Old Empires and Armored Planets: Rich Horton on The Sun Smasher by Edmond Hamilton and Starhaven by Ivar Jorgenson
Rich Horton has been reading through the Ace Double library over at his blog Strange at Ecbatan. His last few selections have been duds, but I’m optimistic about Edmond Hamilton’s The Sun Smasher and Ivar Jorgenson’s Starhaven, Double #D351, published in 1959. Edmond Hamilton was my favorite pulp SF writer, and “Ivar Jorgenson” was a pen name for none other than Robert Silverberg. Here’s Rich.
Each of these novels was published earlier in a single issue of a magazine, possibly (especially in the case of the Jorgenson novel) in shorter versions. The Sun Smasher appeared as “Starman Come Home” in the September 1954 Universe Science Fiction, while Starhaven appeared as “Thunder Over Starhaven” in Science Fiction Adventures for October 1957. (I suspect the Hamilton novel, which is the shorter of the two at about 30,000 words, probably is the same version as appeared in the magazine, but the “Jorgenson” story, some 40,000 words long or more, is expanded, as Silverberg discusses below.)
The covers of the magazine editions of these stories are something of a real delight, so I’ve reproduced them here.
I always enjoy Rich’s reviews of classic SF. But when he starts throwing in vintage magazine covers, you know he’s really speaking my language.