The Star Stealers: The Complete Tales of the Interstellar Patrol, The Collected Edmond Hamilton, Volume Two

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.”

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.