World of the Starwolves: Hamilton goes out like a pro

World of the Starwolves by Edmond Hamilton

Although Ohio-born author Edmond Hamilton had given his readers much in the way of action, spectacle, alien races, futuristic science, and cosmic wonder in the first two novels of his so-called STARWOLF TRILOGY – The Weapon From Beyond (1967) and The Closed Worlds (1968) – there was yet one element that he seemed to be holding in abeyance. In Book #1, the reader had met Morgan Chane, an orphan born of Earthling missionary parents, who had been brought up by the piratical Starwolves on the planet Varna. Chane, we learned, had been forced to flee from his Starwolf brothers after killing one of them in self-defense and arousing one of the Varnan clans to seek vengeance. Chane had gone on to work with a band of Terran-based mercenaries, the Mercs, headed by the aging but still highly capable John Dilullo, and in those first two installments of the trilogy had narrowly escaped with his life on two very tough missions with them. But in all those hundreds of pages of derring-do, what Hamilton had neglected to give his readers were the Starwolves themselves, and a visit to the planet Varna. Oh, we’d run into their ships in deep space, and were even vouchsafed glimpses of their world, via Chane’s recollections and his consciousness roaming while in the grip of the alien artifact known as the Free-Faring. But a trip to Varna itself, and the Starwolves as actual characters in his saga, these would have to wait until Book #3, the appropriately titled World of the Starwolves, also released in 1968.

Like its two predecessors, World of the Starwolves first saw the light of Earthday as a 50-cent Ace paperback with cover artwork by the great Jack Gaughan; again like its predecessors, this would be the novel’s only stand-alone, English-language edition. Internationally, however, the book would appear in Italy (1969, as Le Stelle del Silenzio, or The Stars of Silence), Germany (also 1969, as Die Singenden Sarnen, or The Singing Suns) and France (1978, as La Planete des Loups, or Planet of Wolves). And as I’ve said elsewhere, for those smart shoppers who would like to acquire this entire trilogy in one big, English-language volume, please know that two such do exist under the title Starwolf: the 1982 paperback from Ace and the 1985 paperback from the English publisher Hamlyn/Arrow. I was happy to nab a beautiful, unread copy of that 1982 Ace volume for a good price online, and don’t expect that you’ll have much trouble finding one either.

Now, as for World of the Starwolves itself: John Dilullo had only agreed to go on the hazardous assignment that comprised Book #2 in order to raise enough money to build himself a lavish retirement home in the quaint area of Italy known as Brindisi, and as Book #3 opens, we find Dilullo sitting in that old town, a month or two later. His dream home has not even gotten off the planning stages, and before long, Chane arrives and tells his Merc leader that he doesn’t believe retirement is in the cards for him; as Dilullo is forced to agree much later in the story, “A starman’s home is space.” And when Chane goes on to tell of a plan that he has concocted, Dilullo is instantly drawn in. The Starwolves, it seems, had recently struck the planet Achernar and made off with one of the most precious artifacts in the galaxy, the Singing Suns: a mobile consisting of 40 synthetic gems, each one representing one of the galaxy’s largest stars, that spun about one another and made music in a ceaseless dance of mazelike movement and fluctuating sound. Achernar is now offering a reward of 2 million space credits for the mobile’s return, the accomplishment of which will not be easy, seeing that the Varnans have undoubtedly sold the gems individually to multiple buyers. Little deterred, Dilullo puts together the same band of Mercs that we’d encountered in Book #2, and, with Chane aboard (the Starwolf’s background still unknown to all the Mercs save Dilullo), off they go on their seemingly impossible quest.

The first stop for Dilullo & Co. is the planet Mruun, where they forcibly extract information from the mind of a well-known fence named Klloya-Klloy. While on Mruun, the Mercs save the life of a drunken Paragaran – an enormous dog/bear humanoid – in a street brawl, and bring the creature, named Gwaath, along with them to the storm-lashed world of Rith, whose king – the diminutive, red-skinned Eron – supposedly purchased six of the jewels. But Eron gives them a piece of news that comes as a stunning blow. All 40 of the stolen gems had been purchased by middlemen agents, only to be resold to a race known as the Qajars, whose planet, Chlamm, orbits a dying sun in a neglected section of the galaxy. The Qajars are lovers of beauty and unique artifacts, and their world is a treasure trove that no other races, not even the Varnans, have even heard about. The Qajars are thought to be sadistic, despite their aestheticism, and have jealously guarded their isolation by turning the dead worlds of their cluster into actual superbombs! When Chane, Dilullo and Gwaath approach the planet Chlamm they are subjected to a killing bombardment of energy that agonizes their nerves and brains, forcing them to flee, more dead than alive, back to Rith, where the disgusted King Eron holds all the Mercs as temporary prisoners. And so, Chane decides that there is only one course of action open to him: He will somehow escape from his prison tower on Rith, make it through the eternally storm-lashed landscape to the nearby starport, steal a one-man cruiser, fly to Varna – the homeworld where he is a wanted man – and there try to enlist the Starwolves’ aid in sacking the previously unknown treasure planet. It would seem that, despite all the odds, this erstwhile Starwolf will finally be coming home…

As you may have discerned, this final book in the STARWOLF TRILOGY – which was, incidentally, the final novel of Hamilton’s more than 40-year career – is something of a heist caper, but here, the heist involves making away with the treasures of the galaxy’s most heavily defended planet! If I were forced to name the book’s single greatest selling point, it would be getting to actually visit Varna, getting to know some of the other Starwolves, and witnessing those Vikings of the spaceways as they pull off this daring heist. And so, we get to see one of the Varnan Council meetings, their fast-moving battle tactics in space, and how their raids proceed once they land on their target planets. One might not applaud the Starwolves’ pillaging ways, but we do have to admire the skill and planning that go into every one of their incursions.

Like Books 1 and 2 in this series, World of the Starwolves is penned in a wonderfully readable style, its cliff-hanger chapters impelling the reader irresistibly on. Once again, Hamilton delivers a book with much in the way of color, drive and panache, not to mention (or did I just imagine it?) a bit more humor than was evident before. And much of that humor comes from the bantering relationship between Eron and Chane, and from the booze-guzzling giant Gwaath (who reminded me of a friendlier Chewbacca of Star Wars fame, nine years before that latter character first appeared). Once again, Hamilton gives his readers a raft of interesting alien races: the gray-skinned, Humpty Dumpty folk of Mruun; the hard-drinking, brawling Paragarans; the red-skinned Rithians on their planet of eternal storm; and the sadistic Qajar aesthetes of Chlamm. And as usual, here, we are given a well-drawn slate of secondary characters. Among them: Eron and Gwaath, Berkt (an older Starwolf who was friends with Morgan’s parents and who is now one of his few friends on Varna) and Harkann (one of the two Varnan brothers who have sworn a blood feud with Chane). And typical for Hamilton, he provides his readers with numerous bits of futuristic superscience to dazzle their senses. Some of these gizmos not found in the first two novels include a telepathic recording that Chane finds inside an ancient statue floating in space; an “alarm-damper,” a handy tool for a Starwolf to have when breaking into a building; “deherer disks,” “a device that shortcuts the will completely and makes truthful responses mandatory”; a tridim camera with sensor rays, handy for taking holographic images of a building’s interior from the outside; the long-distance neural torture that the Qajars employ; the Varnans’ anti-radiation helmets for dampening that neural torture, partially if not wholly; the stunner cannons that the Starwolves use to incapacitate whole populations; and the hovercraft sleds on which the Varnans pile their loot and lead it back to their ships.

Perhaps it goes without saying that Hamilton regales the reader with any number of wonders and exciting set pieces in this, the culmination of the STARWOLF saga. Some of my favorites in this regard are the sight of one particular sun that has birthed comets instead of planets, which orbit their primary like moths; Chane and Dilullo’s hoodwinking of Klloya-Klloy in his heavily guarded estate; the punishing nerve torture that our heroes undergo; Chane’s escape from his Rithian imprisonment; the segment in which Chane goes back to Varna, spends time with old friends, gets drunk with fellow Starwolves, visits his parents’ graves, makes his presentation before the Council, and encounters Harkann on a nighttime street; and, of course, the Varnans’ raid on Chlamm, making their way through a series of booby-trapped, exploding planets and engaging the Qajars in space battle before looting their treasure world. I must say that it really is wonderful to see Hamilton – whose nickname during sci-fi’s Golden Age was “The World Wrecker” due to his propensity for destroying entire planets and suns in his stories – casually exploding dead world after dead world one more time in this, his final book. Talk about living up to your nickname!

For the rest of it, World of the Starwolves once again posits the notion that Earth’s human beings and the humanoid residents of countless other worlds in this galaxy had been seeded by an ancient race, an idea also proposed in Hamilton’s wonderful novel The Haunted Stars (1960). And strangely enough, there also seems to be a nod of sorts to (Hamilton’s good friend) Jack Williamson’s conceit of “sentient stars,” a topic explored in some depth in Frederik Pohl & Jack Williamson’s Rogue Star, a book that I recently experienced and that also first appeared in 1968. Thus, while becoming entranced by the Singing Suns, Chane wonders:

…What did stars talk about, in that silver-singing speech? Of the birth of the universe, when they first exploded into being? Of the mighty rivers of force that ran between them, of the darkening and dying of old comrades, of the dreadful and glorious fate of novae, of the thin, far-off messages that came from brother giants remote across the intergalactic void?…

Some lovely images there, right? And oh … a great big thank-you to Edmond Hamilton for turning me on to the words “fubsy,” “prat,” “chatoyant,” “screek” and “pawky” during the course of this book … but how odd to see the Golden Age sci-fi master employing the term “hipped”! Well, this was the late 1960s, after all!

This reader had not one nitpicking quibble to raise regarding Hamilton’s work in Book #2, but I do have a few to offer with this Book #3. For one thing, we don’t get to see any of the Mercs other than Dilullo as this novel draws to its hasty conclusion; no good-byes to the men we’d come to know and respect. This reader was also hoping for a scene in which Chane’s Starwolf background is finally discovered by his Merc mates, but no such luck. Another scene that I was hoping for was one showing a resolution of that blood feud, either by having Chane do battle with Harkann and his clan, OR by having the clan drop their feud entirely in recognition of Morgan guiding them to their greatest raid ever. Again, no such luck. It’s almost as if Hamilton had been toying with the idea of reserving those incidents for a possible Book #4 in the series, which I would have welcomed; sadly, that fourth installment was just not to be. And then there’s the matter of Hamilton giving one of the Varnan Council members the name “Yarr.” But wasn’t “Yarr” also the name of the Arkuu capital city in Book #2? With a galaxy of names to choose from, why repeat? Still, as I say, these are merely quibbles.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere what marvelous cinematic entertainments these STARWOLF books might have been turned into, and apparently, the Japanese thought so, too. I’ve just noticed that in 1978, the year after Hamilton’s passing, the trilogy was indeed adapted for Japanese television in two dozen 30-minute episodes! These episodes were later edited into two films – Fugitive Alien and Star Force: Fugitive Alien II – that were shown on American TV. I would love to see those episodes or films someday, although I can’t help feeling that it is in the books where the real fun resides.

Edmond Hamilton passed away on February 1, 1977, at the age of 72, and I have long thought it a shame that he didn’t live long enough to see the opening of that previously mentioned Star Wars film, three months later. That motion picture ushered in a new wave of popularity for the science-fictional space opera, a genre that Hamilton, along with Williamson and E.E. “Doc” Smith, helped to create over half a century earlier. How gratified he would have been! Only a couple of short stories would flow from Hamilton’s typewriter following the STARWOLF TRILOGY, a series of books that shows the old master in very fine form, indeed, as he approached the end of a truly glorious career. It is a trilogy that comes with my heartiest seal of approval!