Edmond Hamilton wrote seventy-nine stories for Weird Tales and amongst them are several classics including “Thundering Worlds,” “Day of Judgment,” and “He That Hath Wings” (all included in The Best of Edmond Hamilton). Farnsworth Wright and Dorothy McIlwraith, the editors of Weird Tales, never rejected a Hamilton story, nor did they push or prod him in any particular direction. Hamilton had free rein to work within the science fiction to fantasy to horror range. This freedom resulted in some of 1940s fantasy’s best experiments.
Ed worked in what is now known as “portal fantasy” a decade before CS Lewis took us to Narnia. A portal fantasy is one in which a person from our world goes to another realm of the fantastic. Perhaps the most famous in Weird Tales were Nictzin Dyalhis’s “The Sapphire Siren” and CL Moore’s “Jirel Meets Magic” and “The Dark Land.” Hamilton’s portal fantasies included Brian Cullen going to the land of Celtic myth in “The Shining Land” (May 1945) and “Lost Elysium” (November 1945), also “The Shadow Folk” (September 1944), “The Inn Outside the World” (July 1945), and “Twilight of the Gods” (July 1948). Like the Harold Shea series by L Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt (1940-1954), Hamilton liked placing everyday people into mythic situations. Unlike those Shea stories that appeared in Unknown, Hamilton’s agenda is not ridicule-oriented humor, but adventure.
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