Customer Reviews (4) 
Enjoyable and usually fun
"Three from the Legion" contains all of the first three volumes of Jack Williamson's "Legion of Space" series, as well as "Nowhere Near," a novella that's part of the same saga.
The first book, "The Legion of Space," tells of a crew of Musketeer-like space soldiers traveling across the solar system to rescue a girl from evil, jellyfish-like aliens bent on taking over the solar system, because the girl knows how to build a powerful weapon that can save the fate of everyone. The story frequently defies logic, but is almost always fun--particularly the character of Giles Habibula, who, when locked in a cell for a few hours, just can't believe he wasn't in there for weeks and weeks, he's so hungry.
My favorite part was when they disintegrated the moon, and it was all okay because the aliens were on it. No big deal! It was just the moon! Nothing important! It only influences Earth's tides and gravity, that's all. Good thing no one was hurt! Whew.
The second book, "The Cometeers," revisits three of the characters from the first novel--The glutton locksmith Giles Habibula, the personality-free giant Hal Samsa, and the decisive and action-oriented leader Jay Kalam--as well as the son of the young John Star from the first book--Bob Star.
The book was written in 1936--a year in America, and in New Mexico (Williamson's home state), very worthy of escapism, what with murder and economic depression and the Dust Bowl. It's very dated, but at least it's dated in a funny way. For instance, they have rockets and have harnessed the power of the sun for insanely fast acceleration, yet the rocket captains keep track of the ship's records with fountain pens in ledger books, and they listen to phonographs.
The story tells of an inhabited comet twelve-million-miles wide that comes to invade the solar system and use it up for food and fuel, several centuries in the future, and once again the Legion of Space is called to save the day, on orders from the Green Hall (a.k.a. Albuquerque, New Mexico).
It's not as funny as the first book, or as fun, but it's all right.
The third book, "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 Legionnaires, and who has a somewhat sordid back story revealed.
The action ranges from the Green Hall on Earth, to the New Moon (a massive machine built to replace the one 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.
The novella that concludes this collection, "Nowhere Near," is pretty fluffy, and honestly, I was pretty ready for the book to be over by the time I got to it.It tells of Giles Habibula, now an old, old man, visiting a distant station five light years away from our solar system, while simultaneously experimenting on himself to become immortal and trying to solve the mystery of a strange, mechanized, black-hole-like anomaly of time and space.The end is pretty much Deus Ex Machina, but it's a happy one.
I recommend this series--and this book, "Three From the Legion," for fans of pulp sci-fi, and for people who enjoy reading about New Mexico's future as represented in science fiction (my current subject of research), but...I don't know. Don't expect anything really intelligent here, or anything more than a somewhat fun read--even if it was unique and original when it first came out.
Ian Myles Slater on: A Little Creaky, but Fun!
"Three From the Legion" collects stories from (mainly) an early part of Jack Williamson's long career -- almost as long as American science fiction magazines, and continuing, with a novel, "Stonehenge Gate," released in 2005.
Serialized publication in 1934 of "The Legion of Space" was followed by "The Cometeers" (1936), and "One Against the Legion" (1939). These were well received, fondly remembered, and later given then-unusual hardcover editions by Fantasy Press, in somewhat revised forms, "Legion" in 1948, and "The Cometeers" in 1950, with the lattervolume including "One Against the Legion."
When Pyramid Books repackaged them in mass-market paperbacks in 1967, "The Cometeers" was sent out on its own, and the new volume "One Against the Legion" was filled out with a new, shorter, story in the same sequence, "Nowhere Near" -- in which Williamson just missed being the first to describe a "Black Hole" in those words. It also marked the Legion's return to interstellar space through its normal means of travel.
(Note that Williamson's 1938 short novel of competing alternate futures, "The Legion of Time," also published by Fantasy Press and Pyramid, and reprinted in a large-print format in 2002, is connected only by similarity of title; it is paired with an unrelated time travel story, from 1939, "After World's End.")
After Pyramid foundered, this omnibus gave the stories a fresh start in 1980; it appeared in hardcover as a Science Fiction Book Club Special for members, and as a Pocket Books mass-market paperback. Despite the title, it contains all four stories. There were also separate printings of the three volumes. Ultimately the older tales were joined by what seems certain to be absolutely the final story in the series, "The Queen of the Legion" (1983) -- or at least it is the last Williamson would consider writing. At one time there was a game version: "The Legion at War."
The flaws in the stories are now obvious -- thin characterization, gender stereotypes, plot devices that, if not already over-used then, are now threadbare. (Well, *someone* had to invent the sexy-but-murderous-androids plot -- unless you count clockwork in E.T.A. Hoffmann!) It may be difficult for some modern readers to grasp just how popular the first two stories in particular were. And how good they remain, taken as fast-moving adventures with some serious implications. Williamson was soon to become a better writer -- or display his talents to better advantage -- but even as my critical training tells me I *should* be objecting to these stories, I keep reading (and re-reading) with pleasure.
"The Legion of Space" was intended, at least in part, as a career breakthrough, with lasting consequences for the whole series. Williamson, after selling his first stories as a teenager in the earliest days of "Amazing" magazine ("The Metal Man," 1928, and many others), had been studying literature. He felt that he could now write to the standards of the then-prestigious (and better-paying) general fiction magazines which occasionally published science fiction, especially "Argosy" -- particularly since some of his existing markets, such as the Clayton chain's "Astounding," were foundering.
Hearing from his professor that even established novelists borrowed from earlier writers, he based his main heroes on D'Artagnan and the Three Musketeers, and threw in a version of Falstaff for comic relief. He added a little desert-fortress scene-setting from "Beau Geste" (Mars instead of the Sahara), showed us a hero closely related to a major villain, and introduced him to a beautiful princess -- no, make that the "Keeper" of a Secret and Ultimate Weapon, and defender of the Republic of the Solar System -- centuries in the future. Naturally, she is promptly kidnapped in an attempt to gain control of the weapon ... .
Still an extremely young man, Williamson had formed a template that is still in use. Don't believe me? Try watching the installments of "Star Wars" *after* reading "Three from the Legion"! (There probably will never be a "Legion" movie; it would look too derivative....)
The basic concept of the Legion itself was largely a re-tread of stories that Edmond Hamilton, E.E. Smith, Williamson himself, and John W. Campbell, Jr. had been writing; a space-borne military or police force defending civilized beings against outlaws, pirates, and marauders from other worlds. (This was Campbell in his first phase; he would re-invent himself as the more sophisticated Don A. Stuart, and finally transform into magazine science fiction's most influential editor. Hamilton too would go one to write in very different styles, besides making major contributions to the DC Universe, many of which are still in use.)
It was easy to grasp, even for those who routinely skipped "that crazy Buck Rogers stuff" in the funny pages; the U.S. Cavalry or the Mounties, but with spaceships and ray-guns. (For television, once budgets exceeded that of "Captain Video," you could add Coast Guard duties, and have the Federation's Star Fleet... .)
Still keeping it simple, apparently with "Argosy" in mind, Williamson stuck with human heroes, and made all the aliens enemies (although not all of the enemies were aliens). He had already demonstrated his competence with sympathetic non-humans in "The Moon Era" back in 1932, and regular readers of science fiction might be happy enough to have tentacled spheres or multi-brained dragonoids among the protagonists (see Hamilton and Smith for prime examples). But the "mundanes" (as science fiction fans would one day call them) had enough trouble with skin colors and accents among their fellow-humans.
Of course, so did Campbell, or some of his mouthpiece heroes; and almost everyone used ethnic stereotypes as a cheap substitute for characterization. (In science fiction, Smith's "Spacehounds of IPC" and the original version of its sequel, "Triplanetary" -- later absorbed into the "Lensman" series -- are contemporary examples.) Williamson's not very successful "futuristic" names for characters in the "Legion" stories seem a conscious attempt at a world without recognizable -- to us -- ethnic distinctions.
Making this part easy was important, because Williamson was using as back-story what could have been a self-contained plot; a story about survivors of a "lost" interstellar expedition returning from exploring an unknown, monster-ridden, planet! Ed Hamilton had already turned the same sort of unlucky venture into a stereotype in his early "Interstellar Patrol" stories, but it would be new and confusing to many "Argosy" readers.
Instead of doing a new version of the plot, and passing it off as original, Williamson was making those events merely the jump-off point, with the "heroic" leader's very heroism and loyalty to humanity being called into question in the first installment. That would be novelty enough. (Later, for different reasons, he also used the android-assassin idea for more Legion back-story.)
Although invading monstrosities from the stars, like Lovecraftian extra-dimensional horrors, were not often given specific motivation, Williamson supplied it. Like nineteenth Europeans in Africa (or, later, the Chinese in Tibet), his aliens were in search of extractable natural resources for their economy, and didn't mind what happened to "inferior beings" which got in the way -- including their collaborators -- let alone the hostile environment in which they were working. This slant on imperialism went back all the way to H.G. Wells (although he was dealing with an attempt at long-term settlement), but many writers already had discarded it in favor of unspecified alien evil-ness.
Unfortunately, no one had told Williamson that "Argosy," wanting consistency if not realism, had a policy against stories which changed permanent landmarks; "Argosy" stories should belong to the same world. A major plot point -- destroying the alien invaders' base on the Moon by using the Keeper's super-weapon against the satellite -- was unacceptable. What if some other writer wanted to use the beautiful full Moon in the night sky, as a scenic background in a love-story set in an even more distant future? So, eventually, it was rejected.
The story finally went to one of Williamson's established markets, a revived version of "Astounding," -- possibly past its "Astounding Stories of Super-Science" phase, but certainly not yet John W. Campbell's more dignified "Astounding Science Fiction" (as he finally persuaded the new owner, Street & Smith, to rename it).
And so only science fiction fans encountered the secret super-weapon AKKA, and got to ponder the usually unmentioned problem that once a "secret weapon" has been used, there isn't much of a secret left -- only an incentive for a first strike. (However, they, at least, would have recognized the weapon's strange name as an allusion to a story by A. Merritt, Williamson's one-time literary god.)
Williamson returned to this conundrum in the first sequel, "The Cometeers," set a generation later, which pointed out in detail that, once such a weapon has been used, and its action reported, a potential enemy with enough intellectual and material resources should be able to duplicate it, instead of just trying to prevent its use.
This now seems painfully elementary, but apparently it wasn't. Suppose the stories had appeared in "Argosy" and been read by a larger part of the American public, perhaps including political and military leaders. Would so many have unquestioningly accepted the notion that the Atomic Bomb could be maintained as an American monopoly? Just one of history's little mysteries.
As it happens, at least one chemist on the Manhattan Project later claimed to have started thinking about Ultimate Weapons while reading "Legion" -- flattering, but not exactly what Williamson wanted to hear.
Williamson, meanwhile, discovered that, despite a pretty girl with powers of life and death, and a set of square-jawed, if slightly eccentric, heroes, the show was being stolen by his Falstaff-surrogate, the old, fat, whining, hard-drinking Giles Habibula, the greatest lock-picker in the Solar System. Well, he *says* he's given up a brilliant career in crime for *honorable* service in the Legion, and is the greatest lock*smith* -- Ahh, lad, the pity of it! 'Tis mortal hard!
The bibulous Giles had another key (pardon the expression) role in "The Cometeers," and was an important, but still secondary, character in "One Against the Legion." He returned in a center-stage role in "Nowhere Near." And watch for a remarkably Habibula-like character complaining and shambling his way through "Queen of the Legion."
The Legion, unlike Hamilton's earlier Interstellar Patrol, and Smith's Galactic Patrol in the late thirties, remained both entirely human in personnel, and mostly bound to the Solar System. It awaited external threats, but posed none to others. A future society outside the confines of the Legion is hardly sketched in (nothing much about money, except at gambling resorts, for example; we do see that marriage is an existing institution). Williamson does tell us a little about its larger economic and political history, with tycoons seizing power, and provoking resistance. In fact, these provide one of the springboards of the plot of "Legion." Not very sophisticated, but remarkable in its day, and still enough, I think, to carry the story.
Outdated?yes!Bad?Never!
Maybe some readers would consider this trash...it isn't!Reading it is taking a journey back to a simpler time when values were obvious, patriotism was a virtue, and good naturally triumphed over evil!You won't be disappointed!
A bad, boring, but above all predictable book.
Old fashioned SF at its worst.
Maybe it was published as adolescence fiction way back when, but it must've been decades since even adolescents found this kind of stuff exciting. Probably the most predictable book I ever read, not that I managed to work through all thee episodes. The whole thing is extremely narrow-minded, totally america-to-the-stars 50s machismo.
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