“The Hidden World” (Science Wonder Quarterly, Fall 1929) by Edmond Hamilton was one of seven stories he wrote for Hugo Gernsback before 1930. I sought it out specifically to see how it compared to his earliest works at Weird Tales, which predate this Science Fiction epic. I was curious if Hamilton varied his style and content for Gernsback. The differences between tales like “The Monster-God of Mamurth” (Weird Tales, August 1926), Hamilton’s first story, and “The Hidden World” are many but invasion story after invasion story that followed was another matter.
Hamilton, according to his afterword to The Best of Edmond Hamilton (1977), got his first inspiration from a different source than many of his contemporaries:
…It was not A. Merritt, much as I admired his work, who most influenced my own early efforts. It was an early-day writer for the Munsey magazines, Homer Eon Flint. His stories in 1918-1919, though sometimes wooden in style and heavy in conception, set my young imagination ablaze with their vaulting visions of what vast possibilities future time and space might contain. I have, through the years, often testified my debt to this now somewhat forgotten writer, and I am glad to do so again.
It is not a huge jump from Homer Eon Flint to the two major influences of “The Hidden World”, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, the two signature authors that Gernsback reprinted in the early days of Amazing Stories. “The Hidden World” opens with a lengthy Vernian set-up, a group of four scientists that experience a world-shaking mystery and go in search of answers. The event is three occurrences of mysterious lights shooting up from the earth’s core. The leader of the group, Howard Kelsall, figures out where the next one will take place. The quartet head off for the Brazilian jungle and seek the truth. Vernian so far, much in the vein of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island, but things change with the appearance of the invaders. Hamilton switches into Wells mode ala The War of the Worlds, and reveals the true diabolical reason for the lights: weird creatures have cut their way up from the earth’s center to take over the surface. Armed with superior technology, including death rays and flying sphere-shaped ships, the “flesh creatures” arrive and capture Kelsall and his assistant, Fenton. (Strangely, Hamilton never gives the invaders a catchy name but calls them “the flesh creatures” through out.)
“For the creatures that moved out of those spheres into the clear starlight and the light of the circling beams were surely such as men had never looked upon before. They were, each of them, a great white mass of flesh that seemed shapeless and sack-like, almost, a mass seven feet in height and half that in width, the upper part of the flesh-mass tapered a little in width. Each was upheld by two thick and equally shapeless lower limbs, each half the thickness of the body it supported and each hardly more than a foot in length. Just above these limbs, at the foot of the shapless body mass, there projected the equally short and thick upper limbs or arms, each ending in two tapering tentacles or feelers. Above these grotesque arms towered the great white mass of the body itself, and set in the upper part of that headless body, directly in its white mass, were the only features visible, a single dark and saucer-like eye inches across and circular in shape, and beneath it a horizonal row of seven small round apertures in the body which seemed the thing’s mouth.”
The Flesh-Creatures are ancient organisms that evolved shortly after the Earth was created, living in a world inside the planet. They are star fish-shaped with a central eye and seven holes below this for a mouth. They speak in a high whistle. Their technology is impressive, using atomic-based machines that separate electrons to create a destructive ray that burrows to the earth’s surface as well as a propulsion system that flies their globe-shaped ships. They live in a gigantic circular city at the very center of the Earth, a city made of transparent steel. Their government is run by a council of twelve. They possess machines that can alter the human brain to understand anything including their speech. They do not sleep because they have an elixir that refreshes the body completely. The flesh-creatures plan to invade upper Earth when the inner world begins to spin faster than the outer, causing enormous earthquakes. They blast a channel out to the outer world and build an armada of flying ships.
Hamilton’s own style of Science Fiction begins after the leader is taken. The narrator and his lone remaining companion, Darrell, steal a ship and venture down into the strange underworld of the star-fish shaped flesh creatures. But unlike later tales by Hamilton, the action is frequently slowed to explain the history and details of the interior world, the flesh creatures’ technology, their need to escape the collapsing interior for the surface and many other details sure to thrill gadget-oriented Hugo Gernsback. Some of it is inventive but the daring-do is more to my taste as the two humans outdrive a species who had perfected the technology millennia before (shades of Independence Day years later.) In the end the duo rescue their friends and escape but also insure the destruction of the flesh creature race.
At last, I found the answer to my question: Hamilton did write to please his editor, whether Hugo Gernsback or Farsnworth Wright, and “The Hidden World” does read like a weird blend of his own style with big chunks of Verne and Wells. He would write a much shorter, punchier version of this kind of plot endlessly for Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales (“The Atomic Conquerors”, “Evolution Island”, “The Moon Menace” and “The Dimension Terror etc, etc, etc.) and in “Monsters From Mars” for Harry Bates at the Clayton Astounding Stories of Super-Science (April 1931), a third editor with yet another set of expectations, lots of action and adventure. Using his own style and brevity, Hamilton has no difficulty pleasing him too.
I was curious about Space Opera written by Edmond Hamilton in this era, correlating it with what E. F. Bleiler said about Hamilton in Science Fiction: The Early Years (1990):
He was a poor technician (whose best work could be considered only competent commercial) and a writer with few ideas. Along with Ray Cummings he was probably the genre writer most deserving of the term “hack,” what with rewriting the same low-level story over and over. On the other hand, he was important historically as perhaps the major creator of the space opera and the modern story of world menace. In establishing fictional patterns he was a very important innovator, many years ahead of his times. His stories, even if not adequate technically and somewhat depressing in terms of psychology and idealogy, were true modern science-fiction. Very little of his work is worth reading today, however, except for historical reasons.
While I agree with this in some cases, I can’t apply it to all of Hamilton’s work. Though he could pump out Captain Future novellas and write Superman comics, he also wrote great stories like “Day of Judgment” and “He That Hath Wings”. Ed was a working Science Fiction writer (not a SF writer who also wrote Mysteries and Shudder Pulps and Westerns as many did to feed themselves.) He knew how to please an editor and sell in a market that really wasn’t that big. His contributions are varied, and often ignored by Golden Agers. I would rather read his “Monsters of Mars” or even “The Hidden World” than any amount of Heinlein or Del Reys about nuclear power plants. This is a personal choice but I think if you look at what has been selling at Baen Books in the last ten years you’ll see I’m not alone. I like Hamilton’s variety, his sense of fun, and sure maybe they aren’t all classics as Bleiler says, but they are never dull.
One of the best things Gernsback did in his magazines was include bios with pictures with each story.In some cases, not Hamilton’s, these bios are the only information we have on some of the more obscure writers.
In the Spring of 1950, Fantastic Story began its run with a reprint of “The Hidden World” and had it illustrated by the great Virgil Finlay.
