Aliens in This World

Our friends over at Cosmos~Liturgy~Sex dug up an article from the Tuscaloosa News telling the whole story of the collaboration of Gary K. Wolf (of Who Censored Roger Rabbit? fame) with his childhood friend, Archbishop Myer of Newark. (Here’s another, fuller article about the remake and collaboration from the Boston Globe.) It seems that their new sf adventure novel, Space Vulture, soon to be published by Tom Doherty Associates (the TOR people), is actually a remake of their favorite book as kids, Space Hawk.

(I was afraid this was some sort of veiled Andre Norton reference, but that book was Shadow Hawk.)

I’ve never come across Space Hawk: The Greatest of Interplanetary Adventurers, written by Harry Bates under the pseudonym “Anthony Gilmore”. It came out in hardback in 1952 — highly unusual for the day — with illustrations by Nettie Weber — which argues that it was aimed at the school library demographic. But I deduce this to have been a novelized reprint of his fourth short story publication, “Hawk Carse” (1931), his seventh, “The Bluff of the Hawk” (1932), and his twentieth, “The Return of the Hawk” (1942). All three apparently appeared in Astounding Stories, and all three were co-written with Desmond W. Hall under the pseudonym “Anthony Gilmore”.

It seems a bit harsh to judge a couple of stories from the top of the 1930’s as harshly as the adult Wolf and Myers do. Astounding Stories in 1931 and 1932 was a pulp magazine, not the Astounding Stories of the Campbell years. (Heck, in 1930 it was still called Astounding Stories of Super-Science.) And yet, when Campbell was firmly editor in 1942 and concerned with making his wartime readership happy with quality stories, he apparently asked Bates and Hall to write a third story for the series. So the Hawk stories can’t be as bad as all that.

Or can they? (A 2004 comment by Wolf on Space Hawk.) Apparently the true problem is the other problem with stories written in the thirties — the sins of other days, only evident to us because the consensus has changed. Our unconsidered sins will, of course, be equally sordid and disgusting to people from the future, but we don’t like to think about that.

Finally, I’d like to remind folks that Harry Bates himself is perhaps best known for a story written solo under his own name that is a true classic of science fiction: “Farewell to the Master”. The original version of that came out in 1940.

“So That’s Who Anthony Gilmore Is?”: An old fanzine article from Spaceways (edited by Harry Warner) about the identity of “Anthony Gilmore”. The secret was apparently hotly debated back in the day.