Friday, July 23, 2004

"The wrath of the King of Orion flamed across the void.  Out from the Hyades sped his hunters, and from Mintaka and Saiph and Aldebaran, grim ships of war sped headlong between the stars in vengeful search for the small and secret ship that had dared violate their domain."

That's the opening paragraph of Edmond Hamilton's "The Star Hunter" from SPACE TRAVEL for September 1958.  Either you like that kind of thing or you don't, and there was a time when I liked it very much indeed.  I was a teenager in a small Texas town, and in reality I'd  never been much farther away from home than the 90 miles to Dallas.  But in the pages of the SF digests that I read by the metric ton, I travelled all over the known universe and to galaxies far, far away, thanks to writers like Edmond Hamilton and magazines like SPACE TRAVEL, the descendant of IMAGINATION and IMAGINATIVE TALES.   Editor William Hamling tried to save his SF line by putting factual articles into SPACE TRAVEL, but it didn't work.  The magazine lasted only a few issues, more's the pity.

Re-reading stories like "The Star Hunter" now, 46 years (!) later, I don't get quite the same charge that I did when I was 17.  The old sense of wonder that I was fairly bristling with in those days has dwindled.  But it's still there, somewhere,  and now and then there's nothing for it but to get out one of those old digests and read a story by Hamilton or Dwight V. Swain or Calvin M. Knox or "Alexander Blade," "S. M. Tenneshaw," "Ivar Jorgenson."  I always wanted to write stories like those, but I never did.  Never could.  But boy did I love to read 'em.

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