BACKTRACK TO THE FUTURE

It's the year 11,959 and everything is screwed worse than ever.

We thought we’d hit the sci-fi genre, since it’s been a while, and chose Edmond Hamilton’s The Star of Life. It’s one of the books visible in the photo of a 1959 airport paperback rack we showed you in August. The story concerns an astronaut named Kirk Hammond whose lunar capsule goes off course toward the far reaches of the solar system. Hammond decides to end his life rather than starve in the void, and when he vents the capsule the absolute cold of space freezes him. He awakens in the hot spacecraft hurtling back toward Earth. Turns out he was frozen so rapidly that his cells sustained no damage, and re-entry has thawed and revived him.

He’s thrilled to be alive, but when he lands he’s stunned to learn he’s made a long elliptical orbit through the solar system and returned to Earth 10,000 years after he left. He’s immediately caught in the middle of a millennia-old conflict between two races—the Vramen, immortal humanoids who control all galactic space, and the Hoomen, descended from ancient humans, and imprisoned on Earth. At least that’s how it all sets up at first. Revelations are in the offing. Hammond is rescued by the Hoomen, but the Vramen have seen the capsule arrive, and their search for this strange object sends Hoomen-Vramen tensions into overdrive, while Hammond himself, as a being 10,000 years old, has the potential to permanently alter the balance of power.

The Star of Life has some big concepts and it’s spread over a galactic backdrop, but like a lot of science fiction, it’s written at basically a junior high level. We had to laugh when one of the characters dropped the nugget: “We made an hypothetical reconstruction.” Here’s an helpful hint for Hamilton and his editors. Don’t teach your impressionable young readers to talk like knobs. It’s not good for them. Still, the book is entertaining—utterly weightless, mind you, but fun in an awkward, haven’t-gotten-laid yet sort of way. This Crest edition is from 1959 and the psychedelic cover art is by Richard Powers. Now back to our regularly scheduled grown people fiction.

Fawcett Publications, Crest Books, Edmond Hamilton, Richard Powers, cover art, literature, sci-fi

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

November 6

1935—Parker Brothers Buys Monopoly

The board game company Parker Brothers acquires the forerunner patents for Monopoly from Elizabeth Magie, who had designed the game (originally called The Landlord’s Game) to demonstrate the economic ill effects of land monopolism and the use of land value tax as a remedy for them. Parker Brothers quickly turns Monopoly into the biggest selling board game in America.

November 6

1991—Gene Tierney Passes Away

American actress Gene Tierney, one of the great beauties in Hollywood history and star of the seminal film noir Laura, dies in Houston, Texas of emphysema. Tierney had begun smoking while young as a way to help lower her high voice, and was hooked on cigarettes the rest of her life.

November 5

1937—Hitler Reveals His Plans for Lebensraum

Adolf Hitler holds a secret meeting with Nazi officials and states his intention to acquire “lebensraum,” or living space for Germany. An old German concept that dated from 1901, Hitler had written of it in Mein Kampf, and now possessed the power to implement it. Basically the idea, as Hitler saw it, was for the Nazis to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Russian and other Slavic populations to the east, whom they considered inferior, and to repopulate those lands with a Germanic upper class.

November 5

1991—Fred MacMurray Dies

American actor Fred MacMurray dies of pneumonia related to leukemia. While most remember him as a television actor, earlier in his career he starred in 1944’s Double Indemnity, one of the greatest films noir ever made.

November 4

1955—Cy Young Dies

American baseball player Cy Young, who had amassed 511 wins pitching for five different teams from 1890 to 1911, dies at the age of 88. Today Major League Baseball’s yearly award given to the best pitcher of each season is named after Young.

November 4

1970—Feral Child Found in Los Angeles

A thirteen year-old child who had been kept locked in a room for her entire life is found in the Los Angeles house of her parents. The child, named Genie, could only speak twenty words and was not able even to walk normally because she had spent her life strapped to a potty chair during the day and bound in a sleeping bag at night. Genie ended up in a series of foster homes and was given language training but after years of effort by various benefactors never reached a point where she could interact normally in society.