Edmond Moore Hamilton (1904–1977) was a US writer of science fiction whose work spanned many different publications and subgenres. His first story, “The Monster-God of Mamurth,” was published in 1926 by Weird Tales, which went on to publish more than seventy of his stories between 1926 and 1948. In the 1920s and 1930s Hamilton became popular as an author of space opera, a subgenre he is credited with creating alongside E. E. “Doc” Smith. His first story collection, The Horror on the Asteroid and Other Tales of Planetary Horror (1936), is widely thought to be the first hardcover compilation of stories identified as “science fiction.” Even more interesting is that link early on between space opera and horror, a link strengthened in the modern era by writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Iain M. Banks.
In the 1940s, Hamilton wrote stories in the Captain Future series, a pulp SF story intended for juvenile readers, alongside writers such as Manly Wade Wellman and Joseph Samachson. But when the science fiction publishing field drifted away from high-adventure space-opera storytelling, Hamilton joined DC Comics as a writer; among other comics scripts, he wrote a Superman story, “Superman Under the Red Sun,” which appeared in Action Comics 300 in 1963. The story in many ways resembled Hamilton’s 1951 novel City at World’s End. He was also one of the first regular writers for the Legion of Super-Heroes and wrote stories for Batman.
Hamilton married fellow writer Leigh Brackett in 1946 and moved into what is regarded as the most consistent phase of his career, writing stories such as “What’s It Like Out There?” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, 1952) and novels such as the aforementioned City at World’s End and The Haunted Stars (1960). Shortly after he died in 1977, Toei Animation debuted an anime based on his Captain Future novels, and Tsuburaya Productions adapted his novel Starwolf into a tokusatsu series, winning him new generations of fans internationally.
“The Star Stealers” (1929) is classic Hamilton and compares favorably to modern science fiction. It represents the best of early Golden Age space opera, which was more sophisticated than is generally acknowledged. It is possible that H. P. Lovecraft was inspired by the alien descriptions in this story, as the story was published in Weird Tales years before Lovecraft created and wrote the Cthulhu mythos stories.