The Wellsian Invasions of Edmond Hamilton

The Wellsian invasions of Edmond Hamilton begin with his second story. “Across Space” sets a pattern that Hamilton will use for five years, pumping out new versions of H. G. Well’s masterpiece, The War of the Worlds (1898). In that book Wells has the very first alien invasion of literature occur, with humankind saved at the end by microscopic germs.

Wells was one of two men that Pulp Science Fiction modeled itself upon. Jules Verne was the other. Editor, Hugo Gernsback, reprinted many Wells and Verne novels and stories in the early pages of Amazing Stories so readers could learn what great SF was. Edmond Hamilton was already a Wells fan when he appeared in Weird Tales in August 1926, only six months after the first issue of Amazing.

Hamilton was attempting to do something no one had really done before, be a full-time SF writer. To do this, he had to write quickly. To do that he had a set plot he used for invasion stories. This plot worked one of two ways: if the invaders came from outside of human activity, he need two characters, and if the invaders were created by humans then he needed three. These characters would be the focal point of the invasion, usually told as a remembrance of past events. One of the men usually sacrificed himself to save the world. In the case of human-created monsters, one man was usually a ridiculed scientist, a Frankenstein figure, who wants revenge and makes a race of invaders. Again, one man will sacrifice himself to take out the crazy fellow with a racial death wish. This cookie cutter approach did not win Hamilton praise from fan magazines but it sold a lot of stories.

That first one, “Across Space” (Weird Tales, September 1926), sounds like it takes place in space but it doesn’t. The invaders come from across the galaxies to Earth and hide on Easter Island. Several of Hamilton’s tales will feature a hero-figure scientist, in this case, Dr. John Holland. He will be interchangeable with Dr. Howard Kelsall in “The Hidden World”. The characters of Hamilton’s stories fall into three types: the hero-scientist, the mad scientist, and the young assistant (usually the narrator). No women, no people of color (except as menials). It’s the monsters that take center stage. Is this really any different than Wells three decades earlier?

The monsters of “Across Space” (Weird Tales, September October November 1926) are bat-like Martians who have a race of synthetic android servants. Their dread purpose — the bad guys always have a terrible purpose that threatens the world– is to bring Earth close to Mars so the Martian race can invade earth and take over the planet.

“The Metal Giants” (Weird Tales, December 1926) is the first of the man-made horrors. Lanier, who was once friends with Detmold, must face off against the mad man and his army of giant robots. To destroy them, he creates a gigantic wheel that crushes them. Hamilton has fun describing people getting stomped on. This story is the great-grandaddy of Kaiju robots.

“The Atomic Conquerors” (Weird Tales, February 1927) has flying saucers filled with little green men in Scotland.

“Evolution Island” (Weird Tales, March 1927) has a mad man who creates an evolution ray and changes himself into a big-brained tentacled thing. He also evolves trees into an army of killer herbage.

“The Moon Menace” (Weird Tales, September 1927) has a foolish scientist help the invading Moon men build a transmat machine so they can get to Earth and take over. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon in reverse?

“The Time Raider” (Weird Tales, October November December 1927 January 1928) is a long serial with a weird being that can travel through time and a larger group of men who must stop of a race of the future from taking over. The Time Machine seems an obvious inspiration but Hamilton does some really new things with it. It’s a bit like if the Morlocks invaded the past.

“The Comet Doom” (Amazing Stories, January 1928) is a classic tale with the first killer robots, really cyborgs from a comet, that plan to pull the earth off course. One of the heroes becomes one of the cyborgs and fights from the inside. This story inspired many who came after including H. P. Lovecraft.

“The Dimension Terror” (Weird Tales, June 1928) has beetle men. Yup, beetle men.

In August 1928, Weird Tales published “Crashing Suns”, the first of the Interstellar Patrol stories. Here Hamilton took his invasion fiction to space, creating some of the very first Space Opera stories. I won’t look at these because they aren’t set on Earth and thus not real Wellsian invasions but their plots and feel aren’t much different except for the epic scale on which they take place.

“The Polar Doom” (Weird Tales, November 1928) has more UFOs destroying cities from their base in the Arctic.

“The Sea Horror” (Weird Tales, March 1929) has invaders from the sea. Imagine if the Sea People from “In the Abyss” built tripods and came ashore…

“Locked Worlds” (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Spring 1929) has a race of spider people and a rogue scientist who wants to allow them to destroy humankind.

“The Abysmal Invaders” (Weird Tales, June 1929) has dinosaurs invaders who come out of the Earth.

“The Other Side of the Moon” (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall 1929) has a race of evil turtles who live, well, you can guess where…

“The Hidden World” (Science Wonder Quarterly, Fall 1929) has a group of scientist investigate weird lights that lead them to being taken to the center of the earth where a race of starfish like beings are in peril of collapsing their world. They have decided the surface world will do fine for a new home. When Hamilton wrote these stories for Gernsback he hads lots of gadgets and gizmos that his Weird Tales stories don’t have.

“The Life-Masters” (Weird Tales, January 1930) has giant protoplasmic slime.

“The Space Visitors” (Air Wonder Stories, March 1930) has space invaders.

“The Invisible Master” (Scientific Detective Monthly, April 1930) has a rogue scientist using invisibility. Not as good as The Invisible Man by a long stretch…

“The Plant Revolt” (Weird Tales, April 1930) has a scientist who creates a way for plants to become mobile and carnivorous. Shades of triffids to come!

“The Death Lord “(Weird Tales, July 1930) has a rogue bacteriologist. Wells did this on a smaller scale in “The Stolen Bacillus”.

“Pigmy Island” (Weird Tales, August 1930) has a scientist who can shrink people. If The Food of the Gods shrunk you instead…

“The Mind-Master” (Weird Tales, October 1930) has a scientist who steals scientists’ heads and controls their intellects. Hawk Carse would do this a little later in Astounding in 1931.

“The Man Who Evolved Man” (Wonder Stories, April 1931) has a man evolve himself into a gigantic brain that does what all brains want to do tonight… try and take over the world!

“The Monsters of Mars” (Astounding Stories of Super-Science, April 1931) feels like Hamilton wrote it in his sleep. Alligator men of Mars.

After 1931 Ed certainly wrote other Wellsian invasion stories like “The Reign of the Robots” (Wonder Stories, December 1931) but you can see he had become bored with the plot too after twenty plus versions. In that story the threat proves to be fake. Hamilton entered a much more varied and interesting era in the new decade with stories set in space, in worlds where weird ideas play out and ultimately to truly inventive classics like “The Island of Unreason”. Hamilton offered us a rainbow of variations on Wells’s cornerstone idea.