“The Hidden World” (Science Wonder Quarterly, Fall 1929) by Edmond Hamilton was one of seven stories he wrote for Hugo Gernsback before 1930. I sought it out specifically to see how it compared to his earliest works at Weird Tales, which predate this Science Fiction epic. I was curious if Hamilton varied his style and content for Gernsback. The differences between tales like “The Monster-God of Mamurth” (Weird Tales, August 1926), Hamilton’s first story, and “The Hidden World” are many but invasion story after invasion story that followed was another matter.
Hamilton, according to his afterword to The Best of Edmond Hamilton (1977), got his first inspiration from a different source than many of his contemporaries:
…It was not A. Merritt, much as I admired his work, who most influenced my own early efforts. It was an early-day writer for the Munsey magazines, Homer Eon Flint. His stories in 1918-1919, though sometimes wooden in style and heavy in conception, set my young imagination ablaze with their vaulting visions of what vast possibilities future time and space might contain. I have, through the years, often testified my debt to this now somewhat forgotten writer, and I am glad to do so again.
It is not a huge jump from Homer Eon Flint to the two major influences of “The Hidden World”, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, the two signature authors that Gernsback reprinted in the early days of Amazing Stories. “The Hidden World” opens with a lengthy Vernian set-up, a group of four scientists that experience a world-shaking mystery and go in search of answers. The event is three occurrences of mysterious lights shooting up from the earth’s core. The leader of the group, Howard Kelsall, figures out where the next one will take place.
If you’d like to read the rest, please check out Monster 3:From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly