Edmond Moore Hamilton (October 21, 1904 – February 1, 1977) was an American writer of science fiction during the mid-twentieth century. He is known for writing most of the Captain Future stories.

Born in Youngstown, Ohio, he was raised there and in nearby New Castle, Pennsylvania. Something of a child prodigy, he graduated from high school and entered Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania at the age of 14, but dropped out at 17.

Edmond Hamilton's career as a science fiction writer began with the publication of "The Monster God of Mamurth", a short story, in the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales. Hamilton quickly became a central member of the remarkable group of Weird Tales writers assembled by editor Farnsworth Wright, that included H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Weird Tales would publish 79 works of fiction by Hamilton from 1926 to 1948, making him one of the magazine's most prolific contributors. Hamilton became a friend and associate of several Weird Tales veterans, including E. Hoffmann Price and Otis Adelbert Kline; most notably, he struck up a 20-year friendship with close contemporary Jack Williamson, as Williamson records in his 1984 autobiography Wonder's Child. In the late 1930s Weird Tales printed several striking fantasy tales by Hamilton, most notably "He That Hath Wings" (July 1938), one of his most popular and frequently reprinted pieces. Hamilton wrote one of the first hardcover compilations of what would eventually come to be known as the science fiction genre, The Horror on The Asteroid and Other Tales of Planetary Horror (1936). The book comprises the following stories: "The Horror on the Asteroid", "The Accursed Galaxy", "The Man Who Saw Everything" ("The Man With the X-Ray Eyes"), "The Earth-Brain", "The Monster-God of Mamurth", and "The Man Who Evolved".

Through the late 1920s and early 1930s Hamilton wrote for all of the science fiction pulp magazines then publishing, and contributed horror and thriller stories to various other magazines as well. He was popular as an author of space opera, a subgenre he created along with E. E. Smith, and which earned him nicknames like “The World Wrecker”. His story "The Island of Unreason" (Wonder Stories, May 1933) won the first Jules Verne Prize as the best science fiction story of the year (this was the first science fiction prize awarded by the votes of fans, a precursor of the later Hugo Awards). In the later 1930s, in response to the economic strictures of the Great Depression, he also wrote detective and crime stories. Always prolific in stereotypical pulp magazine fashion, Hamilton sometimes saw four or five of his stories appear in a single month in these years; the February 1937 issue of the pulp Popular Detective featured three Hamilton stories, one under his name and two under pseudonyms. In the 1940s, Hamilton was the primary force behind the Captain Future franchise, a science fiction pulp designed for juvenile readers that won him many fans, but diminished his reputation in later years when science fiction moved away from space opera. Hamilton was associated with an extravagant, romantic, high-adventure style of science fiction, perhaps best represented by his 1947 novel The Star Kings.

In 1942 Hamilton began writing for DC Comics, specializing in stories for their characters Superman and Batman. His first comics story was "Bandits in Toyland" in Batman #11 (June–July 1942). He wrote the short-lived science fiction series Chris KL-99 in Strange Adventures, loosely based on Captain Future. He and artist Sheldon Moldoff created Batwoman in Detective Comics #233 (July 1956). Hamilton co-created Space Ranger in Showcase #15 (July–Aug. 1958) with Gardner Fox and Bob Brown. He also wrote the well-regarded three-part story "The Last Days of Superman" in Superman #156 (Oct 1962). Hamilton was also among the first regular writers for Legion of Super-Heroes, where he created Timber Wolf, the Time Trapper, and the Legion of Substitute Heroes, among other characters. "The Clash of Cape and Cowl" in World's Finest Comics #153 (Nov. 1965) is the source of an Internet meme in which Batman slaps Robin. Hamilton retired from comics with the publication of "The Cape and Cowl Crooks" in World's Finest Comics #159 (August 1966).

In 1969, the Macfadden/Bartell Corporation published a collection of short science fiction stories "Alien Earth and Other Stories" (520-00219-075), where Hamilton's 1949 "Alien Earth" was featured along with novelettes by Isaac Asimov, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke and others.

Hamilton met fellow science fiction author and screenwriter Leigh Brackett for the first time in the summer of 1940, but lost track of her during the war years. They met once again at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, where she and Ray Bradbury invited him to the coast in 1946. On December 31, 1946, Hamilton married her in San Gabriel, California, and moved with her to Kinsman, Ohio. Afterward he would produce some of his best work including his novels The Star of Life (1947), The Valley of Creation (1948), City at World's End (1951) and The Haunted Stars (1960). In this more mature phase of his career, Hamilton moved away from the romantic and fantastic elements of his earlier fiction to create some unsentimental and realistic stories, such as "What's It Like Out There?" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1952), his single most frequently-reprinted and anthologized work.

Though Hamilton and Leigh Brackett worked side by side for a quarter-century, they rarely shared the task of authorship; their single formal collaboration, Stark and the Star Kings, originally intended for Harlan Ellison's The Last Dangerous Visions, would not appear in print until 2005. It has been speculated^{[by whom?]} that when Brackett temporarily abandoned science fiction for screenwriting in the early 1960s, Hamilton did an uncredited revision and expansion of two early Brackett stories, "Black Amazon of Mars" and "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" — revised texts were published as the novellas People of the Talisman and The Secret of Sinharat (1964).