Customer Reviews

One Against The Legion: Book 3 of The Legion Of Space Series

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This is the third book in Jack Williamson's "Legion of Space" series--a series that, for all I can tell, is considered classic mainly because it was written a long time ago.
Don't misunderstand me, these are very readable books, all of them, but they seem to get fluffier and more inconsequential as the series progresses. This one, "One Against the Legion," shifts from being a standard space opera to being a sort of futuristic Agatha Christie mystery novel--with a strange killer murdering every night's top winner at an interstellar casino. Most of the Legion of Space is absent or mostly absent from this one, except for the fat and skillful Giles Habibula, who finally gets yelled at and told to shut up and quit whining by the other Legionaires, and who has a somewhat sordid backstory revealed.
The action ranges from the Green Hall (Albuquerque) on Earth, to the New Moon (a massive machine built to replace the moon destroyed in the first book), to various other planets and asteroids and spaceships. It's a page-turning story, but is ultimately somewhat disappointing and forgettable.
One of my favorite things about it though, was how comically some of the 1939 terminology in the book has aged.
About an alien robot that carries a girl away, it says:
"Those serpentine tentacles that raped the poor lass away..."
And, in casual conversation about a girl's flirtatious colleague, it reads:
"He began making violent love to me. He was a vigourous and passionate man."
And there are others as well.
I recommend this series for fans of pulp sci-fi, and for people who enjoy reading about New Mexico's future as represented in science fiction, but...I don't know. Don't expect anything really intelligent here, or anything more than a somewhat fun read.

_One Against the Legion_ is the third novel in Jack Williamson's Legion of Space tetrology. The first two are _The Legion of Space_ (_Astounding_, 1934; 1950) and _The Cometeers_ (_Astounding_, 1936; 1950). The fourth is _Queen of the Legion_ (1983). The publishing history of the third novel is a bit more complicated than that of the other three. "One Against the Legion" was originally serialized in _Astounding_ in 1939-- bought this time by John W. Campbell, not Harry Bates. It was published in 1950 in the same volumn as _The Cometeers_. Then, in 1967, it was published separately by Pyramid Books with a new Legion novella called "Nowhere Near" added on. I am reviewing the Pyramid version of the novel.

"One Against the Legion" takes place mostly on an artifact called the New Moon of Earth. The old, original Luna was wiped out in a space battle in _The Legion of Space_. The responsible thing to do would be to make New Moon a mass of science laboratories. Alas, I am afraid that there is more of Las Vegas than Los Alamos about this Big Dumb Object-- an assemblage of casinoes, luxury hotels, police barracks, and euthanasia rooms.

The plots of the earlier Legion books were linear capture-and-escape affairs, with the main villains identified early in the novels. The plot of "One Against the Legion" is more like an English mystery story. Our hero, Chan Derron, is an ex-Legionaire who has been neatly framed for murder and espionage by a super criminal known as the Basilisk. Williamson plants his clues fairly and manages to keep the identity of his villain well concealed until the end.

We learn a bit more about Giles Habibula's past, and there is an ending that does not last a second too long.

"Nowhere Near" is a bit more up to date in its technological background. There are references to computers, lasers, transisters, Uranium-238, anomolies, ultrawaves, and spectroscopic analysis-- terms that were not commonplace back in the 1930s. But the formula is old. Giles Habibula makes his way (along with a generous supply of caviar and wine) to a distant and endangerered space station. The other characters are a new generation of assorted heroes, a lovely heroine, and various villains. Some readers prefer the earlier books in the series. They have a bit more color. But _One Against the Legion_ is a touch better plotted and better written. It holds up passably well.

A weak entry in the Legion of Space series, structured more as a whodunit than an epic space opera and lacking the thrills and chills of The Legion of Space and The Cometeers. Much of the story takes place in a casino. There are many strange coincidences, characters turning out to be long lost relatives or business associates from 50 years ago and the like. Disappointing.

I read the Pyramid paperback edition with the Jack Gaughan cover.

The third installment of Jack Williamson's Legion of Space tetralogy, "One Against the Legion," initially appeared in the April, May and June 1939 issues of "Astounding Science-Fiction." A short, colorful and fast-moving novel, it reacquaints us with the Legionnaires Jay Kalam, Hal Samdu and Giles Habibula; John Star and his extended family only make cameo appearances in this one. Whereas in book 1, "The Legion of Space," the Legionnaires had defended our solar system from the jellyfishlike Medusae invaders, and in book 2, "The Cometeers," from the threat of a 12,000,000-mile-long comet, here, the threat to mankind is of a more human nature: the Basilisk, a criminal whose theft of a secret weapon enables him to accomplish seemingly miraculous feats of teleportation (across billions of miles!) and eavesdropping. The story takes the form of a classic mystery, as no one knows just who the mysterious Basilisk really is, and there are many prime suspects. Much of the action takes place on the New Moon (readers may recall that our old satellite had been destroyed by Aladoree Anthar during the war with the Medusae), an artificial orbiting world that is part casino, part pleasure resort. And taking up the brunt of the action mantle this go-round is Capt. Chan Derron, a Legionnaire who had been arrested and jailed in the mistaken belief that he is the archcriminal, and who now, an escaped convict, must try to clear his name by tracking down the real madman. The novel provides us with much of Habibula's criminal background history, only teasingly referred to in previous installments, as well as a meatier role for Samdu, who had been reduced to pretty much a lumbering cipher in "The Cometeers." In one early scene, Samdu tells the perpetually whining Giles to "shut up"; a long overdue statement, most readers will feel, despite Giles' innate lovability. The novel has been written by Williamson in the best of pulp styles, although some instances of fuzzy writing do crop up (when the author writes of "Andromeda," for instance, we don't know if he's referring to the constellation or the galaxy), as well as inconsistencies (a mysterious object that enters our solar system is said to weigh 10 million tons; 70 pages later, it is said to weigh 20 million tons). Williamson also coins a new word in his tale, with most unfortunate results. His made-up word for a futuristic building material is "cellulite"; how could he know that 40 years later, this word would actually be coined to refer to our bodies' lumpy thigh fat? Quibbles aside, however, "One Against the Legion" is a prime example of a Golden Age sci-fi/mystery, which ends on a most satisfying note indeed.

I mentioned before that the Legion of Space series is a tetralogy (the final installment, "Queen of the Legion," would be released 44 years later!), but this is not strictly true. In the 1967 Pyramid paperback edition of "One Against the Legion" there appeared, for the first time, a novella-length tale featuring Giles Habibula alone, and entitled "Nowhere Near." (And by the way, I believe that just last year, a posthumous Legion tale, "The Luck of the Legion," was released!) In many ways, "Nowhere Near" can lay claim to being the most realistic Legion story thus far. Set on a space station constructed on an ice asteroid 65 light-years from Earth, at the edge of a cosmic anomaly that has been warping time, space, gravity and magnetic fields, the tale dishes out a fascinating theory of cosmogony that incorporates Karl Schwarzschild's gravitational radius statement of 1916. In the story, Giles arrives at the ice asteroid (the eponymous Nowhere Near) in the company of a mysterious woman, while the station's commander, Lars Ulnar (yes, a distant relative of John Star himself) views their visit as most untimely. The baffling anomaly had recently begun to swell alarmingly, and before long, some monstrous machines begin to emerge from it. The reader makes the acquaintance of another son of John Star in this tale, Ken, now a captain of the survey ship that had been monitoring the anomaly, and his is one cool presence indeed. In this compact little tale, that elusive "sense of wonder" is in great evidence, and the origin of the machine invaders an imaginative one that few readers will foresee. My only problem with this story is Williamson's descriptions of the Nowhere Near station itself. They are almost impossible to visualize (the station is some kind of doughnut-shaped affair either on or under the asteroid--maybe both--with spokes and counter-spinning hubs and inner slices of cylinders that are pierced to be used as space valves...AARRGH!), and this is a real shame, as the asteroid and its space base are major players in the tale. The reader's imagination will surely be put to the test here, and I myself just did as well as I could. It was all worth it, though, as the story really is a mind-blowing one. Taken together with "One Against the Legion," it turns this old paperback into one helluva double feature!

This is the third book in Jack Williamson's "Legion of Space" series--a series that, for all I can tell, is considered classic mainly because it was written a long time ago.
Don't misunderstand me, these are very readable books, all of them, but they seem to get fluffier and more inconsequential as the series progresses. This one, "One Against the Legion," shifts from being a standard space opera to being a sort of futuristic Agatha Christie mystery novel--with a strange killer murdering every night's top winner at an interstellar casino. Most of the Legion of Space is absent or mostly absent from this one, except for the fat and skillful Giles Habibula, who finally gets yelled at and told to shut up and quit whining by the other Legionaires, and who has a somewhat sordid backstory revealed.
The action ranges from the Green Hall (Albuquerque) on Earth, to the New Moon (a massive machine built to replace the moon destroyed in the first book), to various other planets and asteroids and spaceships. It's a page-turning story, but is ultimately somewhat disappointing and forgettable.
One of my favorite things about it though, was how comically some of the 1939 terminology in the book has aged.
About an alien robot that carries a girl away, it says:
"Those serpentine tentacles that raped the poor lass away..."
And, in casual conversation about a girl's flirtatious colleague, it reads:
"He began making violent love to me. He was a vigourous and passionate man."
And there are others as well.
I recommend this series for fans of pulp sci-fi, and for people who enjoy reading about New Mexico's future as represented in science fiction, but...I don't know. Don't expect anything really intelligent here, or anything more than a somewhat fun read.