The Horror On the Asteroid & Other Tales of Planetary Horror (1936) was Edmond Hamilton’s first collection. It was published by Phillip Allen, with an airbrushed cover showing a rocket flying through space. It was marketed with: “A new volume in Philip Allan’s famous “Creeps” series”. The Creeps Omnibus appeared a year earlier, reprinting ghost stories, many by H. Russell Wakefield. The publisher may have equated Science Fiction with Horror, though these selections all have a Horror edge to them as you will see.
What may not be obvious at first is how early this collection was published. Science Fiction, not by H. G. Wells, was not usually collected into books. The first big one was Adventures Into Time and Space by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas in 1946. Ten years later! Just another sign of how much of an innovator Edmond Hamilton was to Science Fiction.
Human Evolution
“The Man Who Evolved” (Wonder Stories, April 1931) is a classic from the Gernsback years. A scientist creates a machine that can evolve a person. The subject of the test changes into a more and more evolved creature until he is a giant-brained psycho who wants to take over the world. Fortunately he goes one evolution too many, returning to primordial slime. I encountered this story in Before the Golden Age (1975) edited by Isaac Asimov. It made me an Edmond Hamilton fan for life.
Galactic Disease
“The Accursed Galaxy” (Astounding Stories, July 1935) is unusual in that it was written for Astounding. This is the Tremaine Astounding before John W. Campbell’s Golden Age. Gerry Adams, a reporter on vacation, and Professor Ferdinand Peters of Manhattan University, discover a meteorite that is a polyhedron-shaped spacecraft.
The celestial being trapped inside the vessel explains by way of telepathy that the Milky Way is infected with a disease called “life”. The alien manipulates the men to open the ball. A great energy shoots outward and disappears. The two men now know that Earth is a cursed place. They decide to tell no one.
The image of the energy being shooting up into space is very reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Color Out of Space” (Amazing Stories, September 1927), another SF/Horror tale involving evil meteorites.
X-Ray Eyes
“The Man Who Saw Everything” (aka “The Man With the X-Ray Eyes”) (Wonder Stories, November 1933) begins with David Winn volunteering for an experiment. Dr. Homer zaps him and now he can see through walls. With this ability he discovers two men running for mayor are crooks, then he sees the rows of men in prison, the bodies in the hospital, the insane asylum and then the slums. He rushes to his fiancee’s home to witness her conversation with her mother. Marta Ray admits she doesn’t really love David but is settling for what she can get.
Later they pull Winn’s body out of the East River. His body is frozen in a position where his hand is raised, trying to not see everything. Dr. Homer declares:
“God keep us blind in this world! Prevent us from the horror of doing what he did, of seeing—too well.”
The inspiration for this story must surely be Arthur Machen’s opening to “The Great God Pan”. Hamilton in turn inspired a film. The movie The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963) starring Ray Milland and produced by Roger Corman, doesn’t seem to be based on Hamilton’s story (or acknowledges it anyway).
Invisible Spider Monsters
“The Monster-God of Mamurth” (Weird Tales, August 1926) has a man searching for a lost city. When he finds it, there is an invisible maze haunted by an invisible monster. I’ve written about it before here. It was Hamilton’s first sale. It may have had some influence on H. P. Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling’s “In the Walls of Eryx” (Weird Tales, October 1939).
Terrestrial Brainiac
“The Earth-Brain” (Weird Tales, April 1932) is a strange Northern that takes three men to a mountain in the Arctic to discover the living brain of the planet. They have to climb icy slopes and navigate a weird tunnel while the earth quakes. The energy organ at the mountain’s center kills two of them then chases the third all over the planet, causing earthquakes where ever he is located. Finally in Guatemala, he commits suicide by throwing himself into a fissure.
Beast Rays
“The Horror on the Asteroid” (Weird Tales, September 1933) is the titular story for the collection. The spaceship, Vulcan, is damaged so it must flee to a nearby asteroid to await rescue. There are survivors of previous crashes. The asteroid’s weird radiation causes the castaways to become bestial creatures. Jimmy Dane fights the beast-men off as the rescue ship shows up at the end. I think I did a good job of backing up my claim that this story was used by Star Trek.
Conclusion
The Horror On the Asteroid & Other Tales of Planetary Horror might at first glance seem like a straight Science Fiction collection. But everyone of these stories could be described as a Science Fiction/Horror story (or if we use my tongue-in-cheek moniker Sci-Hor). SF that had a Horror element was much more common in the 1930s than later on in the Golden Age. It certainly was in the works of Edmond Hamilton. These six tales are not the exception but the rule. Phillip Allen must have been counting on this fact to make this book part of their Creeps collection. You can read these tales for their space ships and gigantic earth-size entities but you can just as easily thrill to the creepy elements. No matter which you prefer (both if you are like me) they are all great Edmond Hamilton.
