In this volume, the Earth is threatened countless times, but one lone hero (usually a genius-scientist) stands between triumph or total annihilation. The influence of A. Merritt and M.P. Shiel is felt in several tales of lost, exotic lands, and Hamilton himself begins to exert his own small influence on the genre with several stories of temporal dislocation and cosmic menace. Robert Weinberg delivers an introduction with details on the history of early American science fiction, the context of these stories in relation to their contemporaries, and his own personal memories of knowing and publishing Edmond Hamilton.… (more)