. "It is rather ironical that Campbell made his name as a writer with the heavy-science type of story, a class of writing which he made obsolete by his stories under the "Don A. Stuart" byline and by his editorship of Astounding/Amazing." — Bleiler
* "Who Goes There?" (Astounding Stories, August 1938) — written as Don A. Stuart. Later the basis of the film The Thing.
* The Black Star Passes (Fantasy, Reading, 1953). The first of a science fiction trilogy dubbed the Arcot-Morey-Wade series after its central characters. The twenty-second century, viewed from 1930: giant propeller-driven aircraft carrying two thousand passengers across the country at 500-plus miles an hour, progressing to molecular-motion drives run by solar heat, to interplanetary voyages and war with Venus, to an "invasion" by a rogue star crossing the solar system. The Black Star Passes was originally published in Amazing Stories as three shorter stories: "Piracy Preferred", "Solarite", and "The Black Star Passes", and the book is divided into these sections. Richard Arcot is the nation's leading physicist, only recently supplanting his father, also a great scientist-inventor. Robert Morey, a brilliant mathematician who complements Arcot's genius, is the son of a transcontinental airline owner and Arcot's best friend. Wade is a chemistry genius who turns to air piracy in the first section of the book. Cured of his mental imbalance, he teams up with Arcot and Morey on their adventures.
READ IT
***
John W. Campbell Jr. (1910-1971)
American SF editor and author.
To get a sense of the discourse surrounding the so-called Golden Age of SF and what preceded it, read anything written about Campbell.
Campbell attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he befriended Norbert Wiener, one of the godfathers of computers. He began writing science fiction at age 18. By the time he was 21 he was a well-known pulp writer of super-science space opera but had been dismissed by MIT: he had failed German. He then spent one year at Duke University, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in physics in 1932. Asimov notes Campbell's presence at Duke and speculates that Duke was "best known in my youth for the work of Joseph B. Rhine on extrasensory perception, and that may have influenced Campbell's later views on the subject."The 1940s saw a great wave of science fiction writers, the first to grow up reading the pulps and then writing stories of their own. "Astounding was at the heart of this explosion of writers, and John W. Campbell, Jr. was the heart of Astounding." Effective October 1937 Campbell took over Astounding; he remained there until his death. With the March 1938 issue he changed the title from Astounding Stories to Astounding Science-Fiction. He made the magazine the leader in the field, with its zenith probably being in the early 1940s. He introduced Asimov, Heinlein, del Rey, Sturgeon, and van Vogt to SF.
Campbell had strong ideas about what made good science fiction and he wasn't afraid to make writers do it his way. According to Theodore Sturgeon, "Writers who always sold their stories to editors were suddenly faced with an editor who sold stories to them instead ... and could he sell!" In particular, Campbell stressed scientific plausibility, telling writers, "If you can't make 'em possible, make 'em logical. If you can't research it, extrapolate it!" Those who could adapt did -- Jack Williamson is one who made the leap easily, and his classic 1938 serial The Legion of Space was only one highlight. Meanwhile, Campbell was always hunting for new writers who would do the stories he wanted. The summer of 1939 was the watershed moment. The July issue featured "Black Destroyer" by A.E. van Vogt as well as "Trends", the first Astounding story by a skinny Brooklyn kid named Isaac Asimov. The August issue included "Life-Line", Robert Heinlein's first story, and September served up "The Ether Breathers" from new writer Theodore Sturgeon.
Other magazines began to emulate what was happening in Astounding while Campbell preached his approach to science fiction through the editorial columns. Over the next decade, he would shape the careers of every major SF writer except Ray Bradbury. "Before Campbell, magazine science fiction was brash, exciting, violent, and so lurid that most of it is unreadable today." — Chris Aylott, Space.com "The genre was bug-eyed monsters, exploding galaxies, stories written like engineering diagrams, and the occasional Wellsian or Stapledonian meditation. Campbell didn't change all of this, but by 1949, the excesses were toned down, the science made more sense, and sometimes even style would grace the printed page."
CAMPBELL'S RADIUM-AGE SF
* "When the Atoms Failed" (Amazing Stories, January 1930). Campbell started out as a writer, making his debut in 1930 — while a student at MIT — with the short story, "When the Atoms Failed". He was only 20 at the time, but before long he was second only to E. E. "Doc" Smith as a smasher of galaxies.
* "Piracy Preferred" (Amazing Stories, June 1930). The first of the Arcot, Morey, and Wade series (future inventions).
* "Solarite" (Amazing Stories, November 1930). The 2nd of the Arcot, Morey, and Wade series (future inventions).
* "The Black Star Passes" (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall 1930). The 3rd of the Arcot, Morey, and Wade series (future inventions).* "Islands of Space" (Amazing Stories Qaurterly, Spring 1931). The 4th of the Arcot, Morey, and Wade series (future inventions).
* "Invaders from the Infinite" (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Spring/Summer 1932). The 5th of the Arcot, Morey, and Wade series (future inventions).
POST-RADIUM-AGE SF (not a complete list):
Campbell later changed his writing style and gained new popularity as "Don A. Stuart" in Astounding Stories. "It is rather ironical that Campbell made his name as a writer with the heavy-science type of story, a class of writing which he made obsolete by his stories under the "Don A. Stuart" byline and by his editorship of Astounding/Amazing." — Bleiler* "Who Goes There?" (Astounding Stories, August 1938) — written as Don A. Stuart. Later the basis of the film The Thing.
* The Black Star Passes (Fantasy, Reading, 1953). The first of a science fiction trilogy dubbed the Arcot-Morey-Wade series after its central characters. The twenty-second century, viewed from 1930: giant propeller-driven aircraft carrying two thousand passengers across the country at 500-plus miles an hour, progressing to molecular-motion drives run by solar heat, to interplanetary voyages and war with Venus, to an "invasion" by a rogue star crossing the solar system. The Black Star Passes was originally published in Amazing Stories as three shorter stories: "Piracy Preferred", "Solarite", and "The Black Star Passes", and the book is divided into these sections. Richard Arcot is the nation's leading physicist, only recently supplanting his father, also a great scientist-inventor. Robert Morey, a brilliant mathematician who complements Arcot's genius, is the son of a transcontinental airline owner and Arcot's best friend. Wade is a chemistry genius who turns to air piracy in the first section of the book. Cured of his mental imbalance, he teams up with Arcot and Morey on their adventures.
READ IT
Partisan generation (1904-13)
A version of this post originally appeared at the Boston Globe blog Brainiac, on 4/28/08.
I've decided to call those Americans born between 1904 and 1913 "Partisans" after Partisan Review, a journal founded in 1934 in New York by William Phillips (b. 1907) and Philip Rahv (1908). In '38, Partisan Review was relaunched by Rahv, Phillips, and three other members of their generational cohort: Dwight Macdonald (1906), F.W. Dupee (1904), and George L.K. Morris (1905). It became the most influential literary-political journal of both the prewar anti-Stalinist Left (a.k.a. the New York Intellectuals), and the postwar era's chastened liberals and early neoconservatives.
***
I've identified the following 19th- and 20th-century European and American generational cohorts, each of which gave us important Radium-Age SF authors: Prometheans (1844-53) | Plutonians (1854-63) | Anarcho-Symbolists (1864-73) | Psychonauts (1874-83) | New Kids (1884-93) | Hardboileds (1894-1903) | Partisans (1904-13). I've also reinvented more recent generational cohorts: New Gods (1914-23) | Postmoderns (1924-33) | Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43) | Baby Boomers (1944-53) | OGXers (Original Generation X) (1954-63) | PCers (1964-73) | Netters (1974-83) | Millennials (1984-93)
***
Older Partisans came of age at the height of the Roaring Twenties, a period of economic prosperity; laissez faire capitalism had found its true home in America. Thanks to rapid urbanization, for the first time in American history, the population of cities surpassed the population of rural areas. Nothing seemed impossible: television, talking pictures, nonstop transatlantic flights, new land-speed records, frozen food, color cartoons, long-playing records. Prohibition gave rise to speakeasies, which gave rise to the Jazz Age.
Younger Partisans, however, became adults just as the US stock market collapsed, and the Great Depression began. Communists forecast the Death of Capitalism, while Roosevelt's New Deal used government spending — on programs including the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civil Works Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps — to restore faith in American democracy at a time when many people believed that the only choice left was between communism and fascism. The Social Security Act of 1935 was the beginning of a permanent, expanding national program. Organized labor began unionizing the mass production industries, with great success.
Meanwhile, young Americans enlisted to fight on the side of the socialists, communists, liberals, and anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. As Continental Europe succumbed to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, European artists and intellectuals fled to America. Two years after Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 touched off World War II, and just a few days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, America abandoned neutrality. By the end of the Thirties (1943), the US was ready for war.
Thanks to the Partisans, the Thirties and Forties were a kind of apex not only for American intellectual life, but for American pop culture. Most of Hollywood's golden-age directors (of noir, screwball comedies, and more), a number of whom were refugees from WWII Europe, are Partisans. So are everybody's favorite silver-screen apemen and wolfmen, private eyes and fast-talking dames, dancing scarecrows and yodeling cowboys, not to mention most of the actors who would portray villains on the 1960s Batman show. Plus: The early New Yorker's greatest writers and cartoonists.
Radical politics and an autonomous, experimental, American modernist art were only two of the many possibilities championed by members of this generation. Not only were they Abstract Expressionists and New York Intellectuals, the Partisans were pioneers of big band swing, the Dixieland revival, and the Delta blues;; as well as structuralist anthropology and literary theory. Within the Partisan cohort we find the inventors of the atom bomb, the Skinner box, LSD, Scientology, the instant photo, and the perfect popcorn. We also find the creators of such iconic pop culture characters as Daffy Duck, Tom & Jerry, Bugs Bunny, Flash Gordon, Conan the Barbarian, Shrek, and the Grinch.
***
Radium-Age SF writers from this generation include:
* John W. Campbell Jr. ("The Black Star Passes," "Invaders from the Infinite," became the most influential Golden-Age SF editor)
* Jack Williamson ("The Metal Man," The Girl from Mars)
* Robert E. Howard ("Skull-Face," "The Moon of Skulls")
* Eando Binder (Earl Andrew Binder & Otto Oscar Binder, "The First Martian").
NB: Edmond Hamilton is an honorary Hardboiled.
Golden-Age ONLY SF writers from this generation include:
* Lester Dent (Doc Savage series starts in '33), Robert A. Heinlein, Fritz Lieber, L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, Fredric Brown, Jack Finney, Nelson S. Bond, Ross Rocklynne, Clifford D. Simak, Alfred Bester, C.L. Moore, A.E. van Vogt, A. Bertram Chandler, Eric Frank Russell, Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged, Anthem), Samuel Beckett (Endgame), Hergé (The Shooting Star), Pierre Boulle (Planet of the Apes), Louis L'Amour (The Haunted Mesa), Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast), B.F. Skinner (Walden Two). Honorary Partisan SF writer: George Orwell (1984). Other Partisans include Joseph Campbell, Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon), and Buster Crabbe, without all of whom no Star Wars.
PS: Al Capp's "The Time Capsule," a genuine SF adventure starring Li'l Abner, appeared in Satellite (August 1957).
PS: William S. Burroughs and Donald A. Wollheim, who would push Golden Age SF — by the likes of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip José Farmer — into strange new territories, and who decisively influenced the following (postmodern) generation of SF authors, were born immediately after the Partisan cohort, in 1914. Doesn't that seem to prove the usefulness of my periodization scheme?
***
Meet the Partisans.
1904: S. J. Perelman, Jimmy Dorsey, Count Basie, Isamu Noguchi, Glenn Miller, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Russel Wright, Coleman Hawkins, Ray Bolger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Meyer Schapiro, B. F. Skinner, Joseph Campbell, Clifford D. Simak, Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Fats Waller, Peter Arno, F.W. Dupee, Johnny Weissmuller, George Stevens, Ralph Bellamy, Tricky Sam Nanton, Phil Harris, Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Montgomery, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Elsewhere: Cary Grant, Deng Xiaoping, John Gielgud, Edgar G. Ulmer, Greer Garson, Cecil Beaton, George Balanchine, Willem de Kooning, Ernst Mayr, Pablo Neruda, Earl Andrew Binder (American SF writer). Honorary Hardboileds: James T. Farrell, Graham Greene, Frank Gruber, Joan Crawford, Peter Lorre, Salvador Dali, Edmond Hamilton (SF author).
1905: Lionel Trilling, Lillian Hellman, John O'Hara, Henry Fonda, Eddie Anderson, Bob Wills, Arthur Crudup, Ernie Bushmiller, Howard Hughes, Tommy Dorsey, Jack Teagarden, Robert Penn Warren, Eddie Condon, Diana Trilling, Agnes de Mille, Kenneth Rexroth, Friz Freleng, Barnett Newman, Lois Mailou Jones, Anna May Wong, Myrna Loy, Arthur Lake, Clara Bow, Joseph Cotten, Thelma Ritter. Elsewhere: Ayn Rand, Greta Garbo, Jean-Paul Sartre, Otto Preminger, Robert Donat, Ray Milland, Christian Dior, Maria von Trapp, Albert Speer, Elias Canetti, Anthony Powell, Eric Frank Russell.
1906: Dwight Macdonald, Harold Rosenberg, Anthony Mann, Clifford Odets, Carol Reed, Ed Gein, Grace Hopper, William Bendix, Janet Gaynor, Bugsy Siegel, Janet Gaynor, John Carradine, Josephine Baker, Estée Lauder, Fredric Brown, Louise Brooks, Wild Bill Davison, Nelson Goodman, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Eddie Albert, Lou Costello, Robert E. Howard (SF & Fantasy writer), Lon Chaney, Jr., Satchel Paige, Ozzie Nelson, Victoria Spivey. Elsewhere: Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Aristotle Onassis, Billy Wilder, Roberto Rossellini, Samuel Beckett, Jacques Becker, Albert Hofmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Madeleine Carroll, Henny Youngman, Adolf Eichmann, Kurt Godel, T. H. White, John Betjeman, Imam Hassan al Banna, Luchino Visconti, Leonid Brezhnev.
1907: William Phillips, Barbara Stanwyck, Rachel Carson, Cab Calloway, Katharine Hepburn, John Wayne, James A. Michener, Rosalind Russell, Jessamyn West, Cesar Romero, Buster Crabbe, Robert A. Heinlein, Sunnyland Slim, Milton Caniff, William Shawn, Orville Redenbacher, Gene Autry, William Steig, Burgess Meredith, L. Sprague de Camp, Jimmie Foxx, Charles Alston, Don the Beachcomber. Elsewhere: W.H. Auden, Hergé, Frida Kahlo, Mircea Eliade, Jean Hippolyte, Baldur von Schirach, Laurence Olivier, René Char, Fay Wray, Maurice Blanchot, Run Run Shaw, Astrid Lindgren, Jacques Tati, Jacques Barzun, Peggy Ashcroft.
1908: Philip Rahv, Bette Davis, Richard Wright, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jack Williamson (SF writer), Edward R. Murrow, Louis L'Amour, Theodore Roethke, Buddy Ebsen, Lee Krasner, Carole Lombard, Lionel Hampton, William Maxwell, Ethel Merman, C. Vann Woodward, Nelson S. Bond, Joseph Mitchell, Fred MacMurray, James Stewart, Abraham Maslow, Joseph McCarthy, Mel Blanc, Tex Avery, Milton Berle, Leon "Chu" Berry, Thurgood Marshall. Elsewhere: Arthur Adamov, Anna Magnani, Rex Harrison, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, David Lean, Edward Teller, Daisy and Violet Hilton, Michael Redgrave, Ian Fleming, Henri Cartier-Bresson, John Kenneth Galbraith, Claude Lévi-Strauss.
1909: Clement Greenberg, Benny Goodman, James Agee, Lester Young, Nelson Algren, Wallace Stegner, Eudora Welty, Herschel Evans, Barry Goldwater, Bukka White, Gene Krupa, Ann Sothern, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Alex Raymond, Dean Rusk, Art Tatum, Hugh Beaumont, Wallace Stegner, John Fante, Edwin H. Land, Moon Mullican, Mother Maybelle Carter, Burl Ives, Leo Fender, Al Capp (US cartoonist Alfred Gerald Caplin, Li'l Abner), Kay Thompson, Eve Arden, Vivian Vance. Elsewhere: Simone Weil, Isaiah Berlin, Malcolm Lowry, Albert R. Broccoli, Eugène Ionesco, Elia Kazan, Errol Flynn, Stanislaw Ulam, Carmen Miranda, James Mason, Jessica Tandy, Colonel Tom Parker, Michael Rennie, Francis Bacon, Victor Borge.
1910: Lionel Abel, Paul Bowles, Howlin' Wolf, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Louis Prima, Shep Fields, Franz Kline, Wright Morris, Big Joe Turner, Fritz Lieber, Paul Sweezy, Russell Lynes, Dizzy Dean, Joan Bennett, John W. Campbell Jr., Charles Olson, Spade Cooley, Dorothea Tanning, Gloria Stuart, Mae Clarke, Mary Wickes, Scatman Crothers, Artie Shaw, T-Bone Walker, E.G. Marshall, William Hanna, John H. Hammond. Elsewhere: Jean Genet, A.J. Ayer, Akira Kurosawa, Diana Mitford, Eero Saarinen, Django Reinhardt, David Niven, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Mother Teresa.
1911: Robert Johnson, Tennessee Williams, Paul Goodman, Louise Bourgeois, Buck Clayton, Ronald Reagan, Babe Zaharias, Ginger Rogers, Elizabeth Bishop, Martin Denny, Gypsy Rose Lee, Hugh Marlowe, L. Ron Hubbard, Lucille Ball, Maureen O'Sullivan, Kenneth Patchen, Roy Rogers, John Sturges, Butterfly McQueen, C. L. Moore, Roy Eldridge, Lee Falk, Jack Finney, Jean Harlow, Phil Silvers, Joseph Barbera, Jack Ruby, Hubert H. Humphrey, Vincent Price, Spike Jones, Bernard Herrmann, Mitch Miller, LaVerne Andrews, Jane Wyatt, Romare Bearden, Ruth Hussey, Lee J. Cobb, Kenneth Patchen, Nicholas Ray, Robert Taylor, Otto Oscar Binder (American SF author). Elsewhere: Emil Cioran, Josef Mengele, Flann O'Brien, J.L. Austin, Czeslaw Milosz, Mervyn Peake, Hume Cronyn, Marshall McLuhan, William Golding, Nino Rota.
1912: Woody Guthrie, Mary McCarthy, Jackson Pollock, Milton Friedman, Gene Kelly, Samuel Fuller, John Cheever, Don Siegel, Julia Child, Studs Terkel, Doris Wishman, Charles Addams, Teddy Wilson, Chuck Jones, Lady Bird Johnson, Barbara Tuchman, John Cage, Lightnin' Hopkins, Pat Nixon, Bayard Rustin, Karl Malden, Archibald Cox, Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, Perry Como, Jay Silverheels, Art Linkletter, Minnie Pearl, Gordon Parks, Richard Brooks. Elsewhere: Michelangelo Antonioni, Northrop Frye, Kim Philby, Jacques Ellul, José Ferrer, Eva Braun, Pierre Boulle, Lawrence Durrell, Wernher von Braun, Sonja Henie, Kim Il-sung, A. E. van Vogt, Alan Turing, Pope John Paul I, Franz Jakubowski.
1913: Muddy Waters, Delmore Schwartz, Rosa Parks, William Barrett, Richard Nixon, Frank Tashlin, Danny Kaye, Jimmy Hoffa, Bob Crosby, Jimmy Preston, Lloyd Bridges, Ross Rocklynne, Loretta Young, Jim Backus, William Casey, Richard Helms, Walt Kelly, Frankie Laine, Oleg Cassini, Tyrone Power, Woody Herman, William Reddington Hewlett, David Packard, Dorothy Kilgallen, Red Skelton, W. Mark Felt (Deep Throat), Frances Farmer, John M. Mitchell, Mickey Cohen, Stanley Kramer, Robert Capa, John Garfield, Mary Martin, Victor Mature. Elsewhere: Albert Camus, Anthony Quayle, Max Kaminsky, Philip Guston, Mary Leakey, Paul Ricoeur, Robertson Davies, Menachem Begin, Peter Cushing, Trevor Howard, Vivien Leigh, Benjamin Britten, Hedy Lamarr, Stewart Granger, Lucien Goldmann. Honorary New Gods: Joe Simon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Alan Ladd, Burt Lancaster, Cordwainer Smith, Vince Lombardi, Jesse Owens, Alfred Bester, maybe Ralph Ellison.
***
HONORARY PARTISANS: Cornell Woolrich, George Orwell, John Dillinger, Mark Rothko, maybe T.W. Adorno and Cyril Connolly (all 1903). Daniel J. Boorstin, Howard Fast, Marguerite Duras, Julio Cortazar, Dylan Thomas (all 1914).
PARTISANS WHO ARE HONORARY HARDBOILEDS: James T. Farrell, Graham Greene, Edmond Hamilton, Frank Gruber, Joan Crawford, Peter Lorre, Salvador Dali.
PARTISANS WHO ARE HONORARY NEW GODS: Joe Simon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Alan Ladd, Burt Lancaster, Cordwainer Smith, Vince Lombardi, Jesse Owens, Alfred Bester, maybe Ralph Ellison.
I've decided to call those Americans born between 1904 and 1913 "Partisans" after Partisan Review, a journal founded in 1934 in New York by William Phillips (b. 1907) and Philip Rahv (1908). In '38, Partisan Review was relaunched by Rahv, Phillips, and three other members of their generational cohort: Dwight Macdonald (1906), F.W. Dupee (1904), and George L.K. Morris (1905). It became the most influential literary-political journal of both the prewar anti-Stalinist Left (a.k.a. the New York Intellectuals), and the postwar era's chastened liberals and early neoconservatives.
***
I've identified the following 19th- and 20th-century European and American generational cohorts, each of which gave us important Radium-Age SF authors: Prometheans (1844-53) | Plutonians (1854-63) | Anarcho-Symbolists (1864-73) | Psychonauts (1874-83) | New Kids (1884-93) | Hardboileds (1894-1903) | Partisans (1904-13). I've also reinvented more recent generational cohorts: New Gods (1914-23) | Postmoderns (1924-33) | Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43) | Baby Boomers (1944-53) | OGXers (Original Generation X) (1954-63) | PCers (1964-73) | Netters (1974-83) | Millennials (1984-93)
***
Older Partisans came of age at the height of the Roaring Twenties, a period of economic prosperity; laissez faire capitalism had found its true home in America. Thanks to rapid urbanization, for the first time in American history, the population of cities surpassed the population of rural areas. Nothing seemed impossible: television, talking pictures, nonstop transatlantic flights, new land-speed records, frozen food, color cartoons, long-playing records. Prohibition gave rise to speakeasies, which gave rise to the Jazz Age.
Younger Partisans, however, became adults just as the US stock market collapsed, and the Great Depression began. Communists forecast the Death of Capitalism, while Roosevelt's New Deal used government spending — on programs including the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civil Works Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps — to restore faith in American democracy at a time when many people believed that the only choice left was between communism and fascism. The Social Security Act of 1935 was the beginning of a permanent, expanding national program. Organized labor began unionizing the mass production industries, with great success.
Meanwhile, young Americans enlisted to fight on the side of the socialists, communists, liberals, and anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. As Continental Europe succumbed to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, European artists and intellectuals fled to America. Two years after Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 touched off World War II, and just a few days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, America abandoned neutrality. By the end of the Thirties (1943), the US was ready for war.
Thanks to the Partisans, the Thirties and Forties were a kind of apex not only for American intellectual life, but for American pop culture. Most of Hollywood's golden-age directors (of noir, screwball comedies, and more), a number of whom were refugees from WWII Europe, are Partisans. So are everybody's favorite silver-screen apemen and wolfmen, private eyes and fast-talking dames, dancing scarecrows and yodeling cowboys, not to mention most of the actors who would portray villains on the 1960s Batman show. Plus: The early New Yorker's greatest writers and cartoonists.
Radical politics and an autonomous, experimental, American modernist art were only two of the many possibilities championed by members of this generation. Not only were they Abstract Expressionists and New York Intellectuals, the Partisans were pioneers of big band swing, the Dixieland revival, and the Delta blues;; as well as structuralist anthropology and literary theory. Within the Partisan cohort we find the inventors of the atom bomb, the Skinner box, LSD, Scientology, the instant photo, and the perfect popcorn. We also find the creators of such iconic pop culture characters as Daffy Duck, Tom & Jerry, Bugs Bunny, Flash Gordon, Conan the Barbarian, Shrek, and the Grinch.
***
Radium-Age SF writers from this generation include:
* John W. Campbell Jr. ("The Black Star Passes," "Invaders from the Infinite," became the most influential Golden-Age SF editor)
* Jack Williamson ("The Metal Man," The Girl from Mars)
* Robert E. Howard ("Skull-Face," "The Moon of Skulls")
* Eando Binder (Earl Andrew Binder & Otto Oscar Binder, "The First Martian").
NB: Edmond Hamilton is an honorary Hardboiled.
Golden-Age ONLY SF writers from this generation include:
* Lester Dent (Doc Savage series starts in '33), Robert A. Heinlein, Fritz Lieber, L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, Fredric Brown, Jack Finney, Nelson S. Bond, Ross Rocklynne, Clifford D. Simak, Alfred Bester, C.L. Moore, A.E. van Vogt, A. Bertram Chandler, Eric Frank Russell, Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged, Anthem), Samuel Beckett (Endgame), Hergé (The Shooting Star), Pierre Boulle (Planet of the Apes), Louis L'Amour (The Haunted Mesa), Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast), B.F. Skinner (Walden Two). Honorary Partisan SF writer: George Orwell (1984). Other Partisans include Joseph Campbell, Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon), and Buster Crabbe, without all of whom no Star Wars.
PS: Al Capp's "The Time Capsule," a genuine SF adventure starring Li'l Abner, appeared in Satellite (August 1957).
PS: William S. Burroughs and Donald A. Wollheim, who would push Golden Age SF — by the likes of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip José Farmer — into strange new territories, and who decisively influenced the following (postmodern) generation of SF authors, were born immediately after the Partisan cohort, in 1914. Doesn't that seem to prove the usefulness of my periodization scheme?
***
Meet the Partisans.
1904: S. J. Perelman, Jimmy Dorsey, Count Basie, Isamu Noguchi, Glenn Miller, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Russel Wright, Coleman Hawkins, Ray Bolger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Meyer Schapiro, B. F. Skinner, Joseph Campbell, Clifford D. Simak, Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Fats Waller, Peter Arno, F.W. Dupee, Johnny Weissmuller, George Stevens, Ralph Bellamy, Tricky Sam Nanton, Phil Harris, Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Montgomery, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Elsewhere: Cary Grant, Deng Xiaoping, John Gielgud, Edgar G. Ulmer, Greer Garson, Cecil Beaton, George Balanchine, Willem de Kooning, Ernst Mayr, Pablo Neruda, Earl Andrew Binder (American SF writer). Honorary Hardboileds: James T. Farrell, Graham Greene, Frank Gruber, Joan Crawford, Peter Lorre, Salvador Dali, Edmond Hamilton (SF author).
1905: Lionel Trilling, Lillian Hellman, John O'Hara, Henry Fonda, Eddie Anderson, Bob Wills, Arthur Crudup, Ernie Bushmiller, Howard Hughes, Tommy Dorsey, Jack Teagarden, Robert Penn Warren, Eddie Condon, Diana Trilling, Agnes de Mille, Kenneth Rexroth, Friz Freleng, Barnett Newman, Lois Mailou Jones, Anna May Wong, Myrna Loy, Arthur Lake, Clara Bow, Joseph Cotten, Thelma Ritter. Elsewhere: Ayn Rand, Greta Garbo, Jean-Paul Sartre, Otto Preminger, Robert Donat, Ray Milland, Christian Dior, Maria von Trapp, Albert Speer, Elias Canetti, Anthony Powell, Eric Frank Russell.
1906: Dwight Macdonald, Harold Rosenberg, Anthony Mann, Clifford Odets, Carol Reed, Ed Gein, Grace Hopper, William Bendix, Janet Gaynor, Bugsy Siegel, Janet Gaynor, John Carradine, Josephine Baker, Estée Lauder, Fredric Brown, Louise Brooks, Wild Bill Davison, Nelson Goodman, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Eddie Albert, Lou Costello, Robert E. Howard (SF & Fantasy writer), Lon Chaney, Jr., Satchel Paige, Ozzie Nelson, Victoria Spivey. Elsewhere: Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Aristotle Onassis, Billy Wilder, Roberto Rossellini, Samuel Beckett, Jacques Becker, Albert Hofmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Madeleine Carroll, Henny Youngman, Adolf Eichmann, Kurt Godel, T. H. White, John Betjeman, Imam Hassan al Banna, Luchino Visconti, Leonid Brezhnev.
1907: William Phillips, Barbara Stanwyck, Rachel Carson, Cab Calloway, Katharine Hepburn, John Wayne, James A. Michener, Rosalind Russell, Jessamyn West, Cesar Romero, Buster Crabbe, Robert A. Heinlein, Sunnyland Slim, Milton Caniff, William Shawn, Orville Redenbacher, Gene Autry, William Steig, Burgess Meredith, L. Sprague de Camp, Jimmie Foxx, Charles Alston, Don the Beachcomber. Elsewhere: W.H. Auden, Hergé, Frida Kahlo, Mircea Eliade, Jean Hippolyte, Baldur von Schirach, Laurence Olivier, René Char, Fay Wray, Maurice Blanchot, Run Run Shaw, Astrid Lindgren, Jacques Tati, Jacques Barzun, Peggy Ashcroft.
1908: Philip Rahv, Bette Davis, Richard Wright, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jack Williamson (SF writer), Edward R. Murrow, Louis L'Amour, Theodore Roethke, Buddy Ebsen, Lee Krasner, Carole Lombard, Lionel Hampton, William Maxwell, Ethel Merman, C. Vann Woodward, Nelson S. Bond, Joseph Mitchell, Fred MacMurray, James Stewart, Abraham Maslow, Joseph McCarthy, Mel Blanc, Tex Avery, Milton Berle, Leon "Chu" Berry, Thurgood Marshall. Elsewhere: Arthur Adamov, Anna Magnani, Rex Harrison, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, David Lean, Edward Teller, Daisy and Violet Hilton, Michael Redgrave, Ian Fleming, Henri Cartier-Bresson, John Kenneth Galbraith, Claude Lévi-Strauss.
1909: Clement Greenberg, Benny Goodman, James Agee, Lester Young, Nelson Algren, Wallace Stegner, Eudora Welty, Herschel Evans, Barry Goldwater, Bukka White, Gene Krupa, Ann Sothern, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Alex Raymond, Dean Rusk, Art Tatum, Hugh Beaumont, Wallace Stegner, John Fante, Edwin H. Land, Moon Mullican, Mother Maybelle Carter, Burl Ives, Leo Fender, Al Capp (US cartoonist Alfred Gerald Caplin, Li'l Abner), Kay Thompson, Eve Arden, Vivian Vance. Elsewhere: Simone Weil, Isaiah Berlin, Malcolm Lowry, Albert R. Broccoli, Eugène Ionesco, Elia Kazan, Errol Flynn, Stanislaw Ulam, Carmen Miranda, James Mason, Jessica Tandy, Colonel Tom Parker, Michael Rennie, Francis Bacon, Victor Borge.
1910: Lionel Abel, Paul Bowles, Howlin' Wolf, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Louis Prima, Shep Fields, Franz Kline, Wright Morris, Big Joe Turner, Fritz Lieber, Paul Sweezy, Russell Lynes, Dizzy Dean, Joan Bennett, John W. Campbell Jr., Charles Olson, Spade Cooley, Dorothea Tanning, Gloria Stuart, Mae Clarke, Mary Wickes, Scatman Crothers, Artie Shaw, T-Bone Walker, E.G. Marshall, William Hanna, John H. Hammond. Elsewhere: Jean Genet, A.J. Ayer, Akira Kurosawa, Diana Mitford, Eero Saarinen, Django Reinhardt, David Niven, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Mother Teresa.
1911: Robert Johnson, Tennessee Williams, Paul Goodman, Louise Bourgeois, Buck Clayton, Ronald Reagan, Babe Zaharias, Ginger Rogers, Elizabeth Bishop, Martin Denny, Gypsy Rose Lee, Hugh Marlowe, L. Ron Hubbard, Lucille Ball, Maureen O'Sullivan, Kenneth Patchen, Roy Rogers, John Sturges, Butterfly McQueen, C. L. Moore, Roy Eldridge, Lee Falk, Jack Finney, Jean Harlow, Phil Silvers, Joseph Barbera, Jack Ruby, Hubert H. Humphrey, Vincent Price, Spike Jones, Bernard Herrmann, Mitch Miller, LaVerne Andrews, Jane Wyatt, Romare Bearden, Ruth Hussey, Lee J. Cobb, Kenneth Patchen, Nicholas Ray, Robert Taylor, Otto Oscar Binder (American SF author). Elsewhere: Emil Cioran, Josef Mengele, Flann O'Brien, J.L. Austin, Czeslaw Milosz, Mervyn Peake, Hume Cronyn, Marshall McLuhan, William Golding, Nino Rota.
1912: Woody Guthrie, Mary McCarthy, Jackson Pollock, Milton Friedman, Gene Kelly, Samuel Fuller, John Cheever, Don Siegel, Julia Child, Studs Terkel, Doris Wishman, Charles Addams, Teddy Wilson, Chuck Jones, Lady Bird Johnson, Barbara Tuchman, John Cage, Lightnin' Hopkins, Pat Nixon, Bayard Rustin, Karl Malden, Archibald Cox, Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, Perry Como, Jay Silverheels, Art Linkletter, Minnie Pearl, Gordon Parks, Richard Brooks. Elsewhere: Michelangelo Antonioni, Northrop Frye, Kim Philby, Jacques Ellul, José Ferrer, Eva Braun, Pierre Boulle, Lawrence Durrell, Wernher von Braun, Sonja Henie, Kim Il-sung, A. E. van Vogt, Alan Turing, Pope John Paul I, Franz Jakubowski.
1913: Muddy Waters, Delmore Schwartz, Rosa Parks, William Barrett, Richard Nixon, Frank Tashlin, Danny Kaye, Jimmy Hoffa, Bob Crosby, Jimmy Preston, Lloyd Bridges, Ross Rocklynne, Loretta Young, Jim Backus, William Casey, Richard Helms, Walt Kelly, Frankie Laine, Oleg Cassini, Tyrone Power, Woody Herman, William Reddington Hewlett, David Packard, Dorothy Kilgallen, Red Skelton, W. Mark Felt (Deep Throat), Frances Farmer, John M. Mitchell, Mickey Cohen, Stanley Kramer, Robert Capa, John Garfield, Mary Martin, Victor Mature. Elsewhere: Albert Camus, Anthony Quayle, Max Kaminsky, Philip Guston, Mary Leakey, Paul Ricoeur, Robertson Davies, Menachem Begin, Peter Cushing, Trevor Howard, Vivien Leigh, Benjamin Britten, Hedy Lamarr, Stewart Granger, Lucien Goldmann. Honorary New Gods: Joe Simon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Alan Ladd, Burt Lancaster, Cordwainer Smith, Vince Lombardi, Jesse Owens, Alfred Bester, maybe Ralph Ellison.
***
HONORARY PARTISANS: Cornell Woolrich, George Orwell, John Dillinger, Mark Rothko, maybe T.W. Adorno and Cyril Connolly (all 1903). Daniel J. Boorstin, Howard Fast, Marguerite Duras, Julio Cortazar, Dylan Thomas (all 1914).
PARTISANS WHO ARE HONORARY HARDBOILEDS: James T. Farrell, Graham Greene, Edmond Hamilton, Frank Gruber, Joan Crawford, Peter Lorre, Salvador Dali.
PARTISANS WHO ARE HONORARY NEW GODS: Joe Simon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Alan Ladd, Burt Lancaster, Cordwainer Smith, Vince Lombardi, Jesse Owens, Alfred Bester, maybe Ralph Ellison.
Monday, January 5, 2009
SF authors born 1904-13: 1908
1. Jack Williamson
***
Jack Williamson (TK)
# "The Metal Man," 1928
# The Alien Intelligence (1929)
# "The Cosmic Express," 1930
* The Girl from Mars (1930, with Miles J. Breuer)
* The Green Girl (1930)
# "The Moon Era," 1931
* The Stone from the Green Star (1931)
* Golden Blood (1933)
***
***
Jack Williamson (TK)
# "The Metal Man," 1928
# The Alien Intelligence (1929)
# "The Cosmic Express," 1930
* The Girl from Mars (1930, with Miles J. Breuer)
* The Green Girl (1930)
# "The Moon Era," 1931
* The Stone from the Green Star (1931)
* Golden Blood (1933)
***
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
SF authors born 1904-13: 1904
1. Lester Dent
2. Edmond Hamilton
***
Lester Dent (Kenneth Robeson: Doc Savage) (TK)
Dent a Golden-Age, not Radium-Age SF author?
***
Edmond Hamilton (1904-1973)
American writer. A very prolific contributor to the science-fiction and supernatural fiction genre magazines. He was a barely competent writer with few ideas. Along with Ray Cummins, claims Bleiler, he was probably the genre writer most deserving of the term "hack." However, he is important historically as perhaps the major creator of the space opera and the modern story of world menace. (That is, "sci fi.") Very little of his work is worth reading today, says Bleiler.
Edmond Hamilton began his writing career in the early days of pulp science fiction. His first story, "The Monster of Marmuth", appeared in Weird Tales, and was very reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft. Soon, though, his style changed, and he focused on the "super-science" stories popularized by E. E. Smith and John Campbell. In 1940, pulp editor Leo Marguiles and Hamilton created the Captain Future character, who was the lead character in a short running (17 issues) self-titled magazine. The character would later resurface as an anime character.
Unlike many of the pioneers of pulp sci-fi, Hamilton continued to write stories well into the 1970s. His later work began to focus on more introspective topics, and are some of his best. He also became a comic book writer, scripting many issues of "Superman" comics. While not well known today, Hamilton's work was a definite influence on many writers and filmmakers today. His influences can be seen in "Star Trek", "Star Wars", and "Babylon 5".
Edmond is credited[citation needed] as the author of the first hardcover compilation of what would eventually come to be known as the Science Fiction genre, "The Horror on The Asteroid and Other Tales of Planetary Horror" (1936). The book compiles the following stories: The Horror on the Asteroid, The Accursed Galaxy, The Man Who Saw Everything (The Man With the X-Ray Eyes), The Earth-Brain, The Monster-God of Mamurth, and The Man Who Evolved.
His career as a science fiction writer began with the publication of the novel, "The Monster God of Mamurth",[2] which appeared in the August 1926 issue of the classic magazine of alternative fiction, Weird Tales. Hamilton quickly became a central member of the remarkable group of Weird Tales writers assembled by editor Farnsworth Wright, that included H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Hamilton would publish 79 works of fiction in Weird Tales between 1926 and 1948, making him one of the most prolific of the magazine's contributors (only Seabury Quinn and August Derleth appeared more frequently). Hamilton became a friend and associate of several Weird Tales veterans, including E. Hoffmann Price and Otis Adelbert Kline; most notably, he struck up a 20-year friendship with close contemporary Jack Williamson, as Williamson records in his 1984 autobiography Wonder's Child. In the late 1930s Weird Tales printed several striking fantasy tales by Hamilton, most notably "He That Hath Wings" (July 1938), one of his most popular and frequently-reprinted pieces.
Through the late 1920s and early '30s Hamilton wrote for all of the SF pulp magazines then publishing, and contributed horror and thriller stories to various other magazines as well. He was very popular as an author of space opera, a sub-genre he created along with E.E. "Doc" Smith. His story "The Island of Unreason" (Wonder Stories, May 1933) won the first Jules Verne Prize as the best SF story of the year (this was the first SF prize awarded by the votes of fans, a precursor of the later Hugo Awards). In the later 1930s, in response to the economic strictures of the Great Depression, he also wrote detective and crime stories. Always prolific in stereotypical pulp-magazine fashion, Hamilton sometimes saw 4 or 5 of his stories appear in a single month in these years; the February 1937 issue of the pulp Popular Detective featured three Hamilton stories, one under his own name and two under pseudonyms. In the 1940s, Hamilton was the primary force behind the Captain Future franchise,[3] an SF pulp designed for juvenile readers that won him many fans, but diminished his reputation in later years when science fiction moved away from its space-opera roots. Hamilton was always associated with an extravagant, romantic, high-adventure style of SF, perhaps best represented by his 1947 novel The Star Kings. As the SF field grew more sophisticated, his brand of extreme adventure seemed ever more quaint, corny, and dated.
In 1946 Hamilton began writing for DC Comics, specializing in stories for their characters Superman [4] and Batman. One of his best known Superman stories was "Superman Under the Red Sun" which appeared in Action Comics #300 in 1963 and which has numerous elements in common with his novel City At World's End (1951). He wrote other works for DC Comics, including the short-lived science fiction series Chris KL-99 (in Strange Adventures), which was loosely based on his Captain Future character. He retired from comics in 1966.
[edit] Marriage and collaboration
On December 31, 1946, Hamilton married fellow science fiction author and screen writer Leigh Brackett. 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, 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, would not appear in print until 2005. In the early 1960s, when Brackett had temporarily abandoned SF for screenwriting, Hamilton did an uncredited revision and expansion of two early Brackett stories, "Black Amazon of Mars" and "Queen of the Martian Catacombs"--the results were published as her novellas People of the Talisman and The Secret of Sinharat (1964).
Edmond Hamilton died in 1977 in Lancaster, California, of complications following kidney surgery. In the year before his death he had worked on an anime adaptation of his Captain Future novels and a tokusatsu adaptation of Star Wolf; both appeared on Japanese television in 1978 and the Captain Future adaptation later played in Europe, winning Hamilton a new and different fan base than the one that had acclaimed him half a century before.
* Across Space (Weird Tales, September-November 1926). Bleiler says this novella is "the first of a series of world-saving short novels and nouvelles that were to beset the weird and science-fiction magazines." Androids, controlled telepathically by bat-like winged humanoid beings, guard a ray in an Easter Island volcano that's drawing Mars closer to the Earth. Why? Because hundreds of thousands of years ago, a faction of Martians migrated to Earth and established a colony on the now submerged continent that includes the island. They now live under the ocean, and wish to conquer humankind — which was primitive when they first arrived, but now are too strong to tackle — so they want to get their homeworld close enough to Earth that their fellow Martians can lend them a hand.
* The Metal Giants (Swanson Book Co.: Washburn, North Dakota, c. 1934). Originally in Weird Tales (December 1926). More TK
* "Evolution Island" (Weird Tales, March 1928). Story. Owen, the protagonist, is told by a Professor Walton that Walton has discovered evolution is caused by the Garner ray that emanates from the earth's radioactive interior. Further, Walton can both duplicate this ray and cancel it with a counter emanation. Practically speaking, this means he can evolve animals or plants to their ultimate potential or devolve them back to primordial slime. Buying a small island south of Cuba, he and his assistant Brilling depart; nothing is heard of them for a year. Then, Walton returns and begs Owen for help. It seems that Brilling has entered the evolution ray and become a superman with great mental power, a huge dome of a head, and four tentacular limbs. He intends to lead evolved plants — intelligent, mobile, with vaguely human forms, hello Triffids — to conquer the world. Walton and Owen return to the island, in time to see a small armada of globular air vessels leaving to attack the outside world. Though captured, they escape, reverse the Garner ray, and devolve everything on the island to slime — including the flying globes.
* MORE TK
***
2. Edmond Hamilton
***
Lester Dent (Kenneth Robeson: Doc Savage) (TK)
Dent a Golden-Age, not Radium-Age SF author?
***
Edmond Hamilton (1904-1973)
American writer. A very prolific contributor to the science-fiction and supernatural fiction genre magazines. He was a barely competent writer with few ideas. Along with Ray Cummins, claims Bleiler, he was probably the genre writer most deserving of the term "hack." However, he is important historically as perhaps the major creator of the space opera and the modern story of world menace. (That is, "sci fi.") Very little of his work is worth reading today, says Bleiler.
Edmond Hamilton began his writing career in the early days of pulp science fiction. His first story, "The Monster of Marmuth", appeared in Weird Tales, and was very reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft. Soon, though, his style changed, and he focused on the "super-science" stories popularized by E. E. Smith and John Campbell. In 1940, pulp editor Leo Marguiles and Hamilton created the Captain Future character, who was the lead character in a short running (17 issues) self-titled magazine. The character would later resurface as an anime character.
Unlike many of the pioneers of pulp sci-fi, Hamilton continued to write stories well into the 1970s. His later work began to focus on more introspective topics, and are some of his best. He also became a comic book writer, scripting many issues of "Superman" comics. While not well known today, Hamilton's work was a definite influence on many writers and filmmakers today. His influences can be seen in "Star Trek", "Star Wars", and "Babylon 5".
Edmond is credited[citation needed] as the author of the first hardcover compilation of what would eventually come to be known as the Science Fiction genre, "The Horror on The Asteroid and Other Tales of Planetary Horror" (1936). The book compiles the following stories: The Horror on the Asteroid, The Accursed Galaxy, The Man Who Saw Everything (The Man With the X-Ray Eyes), The Earth-Brain, The Monster-God of Mamurth, and The Man Who Evolved.
His career as a science fiction writer began with the publication of the novel, "The Monster God of Mamurth",[2] which appeared in the August 1926 issue of the classic magazine of alternative fiction, Weird Tales. Hamilton quickly became a central member of the remarkable group of Weird Tales writers assembled by editor Farnsworth Wright, that included H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Hamilton would publish 79 works of fiction in Weird Tales between 1926 and 1948, making him one of the most prolific of the magazine's contributors (only Seabury Quinn and August Derleth appeared more frequently). Hamilton became a friend and associate of several Weird Tales veterans, including E. Hoffmann Price and Otis Adelbert Kline; most notably, he struck up a 20-year friendship with close contemporary Jack Williamson, as Williamson records in his 1984 autobiography Wonder's Child. In the late 1930s Weird Tales printed several striking fantasy tales by Hamilton, most notably "He That Hath Wings" (July 1938), one of his most popular and frequently-reprinted pieces.
Through the late 1920s and early '30s Hamilton wrote for all of the SF pulp magazines then publishing, and contributed horror and thriller stories to various other magazines as well. He was very popular as an author of space opera, a sub-genre he created along with E.E. "Doc" Smith. His story "The Island of Unreason" (Wonder Stories, May 1933) won the first Jules Verne Prize as the best SF story of the year (this was the first SF prize awarded by the votes of fans, a precursor of the later Hugo Awards). In the later 1930s, in response to the economic strictures of the Great Depression, he also wrote detective and crime stories. Always prolific in stereotypical pulp-magazine fashion, Hamilton sometimes saw 4 or 5 of his stories appear in a single month in these years; the February 1937 issue of the pulp Popular Detective featured three Hamilton stories, one under his own name and two under pseudonyms. In the 1940s, Hamilton was the primary force behind the Captain Future franchise,[3] an SF pulp designed for juvenile readers that won him many fans, but diminished his reputation in later years when science fiction moved away from its space-opera roots. Hamilton was always associated with an extravagant, romantic, high-adventure style of SF, perhaps best represented by his 1947 novel The Star Kings. As the SF field grew more sophisticated, his brand of extreme adventure seemed ever more quaint, corny, and dated.
In 1946 Hamilton began writing for DC Comics, specializing in stories for their characters Superman [4] and Batman. One of his best known Superman stories was "Superman Under the Red Sun" which appeared in Action Comics #300 in 1963 and which has numerous elements in common with his novel City At World's End (1951). He wrote other works for DC Comics, including the short-lived science fiction series Chris KL-99 (in Strange Adventures), which was loosely based on his Captain Future character. He retired from comics in 1966.
[edit] Marriage and collaboration
On December 31, 1946, Hamilton married fellow science fiction author and screen writer Leigh Brackett. 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, 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, would not appear in print until 2005. In the early 1960s, when Brackett had temporarily abandoned SF for screenwriting, Hamilton did an uncredited revision and expansion of two early Brackett stories, "Black Amazon of Mars" and "Queen of the Martian Catacombs"--the results were published as her novellas People of the Talisman and The Secret of Sinharat (1964).
Edmond Hamilton died in 1977 in Lancaster, California, of complications following kidney surgery. In the year before his death he had worked on an anime adaptation of his Captain Future novels and a tokusatsu adaptation of Star Wolf; both appeared on Japanese television in 1978 and the Captain Future adaptation later played in Europe, winning Hamilton a new and different fan base than the one that had acclaimed him half a century before.
* Across Space (Weird Tales, September-November 1926). Bleiler says this novella is "the first of a series of world-saving short novels and nouvelles that were to beset the weird and science-fiction magazines." Androids, controlled telepathically by bat-like winged humanoid beings, guard a ray in an Easter Island volcano that's drawing Mars closer to the Earth. Why? Because hundreds of thousands of years ago, a faction of Martians migrated to Earth and established a colony on the now submerged continent that includes the island. They now live under the ocean, and wish to conquer humankind — which was primitive when they first arrived, but now are too strong to tackle — so they want to get their homeworld close enough to Earth that their fellow Martians can lend them a hand.
* The Metal Giants (Swanson Book Co.: Washburn, North Dakota, c. 1934). Originally in Weird Tales (December 1926). More TK
* "Evolution Island" (Weird Tales, March 1928). Story. Owen, the protagonist, is told by a Professor Walton that Walton has discovered evolution is caused by the Garner ray that emanates from the earth's radioactive interior. Further, Walton can both duplicate this ray and cancel it with a counter emanation. Practically speaking, this means he can evolve animals or plants to their ultimate potential or devolve them back to primordial slime. Buying a small island south of Cuba, he and his assistant Brilling depart; nothing is heard of them for a year. Then, Walton returns and begs Owen for help. It seems that Brilling has entered the evolution ray and become a superman with great mental power, a huge dome of a head, and four tentacular limbs. He intends to lead evolved plants — intelligent, mobile, with vaguely human forms, hello Triffids — to conquer the world. Walton and Owen return to the island, in time to see a small armada of globular air vessels leaving to attack the outside world. Though captured, they escape, reverse the Garner ray, and devolve everything on the island to slime — including the flying globes.
* MORE TK
***
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