Weird Tales 1933
A connection between “Gallileo Seven” and Edmond Hamilton may have existed. And it might not have, but I find the parallels intriguing. Edmond Hamilton wrote “The Horror on the Asteroid”, an SF-Horror tale that first appeared in Weird Tales, September 1933. “Gallileo Seven” was the sixteenth episode to appear on Star Trek. It aired on January 5, 1967. It was written by Oliver Crawford and S. Bar-David.
Hamilton’s tale begins when the spaceship, Vulcan (I won’t even go there!), is damaged by a meteor. The passengers and crew flee to a nearby asteroid to await rescue. Once there, they discover weird hairy creatures in the forest. They also find the wrecks of previous crashes. A strange feeling of aggression falls over the castaways as they sink lower and lower into bestial ways. Can rescue come before they all become beasts? The asteroid is actually inhabited by previous victims who have devolved into hairy cavemen and then into reptilian beasts and finally into fish. The hairy men are aggressive and attack the newcomers. The hero of the tale, Jimmy Dane, desperately fights one of the beast-men off as the rescue ship shows up at the end.
Hamilton was fascinated by evolution, starting as early as “Evolution Island” (Weird Tales, March 1927). “The Horror on the Asteroid” has echoes of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot (1918). On Caspak, all things begin as single-cell creatures and evolve until human. Hamilton has reversed this process. This story may have inspired Manly Wade Wellman’s “The Devil’s Asteroid” (Comet Stories, July 1941) which is quite similar, as well as Hamilton’s wife, Leigh Brackett‘s “The Beast-Jewel of Mars” (Planet Stories, Winter 1948).
Television 1967
Hamilton used this story to lead off his first hard cover collection The Horror on the Asteroid and Other Tales of Planetary Horror (1936). Some aspects of the “Gallileo Seven” (January 5, 1967) episode of the original Star Trek seem similar. I have no idea if Oliver Crawford and S. Bar-David ever read Edmond Hamilton. (Probably not. Most Hollywood screenwriters were not familiar with the body of SF.) In this episode the shuttlecraft, Gallileo Seven crashes on Taurus II, a planet that is inhabited by spear-throwing cave giants. The crew melt down as they question Spock’s ability to command. The over-the-top emotionality of Don Marshall’s Boma seems like a man who is being influenced by an evolution ray. Eventually Spock dumps the last of the fuel and the shuttlecraft flies off the planet to an uncertain future.
The Movies 1939
Is it likely anybody had read Hamilton? Probably not. Wikipedia suggests the episode was inspired by the film, Five Came Back. Originally a 1939 black & white, it was remade in color in 1948. The film has an airplane crash in the Amazon jungle. Repairs to their plane are interrupted by dart-shooting natives. The film actually has a bummer ending, which surprised me. The idea of people trapped in a bottleneck, surrounded by aggressive killers, does run through all of these stories. Is this simply a case of a standard adventure scenario, that Hamilton adapted to Science Fiction, and the screen writers applied to Star Trek? Maybe. (I have wonder if the opening scene of The Raiders of the Lost Ark, with its dart-shooting tribe, wasn’t also inspired by Five Came Back?) I also get a little bit of a Gilligan’s Island vibe. They have a professor…
Conclusion
I am sure I am seeing Hamilton everywhere. It is inevitable when you read as much SF Pulp as I do. And watch as much Star Trek as I do. In previous articles, I looked at Fredric Brown’s “Arena” and the connections there are pretty obvious. Yesterday I went on about “Spock’s Brain”. Star Trek is part of Science Fiction history. With episodes written by Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, George Clayton Johnson and David Gerrold, it is inevitable that written SF and television SF should influence each other. When would this happen again? Probably never.
That Edmond Hamilton should have written something parallel to Star Trek is a no-brainer. Ed created one of the very first Space Opera series in Weird Tales called The Interstellar Patrol. He was sending space armadas against robot foes back in 1928 when the Borg weren’t even a gleam in Gene Roddenberry’s eye. Though Star Trek resembled Sewell Peaslee Wright’s John Hanson of the Space Patrol more closely, Wright, like James Blish who would adapt the early screenplays, would have read Hamilton in the Pulps. Edmond Hamilton was an innovator, and I hope some small part of his “The Horror on the Asteroid” found a home in “Gallileo Seven”.
