The Star-Stealers: The Complete Adventures of The Interstellar Patrol

Nearly a century before the racks of mass-market books were flooded with media tie-ins for franchises such as Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. (and ten years before E.E. "Doc" Smith created the Lensmen), Edmond Hamilton pioneered and popularized the concept of a galactic peacekeeping force. Hamilton's first crack at the concept in "Crashing Suns" has his band of heroes confined to the solar system as the Interplanetary Patrol. With "The Star Stealers," Hamilton takes his notion of a stellar police force to the distant cosmic shores as the "Interstellar Patrol." Many of these stories were reprinted in the 1960s from Ace Books as two beautiful paperbacks: Crashing Suns and Outside the Universe. This volume collects ALL of the stories of the Patrol . . . plus continues the program to collect all the prose work of Edmond Hamilton with two unreprinted novels, "The Other Side of the Moon" and "Cities in the Air." In addition to these stories, this volume features a gallery of the original interior illustrations, letters from the magazines' reader's columns, and correspondence between Hamilton and the pulp editors of the day. The American master of modern Space Opera, Walter Jon Williams (author of Implied Spaces, and the three volume saga,Dread Empire's Fall) provides the introduction. Contents: 1. Crashing Suns [Interstellar Patrol #1] (1928) • novelette 2. The Star-Stealers [Interstellar Patrol #2] (1929) • novelette 3. Within the Nebula [Interstellar Patrol #3] (1929) • novelette 4. Outside the Universe [Interstellar Patrol #4] (1964) • novel 5. The Comet-Drivers [Interstellar Patrol #5] (1930) • novelette 6. The Sun People [Interstellar Patrol #6] (1930) • novelette 7. The Cosmic Cloud [Interstellar Patrol #7] (1930) • novelette 8. Corsairs of the Cosmos [Interstellar Patrol #8] (1934) • novelette 9. The Hidden World (1929) • novella 10. The Other Side of the Moon (1929) • novel