I stumbled across The Star Kings shortly after I seriously got into SF, probably when I was about 12. This book blew my mind with its very colourful writing (love the characters' names) and the majestic sweep of the universe it presented. Sure the science is pretty badly dated, but if you can look past that, it's a rip-snorting tale as they say. This book still remains in my top 5, although I can't be sure that's not for sentimental reasons. I searched for about 5 years to find the sequel, Return to the Stars. For those who've read and loved this book, check out the campy movie Starcrash starring Marjoe Gortner next time it comes on late at night - the villian's name is Zarth Arn!

John Gordon and Jarth Arn were both looking for something that was beyond them, beyond the lives they led. For Jarth, it was a world in the past that he had never visited. For John, it was adventure and excitement beyond his dull existence. Jarth needed John to see the world he was looking for and John needed Jarth for the adventure he sought, though John didn't know it at the time. John and Jarth switch bodies and time periods to seek the unknown, but only for a short, limited time. However, as usual, things never go as planned.

Jarth Arn is the second son to one of the most powerful Star Kings. This is just the beginning, as John fights off the League of the Dark Worlds He is torn between the Jarth's love of a mistress named Murn and his love for Princess Lianna, the ruler of a Star-Kingdom. He has to prove his loyalty to his older brother after Jarth's father is assassinated and he is framed for the crime. Then he has to save the entire galaxy from the evil that tries to overtake good.

As I started THE STAR KINGS, I must say it was nothing I ever dreamed of, but boy, it was a great surprise indeed! Mr. Edmund must have had an imagination beyond anything to have dreamed up and written a tale such as this one. From one excitement to the next, I could not stop turning the pages. STAR KINGS is one of the best paranormals I've ever read.

Romance At Its Best ...

Listen lads!
I am 50 years old now, and I read "Star Kings" in 1958... I felt devastated then!
I could never forget it in 44 years, and I just happened to learn that it was written by Ed Hamilton, right a few days ago!... (The Turkish language edition I had read did not mention the author's name, it was a cheap pulp edition of about 50 cents of the day and I got money from my late dad to buy it, oh dear...)
I know it almost by heart after all those years...
To all Hamilton fans and the people of every age who dreamed of being a John Gordon, hail!
Engin Ardic
Istanbul, Turkey

This book is a must for ALL comic fans.It reprints stories from the 50'ss and 60's that team up Superman,Batman and Robin!Such comis aren't printed today,sadly.See how Superman and Batman learned each other's identities and teamed up for the FIRST time.Watch as they sove baffling mysteries.I love this book because the stories are action-packed and it features great artwork from the Golden Age!If you are a hero fan,read about the Dynamic Duo and Superman!Now THAT'S a plan!

These characters no longer exist in comics today. I'm talking about the smiling Batman, the wisecracking Robin, and the Superman whose biggest worry was his secret identity. In fact, they don't even make comics like this anymore. We are now awash in 3-D computer generated graphics and colorization, unusual panelling, and thicker paper stock. This book will take you back to the 50's and 60's with the clever, simpler stories. It was still a challenge to team a much weaker Batman with Superman and make it work. Yet, the writers of World's Finest made it happen again and again. This is fine reading and one of the best volumes in the DC Archives series.

When I was a boy I loved reading the DC line-up of comics. Action comics, Superman, Batman, Detective, JLA, Flash, Adventure, Metal Men, Jimmy Olsen and WORLD'S FINEST were my favorite books.

If you enjoyed these stories as I did, but lost your comic collection along the way - as I did - then this is a book for you.

Handsomely bound in a hard cover with jacket cover art remenisant of the old days, the book has 16 full color, complete tales from Superman #76 and World's Finest #71 thru 85.

The price tag will probably keep younger readers from buying the book, but then, younger readers would probably scoff at the tales and art we enjoyed in the late fifties and thru the sixties.

The trip down memory lane couldn't find better company than Batman, Robin and Superman of old. I'm anxiously awaiting volume two to appear.

~P~

The stories included in this anthology were some of those I grew up with. Back then, kids could go to garage sales and pick up dozens of comics for a few dimes apiece. Not so today, where everything has been indexed price-wise and counter-indexed.

A good read for those of you who prefer more self-contained stories rather than today's lengthy multi-issued epics, but they were fun and at times rather silly.

The introduction is well written, and gives the reader some insight into the era. The Comics Code was in effect, which forced the company and writers to be more careful in what they put out.

The one drawback (in my humble opinion) is sometimes how embarrasing the dialogue is. I cringe a bit when I read the thought balloons between Batman and Batwoman. One wonders if the writers were conscious of that at the time.

Still, it's nice to see Bruce and Dick have a better friendship than what's coming across these days.

The artwork, some by Dick Sprang is great,and reminds me of the time when everything in the comics was indexed like the contents of Batman's utility belt where it possessed maps showing what tools went where.

A fun read. I look forward to Superman in the Fifties.

(This review refers to Volume One only.) Asimov has collected eight stories in this anthology that were influential in his own writing. Asimov read most of these stories when he was about 12 years old, being fortunate enough to devour most of them from pulp magazines that were sold in his father's candy store. As might be expected with any anthology, some stories are better than others, and some have held up better through the years than others. Yet these pieces are not included for comparison to current stories, but to show what Asimov read as a young person and how the works influenced him. Asimov's mini-autobiography alone is worth the price of the book. After each story, Asimov tells how an idea or a concept from a story led to the formation of one of his own works. A very interesting idea. "The Jameson Satellite" is a forerunner of "I, Robot," and "Submicroscopic" is a small step from "Fantastic Voyage." As mentioned by another reviewer, the reader will have to deal with several prejudices from the time these stories were written (especially racial), but overall this book is a great insight into what makes Asimov Asimov.

This collection of early, pulp-style scifi works is a great joy. Asimov's introduction to the stories is exceedingly interesting and helpful. The stories sometimes show flaws or problems in their writing and in their attitudes (while several stories are forward-looking, most show the racism and misogyny common to that time), most of the stories are entertaining and all of them are interesting from a historical perspective. Check it out if you can get your hands on it, it's a great find. I really got a kick out of several pieces, which run the gamut from more reasonable 'conquered man, driven underground, strikes back at his evil alien oppressors' to the completely ludicrous story about the planets of our solar system hatching into giant space chickens. (That last story is meant to be taken seriously, by the way.) A veritable laundry-list of great, long out-of-print authors and some wonderful writing from the early days of popular science fiction.

This book contains the good old stories from the 1930's. There is nothing great here, but it is till worth reading. You can see the evolution of the Science Fiction field by reading the stories in this book.

Hamilton mastered the "pulp" thrust of science fiction, and its virtues, almost before that term for the genre was coined. He could put more drama into a short story than many writers at greater length would manage in a full-length novel. And all of these stories, originally published in "Analog" and other SF magazines, retain that punch.

The science is far from perfect, and occasionally diverges from what was known even in the 1930s and 1940s. "Thundering Worlds" is full of passion and plot, but the physics of planetary bodies is inaccurate enough to be distracting to an informed reader ... yet, still, it's one helluva story.

This Del Rey edition has a striking illustration on its cover of the best story of the lot, "He That Hath Wings." You'll shed a tear for the fate of the protagonist even if you don't envy him his mutation, as I do.

This collection is an excellent look at the development of one of the old writers of the Golden Age. The stories begin weak, and then become progressively stronger througout the book, until at the end the stories are highly literate. On the other hand, some of the earlier stories are so entertaining (yet corny) that one will overlook the weak writing because the stories are just flat-out entertaining. About two-thirds of the way through the book, there is a story called "Easy Money" that is the most hilarious comedy I've ever seen in science fiction.

The last series from the master(and one of the first) of interstellar adventures since the 1920's. The Morgan Chane stories are a fairly typical non-juvenile Hamilton tour de force. With so much of Hamilton's work no longer available this is a good chance to read some of his best action SF.
If you're devotee of the Sci Fi channel (or live action Japanese SF shows) you've probably seen the loosely adaptated live action Japanese version of the 'Weapon from Beyond'.

"Starwolf" is actually a collection of three novels from the late 1960s: "The Weapon from Beyond," "The Closed Worlds," and "World of the Starwolves".

The Starwolves are Viking-like space pirates whose world's harsh gravity imparts to them a superhuman strength and musculature. Morgan Chane was almost one of them...though his family had come from earth. Finding himself an outcast after killing a fellow Starwolf in a feud over their plunder, Chane joins a band of tough interstellar mercenaries to survive. However, his troubles are not over--if any but Dilullo, the aging Merc in charge of the mercenary band, learns his secret, his life could be forfeit, for Starwolves are considered such a menace that they are usually shot on sight.

These books owe a lot to "Conan: The Barbarian," some to the pulp SF books of the 30s and 40s, and a bit to "The Stainless Steel Rat". Though somewhat derivative, they are nonetheless competantly and entertainingly written, with sufficiently interesting characterization, that they are well worth the time they take to read.

If you like slam bang adventure science fiction, with vividly drawn characters, pirates, mercenaries, and dozens of strongly drawn worlds and cultures, this will be your cup of tea, and I highly recommend it. The Starwolf series is full of the excitement and wonder and sense of limitless possibilities for adventure that is missing from much contemporary science fiction. This would be a good book to get a youngster hooked on sci fi (though I first read the StarWolf series as a 30 something adult and have gone back to it several times. Indeed, I've gone on to read everything I can find by Edmond Hamilton.)

A really fun read.

Space opera. Found it used, probably would not have bought it new. As a used book it was well worth the $1.50.

The middle of the twentieth century is in many ways the golden age of science fiction. Science fiction had come into its own with many great authors pushing the genre out into other areas such as mysteries and in this case fantasy. In 'A Yank at Valhalla,' Hamilton takes a sword and sorcerer type fantasy and mixes in strong scientific reasoning. The result is a plausible science fiction tale using Norse mythology. Today the science fiction/fantasy market is dominated by fantasy but back in the golden age, it was writers such as Hamilton that put the science first.

Keith Masters is a pilot on an Artic expedition. He finds a gold cylinder with runes. The runes give a warning about hiding the cylinder. The golden tube is a key that binds Loki and his familiars. If the key is brought back to Asgard, Ragnarok, the Norse equivalent of Armageddon, will occur destroying Valhalla and all the Norse gods.

Keith doesn't believe the runes and wears the cylinder as a good luck charm. While flying a scouting mission north of the main expedition, a storm comes up and forces his plane into a region of the Artic Ocean that blocks light, a gigantic blind spot on the face of the world. He flies through the light boundary and into the world of Odin, Thor, Freya, and Loki. His landing has just started a war between a race of humans with the scientific knowledge to control the weather and attain eternal life.

'A Yank at Valhalla' is a pure fantasy/action story. 'A Yank at Valhalla' is an easy recommendation to anyone who likes fantasy stories and it is a must read for those who are interested in a science fiction/fantasy tale that, if written today, would be dominated by magic.

A solid science fiction effort. Certainly no classic, but generally well written and interesting. The story unfolds nicely as the residents of a small city try to find out why the world around them has changed so much (and why they are still alive!) after a nuclear bomb hits their town. City at World's End is 1950's science fiction and not for all taste. It will probably be enjoyed most by those who enjoy Ray Bradbury or the original Star Trek TV series.

This book's strong opening chapter confronts scientists with the unthinkable: a superatomic bomb has fallen on Middletown, a small American city hiding a secret antiatomic laboratory, servering it from its surroundings; the sun is now red and drawn out, the moon is unrecognizable, the temperature is low. Various hypotheses are considered to explain all of this, and the most unlikely might well be the one closest to the truth. After the initial event has occurred, transmission of knowledge proceeds in a myriad of interesting ways: between scientific and non-scientific Middletownians at first, but then between strangers from the future - some apparently human, some not - and scientific Middletownians (who take on the role of their non-scientific peers because of their relative ignorance). Even though they generally remain on the good side, the 20th century humans' role is decently complex and shows a nuanced way of approaching the space opera subgenre of science-fiction: they frequently reverse roles with 'the other' and even become an historical curiosity under the eye of an historian from the future. This novel's structure is careful, every step being taken with a studied internal cohesion and sense of pace. Its position on science remains ultimately optimistic, but it does acknowledge some of the dangers it could cause and offers an original kind of civilization shock.

With a bizarre premise, this novel explores a possible future of mankind and how people from today (1957) would handle the situation.

In 1961 Edward Hamilton published Battle for the Stars. It was printed in 1964 then 1967 before the Tor double listed above. This is a pulp sci fi novel that has many facets that are similar to a world war II action novel.