Greatly Belated Book Reviews: Edmond Hamilton's Starwolf

Not to be confused with the Star Fox Star Wolves.

I've talked at some length about Edmond Hamilton's work before. Starwolf has the same love of over the top concepts that The Star Kings has, but approaches it from a different direction.

While The Star Kings puts an ordinary guy from the post WWII era in the middle of a crazy space opera from the perspective of one of the most powerful personages in its world, the Starwolf stories are about one Morgan Chane, a rather unusual space pirate. The primary group of space pirates (or perhaps a tad more accurately, space vikings, although I'm saving that review for later) are the Starwolves, natives of the planet Varna, whose high gravity leaves its inhabitants physically stronger and faster than anyone else, and as a result better able to endure intense acceleration. A good summary of the Varnan attitude comes from the second Starwolf story:

He remembered Varna, the place that had always been home to him. The great, harsh, unfriendly, oversized planet which gave its children nothing except the unmatchable strength and speed which its cruelly heavy gravitation bred into their bodies. Even to Chane it had given that, when he had survived being born there. It was as though Varna was a stern mother who told her sons, "I have given you strength and that is all I have to give... go forth and take whatever else you want."
And they had gone forth, the sons of Varna! As soon as they learned the way to make starships, from foolish Earthmen who were trying to encourage trade, the Varnans swarmed out to loot the lesser worlds. They were unbeatable in space; no other people could stand the acceleration they could stand. Across the galaxy went the fear of the quick and ruthless ones-the Starwolves!

The Varnans built their ships differently from others. While most folks built warships to be big and sturdy, the Varnans made theirs small and nimble, and their ships could pick apart heavier craft quite easily.

The reason Morgan Chane is unusual isn't because he's a Starwolf; the reason he's unusual is because, as you may have inferred, he's a Starwolf of Terran heritage. (This is an important distinction; as in Star Trek, most aliens in these stories are actually humans with mildly different characteristics, apparently seeded ages ago by an unknown civilization.) While the Starwolves were mostly egalitarian, one of the others that Chane had thought to be his friend, Ssander, decided that the Earthman didn't deserve as much loot as he did, and when Ssander threatened Chane, Chane killed him. This caused Ssander's family to swear blood oaths to kill Chane.

Oops.

So Chane is forced to flee the Starwolves, and winds up being picked up by a group of mercenaries (nearly always abbreviated Mercs). Their leader, John Dilullo, figures out that Chane is the "Earthman Starwolf" that he had heard vague rumors about, and swiftly learns that Chane was running from the others; he offers Chane a job, which was not so much an offer as a demand, since he could have told the others that Chane was a Starwolf, which would be an instant death sentence.

So the three Starwolf stories (The Weapon From Beyond, The Closed Worlds, and World of the Starwolves) are primarily about what eventually becomes the friendship between Chane and Dilullo, and their adventures with the Merc bands, the only other major recurring Merc being a deceptively fat man named Bollard, usually Dilullo's second. (Bollard, by the way, is actually my favorite supporting character; there's just something about the guy. Sure, the reader is constantly reminded of him being overweight, but it clearly isn't an impediment for him, and he's one of the smarter, more devious characters. And of course, in their line of work deviousness is a good thing.)

The setting has two peculiar, some would say glaring, flaws.

First, Edmond Hamilton makes the peculiar but common assumption about other galaxies among many of the old guard (and I do mean old) of science fiction writers, which translates essentially as: In different parts of space, the periodic table is totally different from what it is here. If you've ever taken some basic science or looked into the matter, you'd be aware that this assumption is total bull.

Second, and this is important to the story, Earthmen are the most technologically advanced race in the galaxy, but Earth is much poorer than any other planet, hence the desperation measure of Earthmen hiring themselves out as Mercs. WHAT?

Granted, for some reason the Earthers decided to basically give away the basics of spacecraft design, but you'd think that they'd be able to make a killing monetarily even if they did. There's some kind of nonsense about how Earth's solar system doesn't have any other habitable planets, while most systems do, and thus most systems are richer, blah blah blah fishcakes, but this really doesn't make much sense either-most of the inhabited planets within single systems fight with each other.

But if you can get around these, and if you can stand reading old pulp fiction, chances are you can, then Edmond Hamilton's Starwolf stories are a fun little romp. Chane in particular is delightfully evil, and I mean that literally.

-Signing off.