Classic Space Opera

In getting the creative juices flowing for some Star Trek gaming--and also thinking about doing some more Pulp Space posts--I've been reading some old school pulp era Space Opera. While (as anybody who reads this blog regularly knows) I'm a big fan of the pulps, I'm not as versed in science fiction pulp stories.  I figured it was time to remedy that.

I picked up Best of Edmond Hamilton in digital edition. I haven't read any of it yet, but I did snag a story by Hamilton from Project Gutenberg called "The World with a Thousand Moons" from Amazing Stories. That story has a spacecraft full of rich kids at play getting commandeered to rescue a dastardly space pirate and his crew from where they've crashed on an asteroid inhabited by nervous system-controlling parasitic insect-things.

Following the pattern of "writer whose wife I'm a big fan of," I also got the collection of Henry Kuttner stories, Thunder in the Void. I've only read a couple of stories so far, but they've been good ones with all the pulp flavor one could ask for. "Raider of Spaceways" has the son of the President of the Americas (who happens to be slumming it as a farmer on Venus) take on a space pirate and a deadly entity from Venus's eternally dark side. In "Thunder in the Void," a wrongly convicted man is broken out of a prison in Antarctica to take part in a daring raid to steal radium fuel. It's daring because space travel is certain death (thanks to xenophobic entities on Pluto) without the protection of a race of energy beings. When the heist goes wrong, and the Plutonian menace strikes someone close to him, our hero goes on a seemingly suicidal assault against that distance world!

What I've read so far has made me interested in reading more. The stories from both these authors really move--and though they both lack their respect wive's subtler hands with mood and character, Kuttner and Hamilton write stories with cool ideas.