The Queen of the Legion [Mass Market Paperback]

Jack Williamson (Author)

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (1982)
• ASIN: B000MREK5W
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Worthy Addition To A Legendary Space Opera, March 19, 2009

By 

s.ferber (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Queen of the Legion (Paperback)

Fans of Jack Williamson's Legion of Space series would have a long time to wait after part 3 of the saga, "One Against the Legion," appeared in 1939. It would be a full 28 years before a short story featuring any of the Legion characters came forth, 1967's "Nowhere Near," and it was not until 1983, almost 50 years after part 1 of the series ("The Legion of Space") was released, that the final novel of the tetralogy, "Queen of the Legion," was delivered. Taking place several generations later than the earlier books, "Queen" tells the story of Jil Gyrel, the only woman to take center stage in a Legion epic. A lonely child growing up in the backwater Hawkshead Nebula, Jil's life takes a decided turn for the worse at age 7, when her starship-pilot father disappears on a mission, her mother remarries, and the family moves to a more "civilized" region of the galaxy. Upon reaching adulthood, Jil returns to her beloved nebula, in time to find the sector in chaos. The Keeper of the Peace--the custodian of the superweapon AKKA, as readers may recall--has just been murdered, mysterious entities known only as "cliffdrillers" have been attacking the human settlements in the nebula, and, worst of all, deadly parasite aliens called "shadowflashers" have been invading human hosts and (perhaps in a nod to 1979's "Alien") laying their eggs in same. Through a series of (somehow plausible) plot contrivances, Jil becomes drawn into this deadly state of affairs as she progresses closer and closer to the nebula's lethal radioactive center. Her companions in her quest to rescue AKKA and save mankind (no easy task for an 18-year-old woman, even if she does possess a black belt in the yawara martial arts, as well as the Gyrel mutant ability to astrogate through the nebula) are Kynan Star, of the famous Star family; Lord Archy, a levitating, silver globule of a robot and one of the most endearing such that any reader could wish to encounter; and Hannibal Xenophon Gul, a Legion corporal whose gluttony, perpetual whining, slovenliness and incessant use of the word "mortal" will surely clue most readers as to his real identity. (Additional hint: He's the same character who had taken an experimental longevity serum when last encountered, in "Nowhere Near.")

Hardly as fast moving as "The Legion of Space," as thrilling as "The Cometeers" or as compact as "One Against the Legion," "Queen of the Legion" still does have much to offer. It is the longest of all the Legion tales, with a large cast of interesting characters and several truly bizarre alien species, and Jil makes for a very appealing heroine. She and Kynan are an unusual love item, he being a good 20 years her senior and a bit of a beaten-up wreck of a man. Williamson, taking advantage of a 1980s permissiveness undreamed of in the 1930s, allows sex to enter into a Legion story for the first time, and although it really is no big deal, the brief allusions to it do startle. The shadowflashers make for excellent and scary nemeses, and the hosts and hostesses who they inhabit become truly repugnant creatures (including some very near and dear to Jil, unfortunately). To my surprise, I found that this intallment had several quite touching moments, perhaps none more so than when Jil regards an alien species known as the "lasermakers"--lumps of spiny matter attached to a rock shelf on a dying planet--and realizes that the creatures are "forlorn, doomed, strange in shape and mind, yet somehow kin." As would be expected, Williamson's skills as a writer show a decided improvement in this novel, after five decades' worth of continual practice. Characterizations seem deeper, and instances of fuzzy writing markedly less (although his descriptions of the shadowflashers' volcanic city are still a bit too sketchy for this reader's tastes). One more short story pertaining to the series, "The Luck of the Legion," would appear posthumously in 2008, bringing the saga's total to four novels and two short stories, and I would imagine that most readers who regretfully say good-bye to Jil at the end of "Queen" will be wishing there were a lot more to follow. This is a worthy addition to a legendary space opera, and I do recommend it to all Amazon readers.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars In the future, we wear cosmonalls., December 13, 2007

By 

Mike Smith (Albuquerque, NM) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Queen of the Legion (Paperback)

I was curious how this book would read, since it's the final volume of a series written almost fifty years before it. The first books in the "Legion of Space" series, written in the 1930s, used some pretty primitive ideas of what the future would be like--from rocket ship captains that keep their ledger books with quill pens, to rockets that fire their boosters continuously as they move through space--but Williamson covered himself pretty well by setting this story several centuries further into the future, which allowed him to update his future's technology here with no major problem.

This book tells the story of a young woman, Jil Gyrel, who lives in the fictional Great Hawkshead Nebula and dreams of joining the famed Legion of Space. An interstellar peace movement, however, is undermining the Legion's military defense capabilities--no political undertone here--and humankind is being taken over by evil body-snatching shadowflashers, with everyone left pretty much defenseless thanks to the Legion's emasculation.

The story bogs down unnecessarily with a rugged mountain man love story subplot that goes nowhere--the odd story of an alpha male spaceman, his naked love-clones, and his musical instrument that allows him to create virtual realities of volcanoes and mountains and oceans. Jeez. There's also an unbelievable and completely one-dimensional love story between the twenty-year-old Jil Gyrel and a many-decades-older space captain--a relationship that seems kind of creepy (or sad) when you think that Williamson himself was older when he wrote this.

And yet, the story remains light by bringing in a character that seems an awful lot like the whiny but resourceful glutton Giles Habibula from the original books, a character that happened to have been experimenting with immortality in "Nowhere Near," the novella that preceded this book in the series.

Also in this book: characters wear "cosmonalls." Like overalls, but cosmic....

Jil and the Giles character and a small crew of others including a very chatty 1980s robot team up to recover the destructive secret of AKKA--a device needed to defend the universe against the invaders--and the whole read is fairly tense and certainly a page-turner. In general, Jack Williamson's writing evidently got a lot better in the decades since the first books in this series, and "The Queen of the Legion" is a fast and mostly enjoyable read.

The series is a good one for what it is, definitely a pleasure, and this book serves as a fairly nice cap to it.