Science
Fiction Book Club
Interview
with John Grayshaw (Jan 2025)
John Grayshaw is the creator and administrator of SFBC on Facebook. He has done about 100 of these Q and A interviews with science fiction authors, biographers, historians, and other experts. He recently had a research article about orphaned stories from Harlan Ellison’s Last Dangerous Visions published in Amazing Stories.
Wesley Grubb: What was Edmond Hamilton’s bestselling, or most
successful, book that he wrote?
His Captain Future stories were published in sci-fi magazines
from 1940 to 1951 and later published as novels. There were about 30 stories.
Among his novels, the most successful were ‘The Star Kings’
series: ‘The Star Kings’ (1949) and ‘Return to the Stars’ (1968) and the
‘Starwolf’ series ‘The Weapons from Beyond’ (1967), ‘The Closed Worlds’ (1968)
and ‘The World of the Starwolves’ (1968).
Wesley Grubb: Edmond Hamilton is one of those bridge-authors,
who began writing before the “Golden Age” and continued to write into the “New
Wave” era. How well did his writing develop, and how well did his stories
mature, from his early career compared to his later career in the 50s and
60s?
In a 1975 interview with Luna Monthly, Hamilton talked about how
quickly he was writing stories back in the pulp era. He said:
“How do I feel
about the rapid, high-production way we oldtime pulp writers employed in our
work? I can’t speak for others, but for me it was the best way in the world to
work. I might have been a more polished writer had I worked in more leisurely
fashion, but I might too have been the centipede who didn’t
know which leg to lift first.
One of the most
ghastly stories I ever wrote was “Outside the Universe,” a wild tale of three
galaxies at war. I wrote that in 1928, over 50,000 words of it first draft. I
used a very small portable typewriter on a big, flat-top inherited desk. In
writing those hectic space-battles, my hard pounding made the little typewriter
creep all over the desk, and I would stand up and follow it in my burning
enthusiasm.”
In the same Luna interview he also talked about the so called “sci-fi ghetto”:
“I think that
there has been too much crying about sf being forced into a ghetto, and away
from the mainstream. I think this is a lot of b.s. The reason why us pulp
writers of sf didn’t appear in the mainstream was simply that we weren’t good
enough writers for the mainstream. Those of us who were good enough . . . Bob
Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and a few others, were welcomed by mainstream markets.”
He was asked in Tangent interview if he regrets not winning more
Sci-fi awards and he said:
“I’d be delighted
to get one, too. I was also nominated for one, but most of our science fiction
has been in the adventure/entertainment scene. If you don’t have Big Thinks in
it the people who vote on these are not greatly impressed. If they can
understand every word of it, then it can’t be great you know? That’s their attitude.”
In the
1975 interview with Luna Monthly, Hamilton lamented the more modern New Wave
trend of literary science fiction over science fiction with an emphasis on
science:
“About my
interest in science, and the attitude of us early sf writers toward science, I
believe you have cleared up for me a puzzling thing about many present day sf
writers . . . their lack of interest in science. This explains the mystery (to
me) of why so many of them have not the slightest interest in the space program
and its great achievements. To me, sf without the scientific element amounts to
very little. I believe that young writers do regard stories not as something
whose subject matter interests them passionately, i.e. scientific
possibilities, but as exercises in English lit. I don’t
think without true passion about whatever you write, no matter how crude it may
be, you can ever be as happy writing. That is just my opinion.”
Jason Bleckly: How does Allen Steele's resurrection of Captain
Future compare with Edmond's original stories?
Firstly, let’s talk
about Captain Future in general. Edmond Hamilton authored most of the Captain
Future stories, but the character was created by Better Publications editors
Mort Weisinger and Leo Margulies before the 1st World Science Fiction
Convention in 1939 and announced at that Convention. His stories were published
in the namesake pulp magazine from 1940 to 1944, after which more stories
written by Hamilton were published in various sci-fi magazines until 1951.
Hamilton talked about the series in his 1975 Luna Monthly
interview. Mostly he was using it as an example of how fast he was writing in
those days
“I stopped
writing so fast, long ago. I did make an exception for the Captain Future
series. They didm’t at first pay much for those. So I did them first draft, a
chapter a day, allowing 2 days for the first chapter, which is more difficult.
Later, when they upped the price they paid, I did two drafts and the writing of
the stories improved. There is no use, however, in giving advice to someone to
write at high speed, because as I say, the market has so changed that you can’t
sell that high-speed stuff any more. I should explain, referring to my
statement on the Captain Future series, that I did not make a practice of
hurrying the writing of stories that would not pay well. I’ve
always believed that a writer should do every story the very best he can, no
matter if it'll be paid for in buttons. But I was trying to make a living
writing sf, and when they asked me to take on the Captain Future chore, I had
to specify that until they could pay more for the stories, I’d have to do them
in as little time as possible. They agreed, and the first few of them were just
sort of written off as rapidly as possible . . . though I had made out a schema
of background for the stories, which I adhered to carefully. But I have never
believed in dashing out a story because it was an unpretentious thing.”
According to the SF Encyclopaedia:
Hamilton's early 1940s absence from adult sf, through his work in comics and
his involvement with Captain Future (Young Adult titles aimed primarily at
teenaged boys), made it initially somewhat difficult for him to be accepted
after World War II as a competent and versatile professional.
Coming back to the question about Allen Steele; he has done two
very different takes on Captain Future. He first did a novella ‘The Death of
Captain Future’ (1995), which is set in Steele’s ‘Near Space’ universe. In the story, a man named Bo
McKinnon collects "ancient pulp magazines" and acts out a fantasy
life based on the Captain Future stories. Steele’s,
more gritty universe contrasts with the Future’s Pulp setting. The novella won
the 1996 Hugo Award for Best Novella. ‘The Exile of Evening Star’ (1999) continues
and concludes the story. They include many quotes from the original stories.
Then Steele wrote ‘Avengers of the Moon: A Captain Future Novel'
(2017). It is a continuity reboot which gently updates the narrative (including
the science) to fit with a more modern sensibility. The novel features the main
characters from the original stories and presents a new origin story for its
protagonist. ‘Captain Future in Love’ (2019), ‘The Guns of Pluto’ (2020),
‘1,500 Light Years from Home’ (2021) and ‘The Horror at Jupiter’ (2021) have
followed.
Damo Mac Choiligh: Leigh Brackett wrote Westerns, Crime novels
and Science fiction - did she regard herself as being primarily a genre writer
and was any one of these genres particularly close to her heart?
Science Fiction was definitely the dearest to her heart. She said
in an interview with Tangent in 1976:
“I knew that what
I really wanted to write anyway was science fiction. If I want to write about
Mars, who’s going to contradict me? Nobody’s been there. And besides, that’s what
I really wanted to write about so that’s what I did. Sure enough, there wasn’t
a heck of a lot of money in it, but it was a heck of a lot of fun; there’s some
awfully nice people.”
Later in the same interview Hamilton is talking about Brackett
starting to write crime novels.
Hamilton (to
Leigh) “You had quite a strict family back then—”
Brackett- “Oh,
yes, very.”
Hamilton: “I got
you back at ten o’clock one night and
you got quite a scolding for being out that late. A few years later, during the
War, I picked up this novel she had written called ‘No Good From a Corpse’. It
was a tough private-eye novel. The hero was named Edmond, wasn’t he?”
Brackett: “Uhm-hmm.”
Hamilton: “I always
felt you were dreaming of me [ laughing ]. I hoped.”
Brackett: [chuckling] “I just liked the name.”
Hamilton: “She
had written this novel that was full of Humphrey Bogart-type characters. “I
grabbed her and said, ‘Doll, you’re quite
a dish’” and all this
sort of thing and people were shooting other people up, and I told my
folks…Betty and Phil had looked at that novel…and I said I didn’t know where
she got all this experience because I couldn’t keep her
out past ten o’clock at night [laughing].”
Brackett: “Well, I’ll tell you where I got it. I got it from reading
Hammett and Chandler.”
And it is no doubt ‘No Good From a Corpse’ that had Howard Hawks
shouting “find me this Brackett guy.” If he really said that, but we’ll talk
about that later in the interview.
How did Hamilton and Brackett meet?
Apparently, they met through Hamilton’s friends in the comic
business. I’ll let them tell it. This is from Hamilton and Brackett’s interview
in Tangent fanzine from 1976:
Hamilton: “Well,
it was in 1940. Mort Weisinger and Julie Swartz, my old friends, were out in
Beverly Hills from New York on vacation, Juile was my agent at that time and
Jack Williamson and I went over to see him in Beverly Hills, and Julie said, “ I
have a client here, a young girl who lives in Los Angeles, and she’ll be coming
through this morning to see me.” So, when she arrived, she was overcome with
awe to meet two great science fiction writers like Jack Williamson and myself;
but I was quite kind to her, put her at her ease…I think I’ll let her tell her
version of it now.” [laughing to Leigh]
Brackett: [laughing] “Well, they were both looking thoroughly
auctorial; they were both wearing sweatshirts, looking like geniuses. I nearly
fell through the floor. Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, they were the two
great names. Seven years later he got around to asking me to marry him.”
Damo Mac Choiligh: Ray Bradbury famously served as Best Man at
the Brackett/Hamilton wedding; was he particularly close friends with one or
both of them?
Yes, Bradbury was a sort of protégé of both of
them. And he must have been a damn good friend as he was as you said, the best
man, and they got married at his place in San Gabriel, California.
Here is what they said about Ray Bradbury in the 1976 Tangent
interview:
Brackett: “Ray was a member of the LASFS group [Los Angeles Science
Fantasy Society] This was before he had started to sell so he was writing like
mad and trying like mad to break in. “(to Ed): That summer that you and Julie [Swartz] were out there
Ray was selling newspapers on the corner about a block or so away from our
place.”
Hamilton: “Julie
always liked Ray very much, so when he’d lay in some beer and whiskey and so on
for our evening parties, he would always get some Coke for Ray. He was such a
kid he didn’t drink anything and Julie would say, “I'll get a
little coke for the kid.” As I say, Ray was very young, and he would bring his
stories over for Julie and I to read. Finally I told him, “You don’t want us to tell you how to
write. You know very well what you want to do and you’re going to do it your
own style. What you’re bringing these stories over for is that you want us to
tell you they're good. They’re
good. So just go ahead and write them.” I think it was that summer he published
his first story that he collaborated with Henry Hasse on. [Super Science
Stories, November 1941- The Pendulum] Well, he brought the magazine over to
show us beaming like the sun, and then he was so overcome that he took the
magazine like this and he kissed it and kissed it.” [laughter from all ]
And then there is the story of how Brackett and Bradbury
collaborated on the novella ‘Lorelei of the Red Mist,’ This is from an article
on Leigh Brackett by Bertil Falk in Bewildering Stories 2007:
“At that point
when Hawks summoned her to his office, she had prepared half of the
20,000-worder “Lorelei of the Red Mist” for Planet Stories. She had written the
line “Then it was gone, and the immediate menace of the foreground took all of
Starke’s attention.” At the same time that she wanted to
accept Hawk’s offer, the assigned story had to be finished. She had to make
some kind of decision.
The dilemma was
solved. Ray Bradbury was five years younger than Leigh Brackett. She was a kind
of mentor and a sounding board for this aspiring writer. She turned to Bradbury
and asked him to complete the story. He accepted the challenge.
Where Brackett
had stopped writing the story, Bradbury jumped into medias res and continued
with the following sentence, “He saw the flock, herded by more of the golden
hounds.” Then he completed the story in ten days and ‘Lorelei of the Red Mist’
was published that same year. The rest is, if not exactly history, at least
science fiction history.”
Damo Mac Choiligh: I think it's fair to say that 'The Long
Tomorrow' is Leigh Brackett's most well-regarded novel. Do you think she was
drawn to the agrarian life portrayed in the book? When she and Hamilton
married, they moved to Kinsman, Ohio, which Wikipedia tells me is a tiny
village. Did they want to embrace a rural lifestyle or small-town life? Or was
it more a matter of leaving the city?
Don Sutton, Brackett and Hamilton
historian and their former neighbor said:
“She had pitched
some Sci-fi to Hollywood. They said it would be too expensive with special
effects and production costs, so she
wrote ‘The Long Tomorrow’ as a response. Then
they told her that there weren't enough special effects. The book began in
Kinsman and I could see the locations in the book.
They bought the
house across the street from his family. It was one of the oldest houses in
Kinsman. They gardened and remodeled the house. They liked the privacy. In
later years they had a winter home in CA.
When they would come back home in the spring they would say ‘It’s good
to be home.’ They said their best
writing was in Kinsman.”
Brackett and Hamilton talked about “The Long Tomorrow” in an interview
with Amazing Stories in 1979:
Brackett- “Well,
I became fascinated by the Amish way of life. I had not known anything about
these people before we moved back to Ohio and I observed their methods of
living, which were quite fascinating, and I said “If the atomic collapse does
come they’ll go sailing right on because they don’t depend on all the
artificial appurtenances of civilization as we do. If our electricity goes we’re
sunk, because the entire house runs on it. They don’t bother with it.”
Hamilton- “Before she never even saw them to think about them, but seeing them
with a fresh eye she came up with this idea.”
Brackett- “It occurred to me that if this web of civilization ever collapsed,
they would be the ones to teach the lost skills of how to exist without it to
the survivors.”
Damo Mac Choiligh: The director Howard Hawks famously asked
his secretary to find "this guy Brackett" to help William Faulkner
write the script for 'The Big Sleep'. Although Hawks had no difficulty when he
found out Brackett was a woman, did she encounter sexism from others in
Hollywood?
That may just be a story. Brackett was adamant in interview after
interview that she was not discriminated against.
In the Tangent interview in 1976 Brackett said
“But no, there
was never actually any discrimination against women screenwriters. The first
job I ever got was at Republic and the highest paid person on the lot was a
woman. The discrimination against women came in later, much later, when
television came along with all these male-oriented western series and detective
stories, and they figured a woman wouldn’t be able to write that kind of thing.
Which is where the problem came in. Dorothy Fontana gave a very concise,
intelligent discussion of that one night out there at UCLA. This is breaking
down now. In other words, they are reading the script to see if it’s a good script and not who wrote it.”
In a Luna Monthly interview from1976 Brackett said:
“I have never in
my life thought of myself as A Woman. I was always me, an individual,
free-standing and in the round. Whatever I do or think or feel, I do or think
or feel it not as some component of a mass group, but as myself. I have always
refused to be bound by stereotyping or limited by any other limitations than my
own. To me, my sex has never been of the slightest importance outside of the
bedroom.”
And later in the same interview she said:
“I have never
been discriminated against because of my sex, that I know of. Editors aren’t
buying the sex, they’re buying stories.”
Damo Mac Choiligh: How did she find it working with a literary
giant like Faulkner on 'The Big Sleep'?
In an interview with Starlog from 1974 Brackett says:
“I went to the
studio the first day feeling absolutely appalled. I had been writing pulp
stories for only a few years, and here I was expected to work with William
Faulkner, who was one of the great literary lights of the day. I wondered what
I had to offer.
That question was
quickly resolved when Faulkner came out of his office to meet me carrying a
copy of Chandler’s novel. He put it down and announced “I have worked out what
we will do. We will write alternate chapters. I will write these chapters and
you will write those chapters,” Faulkner went back to his office and I didn’t see him again. So, the collaboration was quite simple.
I never saw what Faulkner wrote, and he never saw what I wrote. We just turned
our pages into Hawks.”
And I have to mention the famous anecdote of Faulkner, while
working on the screenplay calling Chandler to ask who killed the Sternwood
family's chauffeur, Owen Taylor, to which Chandler famously replied, "I
don't know." This might also be just a story, but I’ve always loved it.
Who were some of the writers Hamilton and Brackett grew up
reading?
Once again, I’ll let them speak for themselves. Here is what
Hamilton said about how he got into Science Fiction in the Tangent interview in
1976:
“Some people,
myself included, are born with a feeling about these things. In my case I couldn’t
even read. This was on a farm in Ohio back in 1908 when I was four years old. I
got hold of some magazine that contained an article by H.G. Wells called ‘The
Things That Live on Mars’ It was, as I see it now, a follow-up to his very
successful ‘War of the Worlds,’ and it had these pictures of tall slender
tress; strange looking Martians moving about. I looked at that magazine until
it wore out. I wasn’t yet able to read it, to read the article, but those
pictures! I sat and wondered if Mars was a long way off and if it was a very
strange place. This feeling I say; I think people have a bent towards this,
that is to say, I had a very large family and I don’t think any of them read
anything but maybe my first story. They just had no interest in science
fiction. They were all great readers, but not science fiction.”
And here is what Brackett said in Luna Monthly in 1976:
“On or about my
eighth year, a milestone event occurred and changed my entire life. Someone
gave me a copy of Burroughs ‘The Gods of Mars’. I had always refused to read
girls’ books. I liked stories where things happened, the wilder and more exotic
the better. I knew all about Indians and pirates and Fuzzy-Wuzzies and Mowgli’s
jungle, and the terrible charge of the Highland men. But suddenly, at one
blazing stroke, the veil was rent and I had a glimpse of the cosmos. I cannot
tell you what a tremendous effect that idea of Mars, another planet, a strange
world, had upon my imagination. It set me firmly on the path toward being a
science-fiction writer. From then on, I could not get enough of fantasy.”
How did Hamilton get involved in writing comics and did he
enjoy writing them?
As was mentioned before, Hamilton had two close friends from the
early days of SF fandom, Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger who were two of the
heads of DC Comics at the time. And in the Tangent interview from 1976 Hamilton
said “Well, of course, the main attraction with comic books was that they paid
so much more than science fiction.” He wrote many comic stories in the 40s-60s.
Various Batman and Superman comics, Mysteries in Space, and Strange Adventures.
And he also wrote all the earliest stories of The Legion of Super Heroes which
have always been personal favorites of mine.
What parts of Brackett’s Empire
Strikes Back script ended up in the final script and movie?
According to The Making of The Empire Strikes Back: The
Definitive Story Behind the Film by J.W. Rinzler (2010):
“George Lucas
said he asked Brackett to write the screenplay based on his story outline.
Brackett wrote and finished the first draft title “Star Wars sequel” that was delivered to Lucas shortly
before her death from cancer on March 18, 1978, but her version was rejected
and Lucas wrote two new drafts and then turned them over to Lawrence Kasdan
(who had just written Raider of the Lost Ark) to rework some dialogue.”
And according to a 2021 article by John Saavedra in Den Of Geek:
“In this draft
there is a love triangle between Luke, Leia and Han Solo. Yoda is named Minch,
Luke has a hidden sister named Nellith, Lando Calrissian is Lando Kaddar, Luke’s
father is still a distinct character from Darth Vader and appears as a force
ghost on Dagobah, and Han Solo, at the end of the script, leaves to search for
his uncle Ovan Marek, the most powerful man in the universe after Emperor
Palpatine.
However many
aspects are similar to the final movie, we still get a version of the Battle of
Hoth, the wise words of an old jedi master, the excitement of zooming through a
deadly asteroid field, a love triangle, a majestic city in the clouds,
unexpected betrayals, and the climatic duel between Luke Skywalker and Darth
Vader.”
Where is a good place to buy their works?
Haffner Press http://www.haffnerpress.com/ offers many of Edmond
Hamilton and Leigh Brackett’s
works.
Did they ever collaborate on a writing project?
In his introduction to The Best of Leigh Brackett (Ballantine,
1977) Hamilton wrote:
“We found, when we first began working together, that we had
quite different ways of doing a story. I was used to writing a synopsis of the
plot first, and then working from that. To my astonishment, when Leigh was
working on a story and I asked her, ‘Where is
your plot?’ she answered ‘There
isn’t any ... I just start writing the
first page and let it grow.’ I
exclaimed, ‘That is a devil of a way to write a story!’
But for her, it seemed to work fine.”
According to Bertil Falk’s 2007
article in Bewildering Stories on Leigh Brackett:
“Over the years
the two affected each other’s writing. Leigh Brackett learned plotting from her
husband. Even though he plotted his stories before he wrote them, he had
nevertheless been a hack writer all the way from
“The Monster-God of Mamurth,” published in Weird Tales, August 1926. Under the
influence of his wife, he stopped using his typewriter as a machine gun. He no
longer wrote in a hurry and took an interest in carefully forming his
sentences.
When Startling
Stories asked Hamilton, in 1950, to revive Captain Future for a series of short
stories, he was busy working on other assignments. He wrote the first story “The
Return of Captain Future.” Then he wrote the synopses for the other stories.
But when I visited them, I was told that it was actually Leigh Brackett who
wrote them under his guidance using the “pen name” Edmond Hamilton.
In 1964 it was
the other way around, when Hamilton expanded Leigh’s short story “Queen of the
Martian Catacombs” into “The Secret of Sinharat” and “Black Amazon of Mars”
into “The People of the Talisman.” Both stories were originally penned in the 1940’s.”
In the 1976 interview with Tangent Hamilton said:
“The fact is I
was out of the running for a couple of years with a sickness. When I was
recuperating in the hospital I wrote the first half of this story with a pencil
and pad. This was Harlan Ellison’s story for THE FINAL DANGEROUS VISIONS. What
he wanted was a collaboration between Leigh and myself; you know a formal
collaboration. The story is called “Stark and the Star Kings” and if I may say
what’s funny about it; the first half of
it I wrote and it’s all about Stark.
She wrote the part about the Star Kings.”
The story was not published until 2005 in the collection “Stark and
the Star Kings.”
Did Hamilton and Brackett have any particular writing habits
or routines they stuck with?
Here is what Brackett said about her writing habits in a 1976
interview with Luna Monthly:
“Working habits.
Normally, I get to the typewriter first thing in the morning: otherwise, the
day is generally lost. Normally I work all morning. I seldom work in the
afternoon, unless the pressure is extreme. I sometimes work at night, though
not as much as I used to I don’t know why, exactly.”
And here is what Hamilton said about his writing habits in 1975
in Luna Monthly:
“How did I work?
I just sat down and wrote like crazy ... I took no notes, or outlines. I
started by doing a rewrite of each story, then for quite a few years I wrote
everything out first draft and the hell with rewriting. Of course, the fact I wasn’t
getting paid much for those stories had something to do with that. As time went
on, I became more careful.
About planning my
early stories, or not planning them ... I must have given you the wrong
impression if you thought I did not plan out those early yams. In fact, for
many years I planned each story rigorously and the longer ones in a
chapter-by-chapter synopsis. I ceased to do this in later years. I suppose by
then I had confidence enough that I would not go badly astray but could develop
the plot naturally as I went along. It’s been a long time since I outlined a
story in advance. I just start, and let the subconscious develop the thing. One
thing, though ... I always had a weakness for wanting to know what the very
last line of the story would be. I suppose that is because it is the place
where you leave the reader, and therefore I feel it is the final impression you
want the story to give.”
What were some of Hamilton and Brackett’s
interests other than writing?
Brackett brilliantly spoke about Hamilton and their domestic life
in an 1976 interview in Luna
Monthly:
“What is Edmond
Hamilton really like? He is Brilliant, of course, with immensely wide-ranging
interests. A formidably knowledgeable bibliophile; he can tell you every
edition of every book of any note, no matter how obscure, published since
Gutenberg started the whole business, and from memory. He has a steel-tap
memory. Nothing read is ever lost, and he has read nearly everything. He has an
independent mind, forms his own opinion, and is not impressed by prevailing
modes of thought. He has never to my knowledge, lost a friend. He is extremely
conscientious about his work. I’ve seen him throw away the result of many days
hard labor because he thought it wsn’t good enough. He has done many stories,
probably more than most writers, on order; to fit a cover, or a particular
need—the sort of assignment that is sometimes referred to as hack-work, but I
have never known him to ‘hack’ a story, i.e., to write it cynically, without
care, without pleasing himself or trying to please the reader. He gives his
best to everything he does, which in my book means true professionalism: the
ability to turn out a story to order and still make it good. He has never
learnt properly how to tie his shoelaces. He is unimaginative in his dress
(brown suits, brown slacks, brown sport coat, tan shirts, white for special
occasions, one black suit for banquets) but he is fastidious in the extreme.
Getting him rigged out to go somewhere is worse than habiting a
seventeen-year-old girl for her first prom. He is a creature of habit, like a
cat. He placed the furniture; it has never been moved. He loathes
housecleaning, doesn’t mind a reasonable amount of dust, but insists on
neatness. No jackets tossed on chairs, etc. He loves the country. He does not
like big cities. He prefers to visit with a few friends at a time, rather than
many. He promised me when we married that, though I might have to pull the
plough, he would never ride it. He never has. But he will not work in the
garden, except to run the cultivator now and again if I don’t
catch him in time; he sometimes fails to note where the weeds leave off and the
young beans and potatoes begin. He enjoys mowing and spends hours at it. He is
not a good carpenter, and where work of that sort is concerned tends to be
impatient rather than methodical. He enjoys travelling, but it must be done
with a purpose, to see someone or some place of especial interest. On ordinary
brief jaunts, the some place is inevitably a bookstore. He does not like to eat
out. No comment. He has great charm and a fine sense of humor. Life with him
has not been dull.”
Please tell us about Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett Day in
Kinsman.
This was a special event that they did for two years in Kinsman.
Don Sutton and the Kinsman Historical Society were the main driving force. (As
I mentioned before Sutton is a historian and bookstore owner in Kinsman). There
were many events including presentations by Stephen Haffner from Haffner Press,
a presentation by Don in which he portrayed Hamilton. There was a presentation
of Hamilton’s and Brackett’s slide collection which had never been seen by the
public before. And there was a walk to Hamilton’s
grave at dusk where they drank a toast to him.
Sutton told me they are getting a Science Fiction museum in
Warren, OH that may be open in 2026. And that currently there are some Science
Fiction pieces displayed at the Medici Museum in Howland, OH and that he will
be working on a section for Brackett and Hamilton.
What is Hamilton and Brackett’s
legacy? Why was their work significant at the time? And why is it still
important today?
I think that despite Brackett’s nonchalance about her importance
as a woman writer, that she (along with all the other women sci-fi writers of
the time) threw open a lot of doors for all the women that would come after
them. Also, I think she is unique in that she found so much success writing not
only pulp stories and novels, but also movie scripts. Her novel, ‘The Long
Tomorrow’, as well as her scripts for ‘The Big Sleep’, and of course ‘The
Empire Strikes Back’ will all stand the test of time.
For Hamilton, I don’t think he is a household name in the same
way that Brackett is, however I do think that a lot of his work is remembered
more than his name is. Allen Steele was only able to revive the Captain Future
series because it is still remembered. And as long as Batman, Superman, and the
Legion of Super-Heroes are still being published Hamilton will be remembered as
one of their most prolific writers in the Golden and Silver Ages.
