Product Description
From the screenwriter for STAR WARS: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, THE BIG SLEEP, and RIO BRAVO...Walter Sherrisâ€"successful, happy, good husband and fatherâ€"made just one mistake: he took a walk along a dark road one night. Without warning, a car raced towards him and screeched to a stop; out piled five young men intent on violence. To the accompaniment of wild brainless laughter, Walter Sherris was beaten to the ground.He awoke in a hospital nine days later. And from that moment his pleasant life became a nightmare, more horrible than those he had wrestled with in those nine days of unconsciousness.Walter Sherris wanted revenge: for the broken leg and the pain; for the doubts he now had about his pretty young wife; and for thecountless and nameless others who had been mauled by the thrill seekers, the sadists, the compulsive slayers . . . the tigers loose in a tame suburban world.The police were evasive, almost disinterested. There were no witnesses. So Walter Sherris set out alone to trap the tiger.The Tiger Among Us was filmed as 13 West Street (starring Alan Ladd). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

World Wrecker
Hamilton started out writing pulp stories for early sci-fi, but through the decades grew into a serious portrayer of lore. His stories in this anthology, assembled by his wife/editor, range across the spectrum. The collection shows his diversity, and awakens the reader to perspectives no other writer has ever delivered.

One early story tells of an alien intelligence which brings a man's clocks, typewriters, vacuum, and other machinery "to life." It is an alien experiment testing how humankind might defend itself against our own machinery turned traitor. The hapless home owner is an ordinary man, who tackles it the way any ordinary man would.

A truly remarkable tale (Alien Earth) draws us into the plant world, slowing down human senses to the pace of trees and grass growing. We are witness to the unsuspected world of plants struggling for resources, attacking one another, sharing information. It is a fascinating look at life on Earth at a new pace.

The story of Earth's ending ... I was exhausted the night I read that, but couldn't put the story down.

Hamilton has been given the nickname World Wrecker and World Saver. He wrote of things on a galactic scale, of the creation of life on Earth, the end of life everywhere, and cities hurled through time. No one before or since has explored so deeply into the fantastic. Collect any story of his you can. I sure intend to.

Ron Carpenter

Sci-Fi from the 30s and 40s
I had not heard of Edmond Hamilton until I read The Space Opera Renaissance, an anthology of Sci-Fi short stories dating from 1929 up through the present. One of the more interesting stories was titled the Death of Captain Future. It was based on a character created by Edmond Hamilton in 1940. The character conjured up images of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. In other words when science fiction dealt almost exclusively with far out adventure. I liked the simple appeal of those stories and thus sought out The Best of Edmond Hamilton. The book was good but not exactly what I was expecting. There was a goodly amount of moral dilemmas and angst as well as naivete about science and its possiblities. Not enough heroic adventure. It did portray one thing that always interests me, however, and that is a peek into yesteryear's perception of the future. The movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a great example of that.

An star-spanning master of science fiction
Edmond Hamilton isn't as well-known as he deserves to be, and that's a shame. From the earliest days of the Golden Age, to the dawn of more complex & literate science fiction, his was always a name & imagination to be reckoned with, a guarantee of good reading.

The stories from his first decades are raw & wild, bursting with ideas & spectacular images. If the science was wrong even then, it really doesn't matter. Like his contemporaries, Hamilton was playing with Ideas & Archetypes, giving them a space-age makeover. The phrase "sense of wonder" rightfully applies to those years! Just consider the chilling "Fessenden's Worlds," for example.

Yet even in those early stories, with the emphasis on the immense, he was already casting a dubious eye on the image of the triumphant, conquering spacemen. Earth doesn't always come off so well, and he makes the reader aware of the dark side of the heroic, colonizing human, as in "A Conquest of Two Worlds."

As the years continued, he developed greater depth & sensitivity, as demonstrated the elegiac "Requiem," the somber "Day of Judgment," and especially in his lovely, lyrical tale, "He That Hath Wings." This is still one of the finest parables about the fate of the non-conforming outsider in modern society that I've ever read, retaining all of its bittersweet emotional power to this day.

In his later years, he intertwined stellar adventure with astute psychological character study, giving us stories such as "What's It Like Out There?" that were not only gripping, but philosophical as well. Yet he never lost his ability to create powerful, stunning images. He had all the virtues of the pulp writer, without any of the flaws; as a result, his work remains strong & worth reading to this day, and definitely in need of reprinting!

Pulp story master, often at his best
Hamilton mastered the "pulp" thrust of science fiction, and its virtues, almost before that term for the genre was coined. He could put more drama into a short story than many writers at greater length would manage in a full-length novel. And all of these stories, originally published in "Analog" and other SF magazines, retain that punch.

The science is far from perfect, and occasionally diverges from what was known even in the 1930s and 1940s. "Thundering Worlds" is full of passion and plot, but the physics of planetary bodies is inaccurate enough to be distracting to an informed reader ... yet, still, it's one helluva story.

The Del Rey mass-market paperback edition (also available, and different from what's currently pictured) has a striking illustration on its cover of the best story of the lot, "He That Hath Wings." You'll shed a tear for the fate of the protagonist even if you don't envy him his mutation, as I do.

Enjoyable Early Golden Age Science Fiction
This collection is an excellent look at the development of one of the old writers of the Golden Age.The stories begin weak, and then become progressively stronger througout the book, until at the end the stories arehighly literate.On the other hand, some of the earlier stories are soentertaining (yet corny)that one will overlook the weak writing becausethe stories are just flat-out entertaining.About two-thirds of the waythrough the book, there is a story called "Easy Money" that isthe most hilarious comedy I've ever seen in science fiction. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Classic Sci-Fi at its best!
This is, as you can see by the title, a compilation of short stories.It is probably the first non-Star Trek Sci-Fi book I read as a child and hooked me on the story-telling capabilities of Leigh Brackett.The storiespretty much cover the gamut of man-vs-machine, man-vs-god, man-vs-man. They also address racism, slavery, the despair of being only human in thisimmense galaxy and the hope and delight in being human in this immensegalaxy.The writing style is haunting.The titles are evocative.Try"The Lake of the Gone Forever", "All the Colors of theRainbow", "The Citadel of Lost Ages" or my personalfavorite, "The Shadows".These stories still make me laugh andcry and I am now 38 years old. I hope the publishers will wake up and do areprint of this book someday. ... Read more

Product Description
This Halcyon Classics ebook contains three works by screenwriter and novelist Leigh Brackett.Brackett (1915-1978) wrote dozens of works during a nearly forty-year career, including screenplays for The Big Sleep (1945), Rio Bravo (1959), The Long Goodbye (1973) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980).Brackett was a versatile writer, penning space opera like BLACK AMAZON OF MARS and detective stories, including the hard-boiled mystery NO GOOD FROM A CORPSE.

Much of her science fiction was set in a fictional Earth solar system with Mercury, Venus, and Mars all inhabited and earth-like to some degree.

This ebook is DRM free and includes an active table of contents for easy navigation.

Contents:
Black Amazon of Mars
A World is Born
No Good From a Corpse
... Read more

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Presented in fully-illustrated form, this is the complete script to the second film of the "Star Wars" trilogy, including hundreds of movie stills from actual on-screen action. It includes all the new scenes from the "Special Edition". ... Read more

Product Description
CONAN THE CONQUEROR:

His enemies had to raise a Master of Evil from the tomb in order to topple King Conan from his war-won throne. No city-bred swordsman could outfight this northern barbarian; no scheming courtier could outdrink him; and no faithless wanton could beguile him long enough for a betrayal. But they had not calculated the greater reign of terror that their resurrected fiend would inflict upon Conan's former kingdom.

THE SWORD OF RHIANNON:

Mars, a million years ago: a planet of science-lords and man-monsters; a world of mystery and marvel. Interplanetary explorer Matt Carse is thrown back through time to that world, and he finds himself inhabiting the body of a mythical god, slated to fight that immortal's battles all over again. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Eternal Life and the Night of Carnival
_The Secret of Sinharat_ by Leigh Brackett and _People of the Talisman_ by Leigh Brackett (1962) are two dandy novels featuring Brackett's strong, silent, outlaw hero, Eric John Stark. _Secret_ first appeared as "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" in a 1949 issue of _Planet Stories_. _People_ was originally "Black Amazon of Mars" in a 1951 _Planet Stories_. The original novellas were reportedly expanded for book form by Brackett's husband, Edmond Hamilton. Each novel can be read independently of the other, but the action of _Secret_ preceeds that of _People_.

Both stories, as you may have gathered from the titles above, are set on Mars. Not a scientifically plausible Mars, but a Mars in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs-- a Mars of dark canals, strange beasts, alien races, beautiful princesses, lost cities, high and low Martian languages, and an old super-science that borders on the magical. It is a Mars that is incredibly ancient and slowly dying. Unlike Edgar Rice Burroughs, Brackett knew how to write. She knew how to costruct a plot, how to handle dialogue, and how to capture the poetry of her setting:

The wind howled down from the northern ice, and the broken walls rose up against the wind, brooding, gigantic roofless now but so huge and sprawling that they seemed less like walls than cliffs of ebon stone. Stark would not have gone near them but for Camar. They were wrong, somehow, with a taint of forgotten evil still about them. (_People of the Talisman_, 6)

In _The Secret of Sinharat_, Stark is captured by the authorities and recruited as a reluctant spy to investigate a dangerous underground movement. He finds the promise of eternal life. In _People of the Talisman_, Stark promises a dying Martian blood-brother that he will return a stolen talisman to the city from which it was taken. He makes it to the city across hostile territory, but he then finds that returning the talisman sets off more problems than he intended in a city that is living a night of carnival, dancing toward oblivion.

These are excellent planetary romances. Not classics, but very, very good. I give each of them a four star rating. If you can, get the original version of the book that contains a pair of lovely Ed Emshwiller covers and also a couple of interior illustrations by that artist. ... Read more

Product Description
Stardrive!Access to the farthest reaches of the Galaxy!Ballantyne created and tested the new engines.Then he returned from the stars ... alone and dying of radiation.Arch Comyn must find out what happened -- and to do that he must make the perilous journey himself, and come face to face with the horrifying secret that awaits mankind. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Not Free SF Reader
Dangerous hyperspace journey.


A family-held corporation has tested interstellar space travel to Barnard's Star - and something has gone badly wrong.

They race madly to put a second mission together before the oversight people can shut them down, as an outsider becomes involved with one of the women in the family, and mixed up in their corporate intrigue going along for the ride.

A really very short novel, with a reasonably powerful ending.


3.5 out of 5 ... Read more

Product Description
Give a man enough rope and he'll hang--someone!

A book written to cash in on the success of film actor George Sanders, and ghost-written by Leigh Brackett, whom the supposed author claims never to have met. Stranger at Home is the story of Mike Vickers, back home from the dead, and trying to find out who among his family tried to get him out of the way in the first place. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Good, standard mystery
This book was written to take advantage of the popularity of the British actor George Sanders, who was credited with writing the story.It was actually written by a woman named Leigh Brackett, who was more of a science fiction writer, but she does a good job here.

The plot is simple. A man named Michael Vickers, on a trip with three buddies in Mexico, is assaulted, and disappears.He was never found, andpeople assume he has been killed. Of course, this is not the case.He comes back home to his life inLos Angeles after having been missing for four years, and determined to find out who tried to kill him.

This book is fast reading, and a very typical 1940's pot-boiler.Michael Vickers has a beautiful wife, of course, and a large estate, and pots of money.And although it is somewhat pretentious in that regard, the story is fun, and it is not easy to figure out who actually was involved in the crime.There are a couple of cool red herrings, and a plot twist at the end, all of which make it a fun read. ... Read more