What do You think about The Legion Of Space (1977)?
Zowie!When the the last time you finished reading a book and said, "Zowie!"?I might have said it when I finished Jack Williamson's The Legion of Space had I been twelve years old and read it in 1934, the year it was first serialized in Astounding Stories. I might have uttered an appreciative "zowie" had I read it in book form in 1947, assuming, again, and this always seems to be the crucial bit, that I was around twelve years old. But I just read it in a book club edition published along with two other Wiliamson "League: stories in 1975. Two confessions: I am not twelve years old, and I am not going to read the other two novels. The "Legion" series exists today as an interesting historical artifact, a sample of what sf was like before the Golden Age that began after World War II. It is also a good example of why the literary establishment -- damn those snobs -- were not inclined to take sf seriously. This is a slambang adventure story -- planet-hopping space opera with the fate of the human race at stake. Can this desperate band of misfits, lifted as characters from The Three Muskateers with a touch of Flastaff thrown in, get the job done? Can they rescue Aldoree!, a heroine whose name appears so often followed by an exclamation point that when one is missing it reads as a typo. Aladoree! who holds the secret to an all-powerful weapon. Aladoree! who is held captive by the grotesque Medusae, gigantic floating things from beyond our universe who fortunately, for mankind's sake, want the secret of Aladoree's weapon badly enough themselves that they don't just kill her and get it over with.Williamson wrote this when he was twenty five years old, and he published his last Legion novel in 1982. If The Three Muskateers was his inspiration, Star Wars is his progeny. Had The Legion of Space been optioned by Hollywood in the 1930's or '40's, the film would have looked like a Buck Rogers serial, with which, admittedly, it has a lot in common. The sets would have been as stagy as the acting, and the monsters would have looked ridiculous. In fact most of the monsters could not even have been done unless the studio was prepared to pony up for stop motion animation. It was not until the last decades of the 20th century that special effects technology began to catch up with what was called for by sf narratives. But what we got, fifty years after the fact, were the same adolescent fantasies that appeared in the pulps. OK, not true across the board, but look in the movie guide of today's paper -- if anyone still takes the paper. I am not going to change my rating of The Legion of Space, but I recommend that anyone interested in the history of science fiction give it a read.
—Charles Dee Mitchell
‘SPACE LEGIONNAIRESThey were the greatest trio of swashbuckling adventurers ever to ship out to the stars! There was giant Hal Samdu, rocklike Jay Kalam and the incomparably shrewd and knavish Giles Habibula.Here is their first thrilling adventure – the peril-packed attempt to rescue the most important person in the galaxy, keeper of the vital secret essential to Humanity’s survival in the deadly struggle against the incredibly evil Medusae.’Blurb from the 1983 Sphere paperback editionER Burroughs employed a device of using a prologue to explain to the reader how his ‘factual’ accounts of John Carter’s exploits on Mars managed to find their way to a publisher. Here, Williamson does much the same thing as the first chapter, set in a contemporary USA, tells of old John Delmar, who is convinced of the fact of his death within a matter of weeks. John Delmar, it transpires, is receiving telepathic broadcasts from the future and has been writing the future history of his family. Pioneers and scientists, they eventually found an Empire within the Solar System and become despotic and corrupt rulers before being overthrown and replaced with a democratic system.Our hero, John Ulnar, is a descendant of this future historian and is embroiled in a plot to restore the Empire. A young girl, Aladoree Anthar, is the hereditary guardian of the secret of a simple but devastating weapon known only as AKKA. To gain control of AKKA and implement a coup, the Ulnar family (unbeknown to John) have made an alliance with the Medusae from the hellish world which orbits Barnard’s Star. Aladoree Anthar is kidnapped and it is up to John and his trio of companions to travel to the world of the Medusae, rescue Aladoree Anthar and stop the great tentacled beasties in their secret plan to invade and conquer Earth.It’s a simple but effective tale which suffers from rather obvious errors such as humans being able to live and breathe in the open atop a three thousand foot building on the Martian moon, Phobos, or indeed on Pluto’s moon, Cerberus.One also wonders why Williamson’s Falstaffian character Giles Habibula is never told to shut up, since his rambling oratories and complaints appear with depressing regularity from his first introduction.'Poor Giles Habibula, aged and crippled in the loyal service of the Legion, now without a place on any planet to rest his mortal head. Hunted through the black and frozen deep of space, driven out of the System he has given his years and his strength to defend. Driven out to face a planet full of green inhuman monsters. Ah me! The ingrate System will regret this injustice to a mortal hero!’He wiped the tears away, then, with the back of a great fat hand, and tilted up the flagon.[p70]On the positive side, Williamson’s settings are colourful and inventive and in describing larger cosmological issues such as the functions of dust-clouds and nebulae as the wombs for the creation of new star systems, he is very much in tune with current thinking on the issue.It’s a novel which seems very hastily written for serialisation in ‘Astounding’ and not subsequently revised for book publication. This does however, give the story a fast-paced edge.
—Roddy Williams
"The Legion of Space," the opening salvo of a tetralogy that Jack Williamson wrote over a nearly 50-year period, was initially released as a six-part serial in the April-September 1934 issues of "Astounding Stories." (This was some years before the publication changed its name to "Astounding Science-Fiction," in March '38, and, with the guidance of newly ensconced editor John W. Campbell, Jr., became the most influential magazine in sci-fi history.) It was ultimately given the hardcover novel treatment in 1947. One of the enduring classics of swashbuckling "space opera," "Legion" is a true page-turner, written in the best pulp style. Though Williamson had only sold his first story, "The Metal Man," some six years before, by 1934 he showed that he was capable of coming out with a blazing saga of space action to rival those of E.E. "Doc" Smith himself. That elusive "sense of wonder" is much in evidence in "Legion," and the book's relentless pace, nonstop action, incessant cliffhangers, and remarkable panache make it truly unputdownable. Simply put, the book is a blast.In it, we meet young John Ulnar, a recent graduate, after five years of training, of the Legion Academy. His initial posting as a Legionnaire is the planet Mars, where his supremely important duty is to guard beautiful Aladoree Anthar, keeper of the secret of AKKA, the system's ultimate superweapon. Three fellow Legionnaires (read: 30th century musketeers) are detailed to the same assignment, and so we get to meet, for the first time, the perpetually cool Jay Kalan; a redheaded giant of enormous strength, Hal Samdu (yes, an anagram of "Dumas"); and the perpetually complaining Giles Habibula, a master lock picker and a character universally described, in the 75 years since his initial appearance, as "Falstaffian." When Aladoree is kidnapped by the Medusae--enormous, levitating, jellyfishlike aliens from the dying world around Barnard's Star--with the help of some traitorous Legionnaires, the quartet embarks on an interstellar quest, against tremendous odds, to rescue her and save the human worlds from invasion. Before all is said and done, Williamson has dished out several space battles, a nebula storm, a raid on Pluto's moon, and a transcontinental slog across the Medusan homeworld, fighting various alien flora and fauna (including a giant amoeba!), not to mention the elements themselves, the entire way, all culminating in a suicidal incursion into the Medusans' miles-high city. This is truly red-blooded, rousing stuff, guaranteed to pump the adrenaline of all readers who are young at heart. "The single most popular science fiction novel serialized during the '30s," sci-fi great Alexei Panshin has written of it, and is it any wonder?"The Legion of Space" is not for everyone, however, and does admittedly come with its share of problems. The book is inelegantly written, to put it mildly, and those readers who prefer their sci-fi to seem more like prose poetry should stick with the likes of Ursula K. LeGuin or J.G. Ballard. Several passages contain instances of fuzzy writing (such as the descriptions of the space cruiser The Purple Dream), and there are also some instances of faulty grammar, such as misplaced modifiers. Some of the action in the book will most likely strike readers as being highly improbable. (Is it really possible to climb down a 5,000-foot-high drainpipe in the pouring rain? Or construct a glider from the wings of a giant alien dragonfly and some lumber?) And time, it must be said, has rendered many of Williamson's scientific/historic pronouncements...well, dated. Man did not colonize the Moon before the 1990s, and the distance from the Earth to Mars is not the 100 million miles stated in the novel, but, at the most, 63 million. The Martian moon Phobos is not 20 miles in diameter, as Williamson has it, but a mere seven. And Williamson gives the planet Pluto a moon in his story, called Cerberus, although no moon had been discovered as of 1934. It would not be until 1978 that Charon was discovered, and then Nix and Hydra in 2005. Still, the grammatical goofs, improbabilities and scientific/historic blunders all somehow fade into nothingness while the reader is engaged in flipping those pages. The book is utterly engrossing and utterly fun, and has been thrilling generation after generation of readers since it first appeared. The secret of AKKA, and that unusual acronym, is NOT revealed in this book, I should add. Readers are advised to proceed on to book two in the series, "The Cometeers," for further explication....
—Sandy
