Jules Verne Award winner Edmond Hamilton (1904–1977) was one of the three formative pioneers of what some dismissively refer to as “space opera” and others as “the novel of intra- and interstellar adventure.” His earliest works, like the Federation of Suns or Interstellar Patrol series (1928-30), or Comet Doom (1927), The Three Planeteers (1940), and The Star Kings (1949), available from Renaissance E Books), are colorful, pell-mell adventure stories as befits Hamilton's youth. Later, in the 1960s, he would return to his roots for a series of novels and stories that combined the vivid interstellar settings early work with the more thoughtful perceptions and the moody, poetic style he had developed as he matured. These include The City at World's End (1957, available from Renaissance E Book), The Star of Life (1959), and The Haunted Stars (1961). What Hamilton did best, according to Donald Tuck's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, “involved the creation and popularization of the classic early space operas [presenting] galaxy-spanning conflicts between humans and other races, piratical or merely monstrous, [which in turn] did much to define the field's sense of wonder…” That Hamilton did all this without ever losing the human scale, indeed, the human touch, is a tribute to his genius and evident in such a thundering adventure as The Three Planeteers (which, as the title implies, is his homage to one of his favorite childhood novels, as The Star Kings pays homage to The Prisoner of Zenda, only in Hamilton's version of The Three Musketeers, his D'Artagnan, fittingly for a man married to a tomboy who grew up to be a celebrated writer of tough-guy fiction, is a woman!).