Edmond Hamilton, Science Fiction, and Superman

Edmond Hamilton at Nycon 3, Sept 1967. (Photoshop enhanced)

by Nigel Brown

If you have a leaky pipe, you get a plumber, and if you can’t drive, you use a taxi, and if you want to publish science fiction, you should use a professional science fiction writer.

Superman’s origin was set firmly within the science fiction genre, with his creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, part of early science fiction fandom and steeped in the pulp magazines of that era. Superman editor Mort Weisinger also had deep roots in the world of science fiction. Together with future Superman editor Julie Schwartz, he founded the first literary agency specialising in science fiction and fantasy. Their first client was the science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton.

Hamilton later married film-script and science fiction writer Leigh Brackett, known for her excellent adventure stories, a talent she took to her work on the Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back.

He was amongst a number of science fiction writers (Manly Wade Wellman, Otto Binder, and Alfred Bester) that Weisinger employed after becoming an editor at DC comics. Weisinger knew that seasoned writers could be trusted to turn out accomplished comic book scripts.

 

Hamilton brought a strong science fiction element to his Superman stories that would add a sense of wonder, perhaps now lacking, after the first years of publication of Superman. Readers had gotten used to the idea that a man could fly, had super-strength and do all the other fantastic things that had made Superman such an initial hit.

An excellent example of this is the story Hamilton wrote for the landmark #300 issue of Action Comics (May 1963).

 

©DC. Cover of Action #300

The story, 'Superman Under the Red Sun' (with art by Al Plastino), is a classic meld of Superman mythos and the sort of science fiction that wouldn’t be out of place in a pulp magazine.

Stories about the post-human far future have been a theme in science fiction since its beginning. The Time Machine (1895) by H.G.Wells includes a location set ‘more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun… and the red beach… seemed lifeless.’ 

Other notable explorations of this subject have been William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912), and famed science fiction editor John W. Campbell’s story Twilight (Astounding Stories, Nov. 1934). 

 

Hamilton himself wrote a story ‘In the World’s Dusk’ (Weird Tales, March 1936), so it’s no surprise that he brought this idea to the Superman comic.

 

'Superman Under the Red Sun' is set so far into the Earth’s future that our sun has aged red, depriving Superman of his power to escape. The humans of this future, a million years hence, have all migrated to other worlds, abandoning Earth.

 

©DC. Action #300. The Last Man on Earth

The planet’s oceans have all dried up. This setting is described at the beginning of Hamilton’s story ‘In the World’s Dusk’: ‘… there lay the white salt desert that now covered the whole of earth… long ago the last seas had dried up and disappeared…’

©DC. "In the World's Dusk". Action Comics #300

Superman finds a companion, a Perry White android, and then crosses an empty oceanic basin. He encounters a whale that has evolved legs again to cope with the changing conditions of this scientifically feasible future. In a small way, Hamilton’s work is an introduction to the concepts of biological and stellar evolution.

 

©DC. Land-Whale from Action Comics #300

 It makes for a thoughtful story, from which a young reader might take away more than just an afternoon’s light diversion.

No big space battles. No crowds of super-heroes and villains facing each other down at the ends, or beginnings, of multi-universes.

Sometimes less is more.

 

 

© Nigel Brown