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Tag: jack williamson

Novella Review: “Wolves of Darkness” by Jack Williamson

April 19th, 2025

(Cover by H. W. Wesso. Strange Tales, January 1932.)

Who Goes There?

Despite the sheer length of his career and how much of SF history he was involved with, there’s been relatively little retrospective material on Jack Williamson. He made his debut in 1928 and kept writing, albeit with quiet periods in his career, until his death in 2006. By the time First Fandom arose in the late ’30s, Williamson was already considered something of a titan in fandom circles, yet he also outlived most of the young folks in First Fandom who looked up to him. Williamson’s obscurity could be tossed up to him being a B-tier writer who occasionally wrote A-tier material, and also because despite being pretty popular within SF fandom, especially in the ’30s and ’40s, his influence is nowhere near as pronounced as, say, Robert Heinlein’s or even A. E. van Vogt’s. As he more or less admits in his memoir, Wonder’s Child, Williamson didn’t think of himself as a capital-A Artist™, but rather he wrote genre fiction because he enjoyed it. In a way he was the longest-lived and most persistent of the pulpsters, having more in common with the likes of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs than Heinlein. “Wolves of Darkness” itself is a curious if imperfect SF-horror blend that marked one of several turning points for Williamson as a writer. It was, up to that point, his biggest paycheck for a single story, it was made the cover story for the January 1932 issue of the short-lived Strange Tales, and it was also his first attempt at applying an SFnal rationalism to what was then considered purely the ground of fantasy: lycanthropy.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1932 issue of Strange Tales. It was stranded there for 35 years, until it was reprinted in the November 1967 issue of Magazine of Horror. It’s also been reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Classic Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1930s (ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh), Rivals of Weird Tales (ed. Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert Weinberg), Echoes of Valor III (ed. Karl Edward Wagner), and the Williamson collection The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson: Volume Two.

Enhancing Image

Clovis McLaurin is a med student, so somewhere in his twenties, who makes his way to the rural Texas landscape on account of his weird scientist dad needing his assistance for some vague purpose. Dr. McLaurin had inherited a ranch plus some funds from his brother, and has apparently been using the combo of free home and secluded location to conduct experiments. Clovis convinces one the locals, Judsgon, in the town of Hebron, near enough to the ranch, to help him on his way, although traveling by night ends up being a huge mistake for both of them. We’re already told early on that the landscape in these here parts of the state seem to be tormented at night by a pack of wolves, or maybe a werewolf. The introductory blurb for “Wolves of Darkness” tells us that this story will have to do with lycanthropy, which is true enough, although Williamson’s treatment of it pretty unconventional by the standards of pulp fiction. It’s also worth mentioning that one major plus in this story’s favor is its sense of place, which is no doubt inspired by Williamson spending much of his life in rural areas. He was, in fact, born in what is now Arizona, before it had become a state (that’s how old he is), before his family moved to Texas and then New Mexico, literally in a covered wagon in the 1910s. Despite being ostensibly set in what was then modern times, “Wolves of Darkness” is a depiction of the southwest at a time when it was still in the early stages of modernization. It’s set in the 1920s or early ’30s, but could almost just as well takes place circa 1900, as if the past and present were converging. Incidentally Jack Williamson and Robert E. Howard were close contemporaries who were both from the southwest, and thus reading their work from the ’30s you can get an idea of what early modernization for that region was like, albeit from quite different perspectives: Howard had a very love-hate relationship with Texas while Williamson was more forgiving.

Anyway, Clovis ~~it’s such a weird name I’m sorry~~ and Judson are attacked by wolves and a rather skimpily dressed lady with glowing green eyes—in fact the wolves have the same sort of uncannily green eyes, as depicted in the cover. Judson gets killed off-screen, but the woman and her wolf pack take Clovis back to the ranch as a captive. Clovis swears he recognizes the girl from somewhere, and realizes it’s at least the body of Stella Jetton, the daughter of Dr. Jetton, who is (or was) Dr. McLaurin’s colleague. The problem is that Stella doesn’t recognize Clovis, and going by her actions it’s more likely that some outside force has taken control of her body. This turns out to be the case, not just with Stella and the wolves but Dr. McLaurin himself, who is, let’s say not quite himself once Clovis meets him. Both the people and wolves Clovis meets all have green eyes, and all seem to be possessed of some fierce intelligence that while in the bodies of “lower” animals appears to give them extra intelligence, while in the bodies of people they become more animalistic. The big weakness of this outside force becomes apparent early on when Dr. McLaurin (or the thing inhabiting his body) tells Clovis that they really dislike light of any kind, so as to why the interior of the ranch is only shown in a dim red light. The beings who have taken over these bodies are nocturnal, or rather they come from a world that is deprived of light—a notion that seems outlandish, although there are many organisms in the depths of our own planet’s oceans that have never known sunlight. “Wolves of Darkness,” like much if not necessarily all of weird fiction, is basically about someone trespassing beyond the boundaries of the natural order and in so doing fucking around and finding out, as we say. In the case of this story it’s Dr. McLaurin who, prior to the beginning, had tampered with studies in possible alternate dimensions. This is what I mean by the story being SF rather than fantasy, since we’re given an SFnal explanation for why these things are happening.

Even in 1932 the premise of humanity coming into contact with malicious alien life was by no means new, although what’s more novel here is that “Wolves of Darkness” is an early example of aliens of the body-snatching variety. We never see what they look like, although from what I can tell they’re more like energy beings of the sort of that appear regularly in Star Trek; rather we only see them as filtered through the organic Earth bodies they take over. The conflict thus boils down to Clovis being held hostage, to help the aliens make a machine that would basically facilitate an invasion of Earth, or die a horrific death. Of course, he figures he’s gonna die either way, but he’d much rather defeat the aliens and save Stella in the process (he’s not as concerned about saving his dad). I’ve read enough early Williamson that I can tell Clovis very much fits in the mold of what Williamson was doing at the time, which is to say Clovis is a typical early Williamson protagonist: he’s sort of shy and intellectual, but also antsy, and he has a hunger for adventure that puts him in dangerous situations despite his social insecurities. In a way this is wish-fulfillment, a fact which Williamson was not exactly secretive about when it came to his ’30s output. (Some writers intentionally keep the methods behind their madness hidden while others, especially in the age of social media, are a little too eager about sharing with us all the boring fucking processes of their work. Williamson, in Wonder’s Child, takes a pleasant middle ground and only gives us insight into what really mattered to him as both a writer and person. If I ever become a professional writer of fiction, please put a gun to my head if I start oversharing about the miserable and solitary process of writing and getting my stories accepted wherever.) The “romance” between Clovis and Stella (the two barely interact if we discount scenes where the latter is still possessed) is also indicative of pulp fiction, in that it’s totally unconvincing.

What’s more convincing is the thinly veiled sexual angst, which Williamson also points out in his memoir as being rooted in his own failed attempts at romance and sexual intimacy at that time. There’s a memorable scene in which Stella bites Clovis’s leg in retaliation and licks the blood, in a way which is animalistic but also evocative of a merciless dominatrix. Clovis carries that leg wound for the rest of the story, and it gets brought up a few times so as to remind us that Clovis is not in the best physical shape to run from these horrors, but it’s also a connection he has with this woman he is irrationally driven to save. The idea is that he really want to fuck Stella, although this sentiment is never made explicit, or rather it’s shrouded under the guise of “true love.” Their relationship is unconvincing when taken on its face, but is more convincing when read as repressed lust, helped by the fact that Stella is barely clothed for pretty much the whole thing. Another neat thing is that the energy beings are apparently able to inhabit any organic life, even those who are dead, resulting in a small army of green-eyed zombies, including the resurrected Judson. There’s a memorable little passage in which Williamson describes one of the zombies, apparently missing its head, with a pair of gaseous green eyes protruding from its neck stump. This is the kind of gory and unabashedly horrific stuff that would’ve been fine in Weird Tales but would probably not have been fine for Unknown a decade later. “Wolves of Darkness,” aside from just being too long (it’s a novella but has the plot and character depth of a novelette), is a slight challenge to recommend because it has elements of both pulpy weird fiction and more sophisticated SF and fantasy that would appear later.

There Be Spoilers Here

After a lengthy infodump, in which Clovis manages to put Stella under hypnosis and make the energy being recede from controlling her temporarily, and also a failed escape attempt, Our Hero™ knows what he must do. The aliens really hate light, to the point that enough exposure might be able to kill them, or at least make them retreat from the bodies they control. With the help of a few locals, some dynamite, and some matches, he kills the fuck out of some of the zombies and ultimately is able to turn the tables on the aliens. Of course everyone who fell under the possession of the aliens is dead now, including Clovis’s dad, a fact which he doesn’t seem to mind much, leaving Stella as the sole survivor. All’s well that ends well, I guess? It’s a weirdly upbeat ending, considering the death toll and also the strain it put on Clovis’s mental health; meanwhile Stella conveniently doesn’t remember being a meat puppet. Not one of the more convincing endings among Williamson’s fiction.

A Step Farther Out

A few years ago, when I really started to get into magazine fiction, I remember being instantly captivated by H. W. Wesso’s splendid cover for this issue of Strange Tales. I didn’t even know what Strange Tales was at the time; it was actually the horror/fantasy sister magazine to Astounding Stories, back when both were published by Clayton. Astounding almost didn’t make it, but Street & Smith came to the rescue, although Strange Tales was left to rot. Since it was the cover story for this issue, I’d been wanting to read “Wolves of Darkness” for a minute, and I’m glad I finally did. I will say that it does pale a bit in comparison with Williamson’s later attempt at putting an SFnal twist on lycanthropy, “Darker Than You Think,” which I had read a couple years ago, although I may revisit that for the sake of writing about it. “Wolves of Darkness” is a liminal piece in Williamson’s career that I’d recommend for anyone interested enough in the trajectory of the man’s career and/or the history of old-school weird fiction.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: April 2025

April 1st, 2025
(Cover by H. W. Wesso. Strange Tales, January 1932.)

My schedule is not what it used to be, although I’m not sure if that’s my new living conditions, work slowly growing down on me, the real-world turmoil happening just outside of view, or some combination. I used to run this blog as a way of escaping temporarily from the drudgery of my everyday existence, between my job and living with my parents; but since I moved out four months ago, the scales have shifted in balance quite a bit. Writing for this blog no longer feels like an escape, but just more work that I have to do. I must write every couple days or else… what? What would happen if I took a break for, say, a month? Most likely my skill at writing would wither, if only a bit. Writing is like any other skill in that if you don’t do it for long enough then you sort of forget how to do it in the first place. It’s why I always find it amazing whenever an artist, be they a writer, filmmaker, musician, or whatever, takes a hiatus from the craft, then returns years later, seemingly out of hibernation, as if nothing had happened. Do you think Terrence Malick had to remember what it’s like to direct a movie when he was making The Thin Red Line, or if Robert Fripp, after not playing guitar for a couple years, had to refamiliarize himself with the damn thing when recording for David Bowie’s “Heroes”? Really this mindset can be applied to any skill, even one as worthless and solitary as writing.

I just remembered a depressing thought I had the other night, during one of my shifts, which is that I might be witnessing the death of human creativity in my lifetime. I’m not talking about creativity on an individual level, since I think it’s obvious that so long as humankind exists there will be artists, probably living on the margins, for the same reason there will always be Palestinians and Kurds and Chechens and what have you. I’m talking about a collective resentment towards creativity that has, at least in the US and UK, been building up since the Reagan and Thatcher years, if not earlier. Fascism, be it Christofascism or neo-liberalism of the Reagan-Clinton sort, is at its core a rejection of the human mind’s ability, indeed its incessant urging, to grow and progress. There is a Freudian return-to-the-womb desire inherent in fascism, except on a systemic level. The fascist wants to stop the future from happening—not a good or bad future, but the future as a concept. You can at least give the Chinese credit for envisioning a future, although if we’re being honest it’s a rather bleak one. In a more just world “AI” would be used only to make soul-crushing labor easier to stomach for human workers, but instead the right-wing technocrats who have increasingly gotten a stranglehold on government and commerce think such incredible technology should rather be used for kneecapping the human imagination. It’s possible that in just a decade or two the artist will be treated like how drug addicts and the homeless are treated today, which is to say the artist will be treated in the mainstream as at best a nuisance and more often as a threat to “the status quo.” We are undoubtedly on the path to that conclusion, and really it’s been a long time coming.

So what can I do? I talk a lot about art and artists, because I’m of the firm belief that without art human existence is really not worth it. Evelyn Waugh said that without God human existence is “unintelligible and unendurable.” I mostly agree with that sentiment. I write about art, even bad art, even the pulpy stuff, because I think there must be some value in it, and because God knows there isn’t much value elsewhere. Speaking of which, I decided it’s been too long since I last covered material from the pre-Campbell years that isn’t from the pages of Weird Tales. (I can’t help it that on average Weird Tales aged a lot better than its SF contemporaries.) So, I’m doing something a bit different this month. The serial, along with both novellas, will be from the pre-Campbell ’30s. I’m also finally checking the E. E. Smith box off my list, although not by reading a Skylark or Lensman novel but a standalone that caught my eye if only because of its convoluted publication history. The two short stories are from lady writers, one of whom you might’ve heard of if you’re really into crime fiction, while the other is totally obscure. See, the news is not all bad. Spring is finally here, and while my allergies may be kicking in I’m no longer freezing to death.

I’ve done enough yapping. What will I be reading? We have three stories from the 1930s and two from the 1950s.

For the serial:
1. Triplanetary by E. E. Smith. Serialized in Amazing Stories, January to April 1934. Smith was immensely popular in SF fandom during his lifetime, and yet despite a few attempts to resurrect his reputation he has since then been relegated to something of a sideshow attraction. Along with Edmond Hamilton he was one of the pioneers of space opera, with his novel The Skylark of Space especially laying the groundwork for future entries in that subgenre. The magazine version of Triplanetary was a standalone novel that Smith later retooled so as to make it a prequel in the Lensman series.
For the novellas:
1. “Proxima Centauri” by Murray Leinster. From the March 1935 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. I actually don’t remember if I’ve read this one before, so I’m counting it as a new read. Anyway, Leinster is curious if only because he’s one of the few writers from the Gernsback era to survive the coming of Campbell; not only that, but he actually hit his creative peak in the ’40s and ’50s.
2. “Wolves of Darkness” by Jack Williamson. From the January 1932 issue of Strange Tales. Williamson had one of the longest careers of any writer, inside or outside of SF, debuting in 1928 and remaining active until his death in 2006. “Wolve of Darkness” stands out as, if I remember right, getting Williamson his single biggest paycheck for a story up to that point, as he says in his autobiography.
For the short stories:
1. “The Pilot and the Bushman” by Sylvia Jacobs. From the August 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. This is now the third time I’ve nabbed a story from this issue of Galaxy. I unfortunately have next to nothing to say about Jacobs since we know basically nothing about her, not even when and where she was born. She wrote a handful of SF stories in the ’50s and ’60s and then vanished.
2. “The Muted Horn” by Dorothy Salisbury Davis. From the May 1957 issue of Fantastic Universe. This is a case where looking at an author’s ISFDB page can be deceiving, since going by it one would think Davis wrote very little; but actually she was a prolific crime novelist, and was even President of the Mystery Writers of America when she wrote this story, which is apparently horror.
Won’t you read with me?
Serial Review: The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson (Part 3/3)

September 13th, 2023

(Cover by M. Isip. Unknown, May 1940.)

The Story So Far

Theseus, known as Captain Firebrand the infamous Greek pirate, has landed ashore on the island of Crete, at the time the most powerful empire in the world despite its small size. Separated from Cyron, his right-hand man, along with the rest of his crew, Theseus now stands alone except for a crafty but “minor” Babylonian wizard named Snish. Every nine years games are held in Knossos, the capital palace of Crete, to see if anyone is worthy to succeed Minos as the ruler of the island—and to take his beautiful daughter Ariadne as their bride. Things seem to be going well until Theseus’s disguise breaks at the worst possible moment and he gets taken into prison, to be thrown into the labyrinth and meet his death at the hands of the dreaded Minotaur, known to Cretans as the Dark One.

With Snish’s help once again, Theseus hatches a plan to break out of prison and into Ariadne’s bedchamber, where, for reasons unfathomable to both Our Hero™ and the reader, Ariadne admits her intense love for the Greek pirate and they almost agree to escape the island together—only Theseus still has a job to do. The plan is foiled and Theseus is caught once again, and this time is thrown straight into the labyrinth, naked and weaponless, although not bitchless, as Ariadne still helps him in the few ways she can. Reunited with his beloved sword, Theseus thinks he might stand a chance against the Minotaur, only to be blind-sided by what feels like a horn grazing his side. The Greek pirate seems to be in quite the pickle!

Enhancing Image

Good news: it’s a fake-out. The “horn” belongs to Cyron, who was also tossed into the labyrinth and left to be either killed or die from the elements. The two recognize each other and it’s a sweet reunion—only problem being that they’re still trapped in a maze with no obvious way out. It’s here, however, that we’re given what is perhaps the biggest twist in the narrative, which is that despite a statue of the Minotaur being constructed in the labyrinth, the Minotaur himself seems to be nonexistent—an elaborate ruse devised by Minos centuries ago to keep the Cretans in line. Those trapped in the labyrinth either kill each other, themselves, or die presumably from starvation, for hitherto nobody has escaped to tell of the big lie that has haunted the island for so many years.

This has to be coincidental, but I couldn’t help but think if maybe John W. Campbell had a certain theme in mind, as The Reign of Wizardry was serialized back-to-back against Robert Heinlein’s If This Goes On—, which also covers religious fear and tyrants using the people’s faith to rule over them with an iron fist. In the case of the Heinlein novella there’s a conspicuous aside where we’re told that Christianity is totally fine actually, and that the villains of the story are using a religion similar to Christianity but actually something different. The Abrahamic God also gets off pretty easy in Williamson’s story, but in fariness it takes place in pre-Christian times, so it’s only natural that the religion of evil has nothing to do with what some reader at the time would’ve believed.

The Minotaur turning out to be a fabrication is inherently disappointing, since it deprives the narrative of what could’ve been a gripping cosmic element, but in the context of a work written specifically for Unknown I begrudgingly admit it makes sense. Works published in Unknown generally try to urbanize the creatures of myth, such that they become either as ordinary in the context of the story’s world as a real-life animal, or they turn out to be something that can be easily rationalized. The result is that there’s very little cosmic horror to be found in Unknown, and I think this is compounded by Williamson being such a rational storyteller, although his fast-paced pulp action style of writing at this point in his career can make this rationalism not so obvious. That the Minotaur does not exist in this rendition of the Theseus-Minotaur myth is only fitting for something published in a “rational fantasy” magazine.

What’s not so easy to rationalize is Ariadne’s cooperating with Theseus in overthrowing her father, which only becomes harder to swallow as a couple more twists come our way. I’ve said this before, but I wanna stress that Ariadne is a far worse-written leading lady than either of the female leads in The Legion of Time, which who were not exactly deeply realized themselves but who served clear purposes in the narrative. Ariadne’s seems split between her loyalty for her father and her newfound passion for Theseus—the problem being we have no reason to believe Theseus and Ariadne would love each other. It’s one of those inexplicable romance plots that plagues old-school pulp writing, only here it’s more conspicuous because Williamson is going for something a little more high-concept. Sure, it’s a somewhat neat premise, but the characters are still lacking in psychology; we’re not allowed to understand the why of anything.

Anyway, Theseus and Cyron lead a rebellion against the higher-ups of Crete on the basis that the Minotaur, the thing that supposedly lurked in the island’s depths, is not real, and therefore the power of the wizards is based on a falsehood. It goes pretty well! People are surprisingly quick to believe the guy who has been on the island for maybe three days. But there’s still work to be done. Minos goes down without much of a fight, although Theseus realizes that the old wizard might not be dead after all, as the doppelganger, upon dying, turns into “an old, old woman” whose real identity is unknown—for the moment. The real Minos must be hiding somewhere, but Theseus struggles to articulate this, and for now it looks like the day might be saved. Ariadne, who as it turns out is not much of a fighter, encourages Theseus to escape with her using a flying machine (what?) Daedalus had built, but Our Hero™ refuses. Something is not right.

It’s here at the novel’s climax (which also happens to be its ending, since the story ends right when the action does) that we get back-to-back twists, which I have some very mixed feelings about. The first is that impossibly old lady who died disguised as Minos turns out to be… Ariadne’s mother, who, mind you, was a non-presence up to this point; I honestly thought she was dead already, but apparently she chose to take Minos’s place by the time Theseus appeared on the island. I don’t get any emotional weight from this since we have no clue who Ariadne’s mom is as a character, and we barely even get a glimpse of how Ariadne’s feels about her own now-dead parent. It feeds into the other twist I’m about to give and it does explain “Minos’s” odd behavior before, but I honestly would’ve preferred if they just got some random person to stand in for Minos.

The other twist is that Snish, the real Minos, and Talos are all the same person. Let’s sit around a bonfire and ponder this. Snish and Talos—you know, the giant bronze statue, are both disguises for Minos. Theseus recalls, during this revelation, that he never saw Snish and Talos in the same place, and that Snish and Minos being together can be explained by “Minos” being a fake here. I will say, this is not, strictly speaking, a self-contradicting twist, and it’s also a twist I did not see coming, which would give it a point each—bringing its score to a total of two points. Yeah, otherwise it reads as fucking stupid to me; there’s really no other way for me to describe it, other than it feels dumb somehow. I figured Williamson would dish out a few twists in the name of subverting the myth, but he may have gone too far. It doesn’t help that through all this Ariadne is still a blank slate.

But due to the power of “love,” Ariadne gives Theseus the deus ex machina necessary to defeat her father and end the reign of wizardry on Crete for good. Personally if I was pining for Ariadne I would be concerned by the fact that she played a part in the deaths of both her parents, but Theseus is not so bothered by that detail. It ultimately doesn’t matter, though, as it’s implied that Ariadne dies from… something, going limp in her man’s arms. Maybe she’s just tired. I could take a nap myself. Theseus kisses his dead (or maybe just sleepy) girlfriend and the novel ends. Even if Ariadne is not dead at the end, the chemistry between the two is so inert that Theseus may as well be making out with a corpse.

A Step Farther Out

In a deliberate attempt to extinguish wonder, Williamson replaced it with something of very little substance. I have to think The Reign of Wizardry got a Retro Hugo nod because there wasn’t much competition that year. Jason and the Argonauts it ain’t. I suspect the reason it gets so little wordage in Williamson’s autobiography is because there was little he could say about it, other than that it was his first attempt at writing more “mature” fantasy and that it getting published technically made it a success. While it now only exists as a footnote in a pretty good writer’s oeuvre, it did do good in that it probably encouraged Williamson to write a much better and more unique fantasy story—that being “Darker Than You Think.”

See you next time.
Serial Review: The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson (Part 2/3)

September 6th, 2023

(Cover by Edd Cartier. Unknown, April 1940.)

The Story So Far

Theseus, in his quest to end the reign of wizardry in Crete, takes part in the games to see who might be worthy enough to succeed Minos as ruler of the island empire. Disguised as a viking with the help of the Babylonian sorcerer Snish, Theseus persists through the combat trials, going up against men and bulls as they symbolize the Minotaur, the half-man half-bull dark god who lurks in the labyrinth. Having survived the final test, that of “the gods,” Theseus is one step away from taking control of Crete and claiming Ariadne (Minos’s daughter) as his bride when his disguise evaporates at the worst possible moment. Revealed as Theseus, or Captain Firebrand, the Greek pirate with a bounty on his head in Crete, Theseus is thus thrown into jail, where he awaits his death at the hands of the Minotaur. How will he get out of trouble this time, eh?

Know that this review will be short and sweet, in accordance with the installment but also because certain real-life circumstances have made my laptop unavailable for the next couple days, or rather it has been available and I won’t get it back until tomorrow or Friday. Despite this inconvenience, you can’t keep a good dog down, and while I’ve had to write this post in less-than-ideal circumstances, the show must go on.

Enhancing Image

Theseus, if he were acting alone, would surely be toast by now; it’s a good thing he’s not, as Snish, for reasons unknown, continues to serve despite being mistreated. Despite claiming repeatedly to be only the most minor of wizards, Snish’s ability to cast disguises proves to be a life-saver once again, with Theseus this time luring Phaistro (the Creten admiral he had a run-in with earlier) into a trap and switching places with him. Phaistro buying into Theseus’s promise of hidden treasure was ill-advised and a more reasonable man would’ve smelled something fishy, but it turns out that Phaistro was desperate for that treasure. Disguising oneself as a prominent member of Crete’s navy sounds like a good idea until you realize said member also has a crippling gambling addiction.. with debts to pay.

There’s some irony at play here, and unlike the few attempts at humor in Part 1 it’s actually amusing, if in an exhale-through-the-nostrils sort of way. Theseus goes from having a target on his head to having a different kind of target, attributed to a different person (someone whom Theseus normally wouldn’t mind seeing punished) but now aimed at him. Out of the frying pan and all that. Phaistro owes a ton of money to a servant named Amur who apparently is at the end of his paience with the admiral, now offering one last chance for him to pay off his debt: by “making love” to Ariadne, sort of prostituting himself. I suspect that this is the archaic definition of the phrase, since “to make love” used to mean simply to court, which is probably (but I can’t guarantee it is) what Williamson intended, as opposed to the more modern definition. When exactly the definition changed in the English-speaking world I don’t know, but almost certainly the change happened by 1960. Anyway the idea is that Theseus-as-Phaistro will woo Ariadne, who, we need be reminded, is rather a cold bitch.

This seems like it’ll be the end for Theseus, since Snish’s disguise magic evaporates with a kiss, which was how Ariadne found him out in the first place. The good news is that Ariadne’s chamber will be darkly lit, so that with enough luck Theseus will be able to go in and pull a bit of a sleight of hand a la Anton Chekhov’s “The Kiss,” being a touch in the dark that’s nigh impossible to connect with a face. As should be expected, though, the ruse doesn’t fucking work, as at some point Ariadne figures out Phaistro is really Theseus in disguise… and then she goes along with it. It’s here that we get what has to be the most baffling plot development in the novel, which is that Ariadne actually oves Theseus, after seeing him in the games. Despite having known each other for all of two days and being enemies, Ariadne hopes that (so she says) Theseus will take her off the island where they can have a honeymoon in peace. Theseus, for his part, is skeptical about this, which is understandable given Ariadne’s sppsed affection for him makes no goddamn sense. Not that Williamson is a raging misogynist, but his struggle to write women convincingly is most apparent here.

Inevitably, because this is a novel and we still have at least another 45 magazine pages to go, Theseus gets caught yet again, this time courtesy of the real Phaistro; this time Snish is not here to save him. If you went into The Reign of Wizardry knowing it’s about Theseus and the Minotaur, you go in thinking we’ll get an epic fight sequence with them in the labyrinth; we’re not quite there yet, but the back end of Part 2 does see Theseus get thrown, naked and weaponless, into the labyrinth. Good thing modesty is no issue, or at least would be the least of Theseus’s problems. (Something I’ve noticed with the Campbell magazines is that sex rarely ever gets brought up, even implicitly, no doubt due to Campbell being a puritan and also his devoutly religious secretary scrubbing manuscripts of salty language in advance. However, male nudity, even described in some detail, seems to be fair, with there even being several male nudes as Astounding covers. What’s the meaning of this?) I’m getting distracted.

Being thrown into a deadly maze without a weapon or even clothes would drive most people to despair, but not Theseus, who like a true warrior makes the best of what he can… even using human bones as weapons. It’s here, as we approach our encounter with the Minotaur, that the horror of the so-called Dark God takes on an almost Lovecraftian aura, as Theseus sees a statue of the Minotaur and the creature’s voice without ever seeing the creature itself… and then, without seeing what hit him, there’s a horn digging into his side. Had Clark Ashton Smith written this we would’ve gotten more atmosphere and spookiness, especially with the towering idol of the Minotaur, but I’ll take what I can get. It’s fiiiiine.

A Step Farther Out

After the slog that was the first installment we’re on firmer ground, if only because Williamson has far less setup to worry about; could also be that at thirty pages (as opposed to the first installment’s fifty) there’s less room for suffering. Recently getting into Dark Souls again may have also gotten me into the right mindset for this and that I was being unfair to Part 1, but that’s probably not the case. As we approach the third act it’s become apparent to me that this is indeed a short novel, with hardly enough meat on its bones for what we would not consider a modern fantasy novel. I still wish Williamson would take more liberties with what is quite literally ancient source material, but we’ll see how he manages

See you next time.
Things Beyond: September 2023

September 1st, 2023
(Cover by J. K. Potter. Asimov’s, October 1985.)

It’s now September, or as I like to think of it, the month before October. Yeah, I don’t have anything special in mind for this. Summer is about to end, the kids have gone back to school, and I’m about to head back to work as I’m finishing up this post. As has become typical I’ve toyed around with what I’m gonna review repeatedly, right up to the last minute, because I cannot make up my damn mind sometimes. There’s so much fiction, especially short stories, to cover that I’m constantly going, “Hmm, I wanna check this out. But ohhh, what about THIS?” Much as I want to at times I can’t do everything I want in a day. I’m a slow reader and I don’t give myself the heavy loads of someone who gets paid for review columns.

Speaking of making a good use of your time, I recommend subscribing to a few SFF ‘zines; doesn’t matter too much which ones, although I’m biased and I think Uncanny Magazine and Lightspeed are very much worth supporting. Even buying the latest issues of The Big Three™ (Analog, Asimov’s, and F&SF) would be a much better use of your time and money than a no-good piece-of-shit (HBO) Max subscription.

Apparently Analog and Asimov’s now have their own digital subscription services, to compensate for the Amazon bullshit, so that’s great honestly. Not sure what F&SF is gonna do since, with all due respect, of The Big Three™ they’re the ones most “behind” with regards to adjusting to changing market forces. We’ll see what happens there.

So what reading materials do we have?

For the serials:
1. The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson. Serialized in Unknown, March to May 1940. From a historical perspective, Williamson has to be one of the most intriguing figures in American SFF, debuting in 1928 and more or less remaining active until his death in 2006. At his best he also proves to be one of the most gripping and thoughtful “Golden Age” authors. The Reign of Wizardry was Williamson’s first attempt at writing fantasy that was not in the Weird Tales mode.
2. The Chronicler by A. E. van Vogt. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, October to November 1946. In the ’40s and early ’50s van Vogt was a star among genre readers, about on par with Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov—only since then his popularity has waned massively, for several reasons. A direct precursor to Philip K. Dick (by Dick’s own admission), van Vogt’s influence on the field is still discernable but now understated. He remains a divisive figure.
For the novellas:
1. “The Earth Quarter” by Damon Knight. From the January 1955 issue of If. As author, editor, and critic, Knight did much to bridge the gap between ’50s SF and the New Wave, with his Orbit series proving the viability of original anthologies. But in the ’50s he was one of the finer short story writers, with such classics as “Four in One” and “To Serve Man.” “The Earth Quarter” was later revised for book publication, but we’ll be reading the magazine version.
2. “Green Days in Brunei” by Bruce Sterling. From the October 1985 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Probably the most important writer of cyberpunk whose name is not William Gibson, much of Sterling’s work is actually not cyberpunk—at least in content. If Gibson codified the tropes that would define the movement, Sterling codified the attitude of cyberpunk, emphasizing the “punk” half of that word. Will be one of two Sterling stories I review this month.
For the short stories:
1. “Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket” by James Tiptree, Jr. From the August 1972 issue of Fantastic. Real name Alice Sheldon, Tiptree was one of the thorniest authors to come out of the New Wave, being much discussed for the outward feminism (and pessimism) of her work, the mystery of her true identity, and the tragic circumstances of her death. Tiptree made waves in the early ’70s, but I’m going for a relatively obscure story from that period.
2. “Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium” by William F. Wu. From the May 1983 issue of Amazing Stories. Surprisingly, given how obscure a name he is, this is not my first time reading or even reviewing Wu. He must’ve been one of the first Asian-American authors to partake in magazine SFF, and yet he remains to be rediscovered. This story, for one, was up for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award, and it even got turned into a Twilight Zone episode.
Next month is when we’ll be doing all short stories and all spooky shit, so be on the lookout for that. In the meantime my review schedule is pretty normal and I assume nothing will be replaced last-minute.

Won’t you read with me?
Serial Review: The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson (Part 1/3)

August 27th, 2023

(Cover by M. Isip. Unknown, March 1940.)

Who Goes There?

Jack Williamson was the second author to be made an SFWA Grand Master, after Robert Heinlein, and yet he is little read nowadays. Actually, past the first decade of his career, I’m not sure when Williamson would’ve been “popular.” That’s not a knock. This man right here is one of the most respectable old-timey SF writers, never quite reaching the heights of Heinlein, true, but also never sinking nearly to such lows as latter day Heinlein. Remarkably, unlike most writers of his generation, Williamson caught a second wind at such a late point in his career, putting out some pretty good work in the ’90s and 2000s—so, ya know, when he was in his 80s and 90s. He remains, by a good margin, the oldest person to have won a Hugo in any of the fiction categories.

I recently read Williamson’s autobiography, Wonder’s Child (which also won him a Hugo), and I’ve somehow gained an even greater respect for the man. He discusses, to some degree, all the fiction he wrote up to 1980 he thought worth mentioning, although of course the book is more about his life and how he tried balancing that (various jobs, romantic/sexual false starts) with trying to make it as a pulp writer. Curiously, today’s novel only got a single paragraph to itself, and Williamson says little about it even within that space. The Reign of Wizardry was his first published work in Unknown, the fantasy sister magazine to Astounding Science Fiction, and for both readers and Williamson himself it does not hold the esteem of his subsequent Unknown effort, “Darker Than You Think.”

There may be a reason for this.

Placing Coordinates

Started serialization in the March 1940 issue of Unknown, which is on the Archive. It has an e-book edition, wooo. For print versions your best bet would be either the Phantasia Press hardcover (out of print) or the Williamson collection Gateway to Paradise (also out of print). Yeah it’s a novel, but it’s apparently short enough to fit in the latter.

Enhancing Image

The prologue is a curious one, in that while the story to come is unabashedly fantasy, Williamson takes the effort to root it in actual science: in this case archaeology. Crete is an island, still existing today with its own people, off the coast of Greece, but what in modern times (i.e., the 19th century onward) archaeologists uncovered what must’ve been as advanced a civilization as ancient Egypt, during a time when Greece itself would not have been so prosperous. For centuries there were only hints, combined with legends, as to the workings of ancient Crete, whose golden age came to an abrupt end before being occupied by several empires over the centuries. The narrator proposes that the myth of the minotaur and the labyrinth, and the Greek hero Theseus, may have some historical legitimacy in explaining the golden age of ancient Crete coming to an end.

Now we’re on the high seas, with Our Hero™, whom to us is known as Theseus but to other characters as Captain Firebrand—a redheaded pirate who patrols the waters between Greece and Crete. One day, upon raiding a Cretan ship, Theseus and his right-hand man Cyron take in what appears to be a woman of incredible beauty as part of the loot, but who turns out to be an impish Babylonian wizard named Snish; this character, at least so far, seems to be Williamson’s biggest contribution to the myth. Snish is a low-level wizard who, for all his physical weakness, can get through trouble by disguising himself, although the illusion is an audio-visual one that will evaporate if touched and especially if kissed. Curiously the narrator refers to Snish as a “she” when in his female disguise. Anyway, Theseus considers killing the little man, but Snish convinces the crew he’d be of more use in infiltrating the island empire of Crete, at that point the most powerful nation in the Mediterranean—and host to evil wizardry.

While obviously not historically sound, we’re led to believe that Crete is such a powerful nation at this point in history because it is ruled with an iron fist by Minos, the most powerful wizard in the known world. Minos, who apparently is immortal, has ruled Crete for a thousand years, but there is at least theoretically a chance that such a tyrant can be overthrown. We’re told that every nine years (why not ten is beyond me) games are held to test the finest warriors in the land, to see if any survive the trials. “And if any man wins the contests, the old Minos must give up his life, and go down into the dread Labyrinth of the Dark One.” The Dark One being the minotaur—one part bull, one part man, one part god. Being a pirate, Theseus hates authority, and especially authority with magic powers. The games are set to begin in a couple days. If he could get to the shores of Crete, and into Knossos, that magical palace just in time to participate…

I might not be making it obvious, but the first half of this installment (which is really the first quarter of the novel) is messy. The goal is simple: Get Theseus from point A to point B, i.e., from off the island to on the island. Sounds simple, right? But this is a 50,000-word novel and said novel is frontloaded with lore, a few characters who will not matter later, and a couple action scenes that lack the pulpy zest of Williamson’s earlier writing. This was his attempt at writing a “serious” fantasy tale, and I also think there’s a reason why he would only show up in Unknown two more times; in fairness, the second of these three appearances was “Darker Than You Think,” which really is one of the standout fantasy narratives of the ’40s. But whereas that novella captivates with its grimness and psychological implications, The Reign of Wizardry starts out as too convoluted for people not already familiar with what its retelling and yet too shallowly written to be considered a demanding-but-it’s-worth-it reexamination of old material. It’s a remix of a song that barely stands on its own.

But it’s not all bad. A shipwreck puts Theseus on the shores of Crete but separates him from both Cyron and Snish, and this is where the plot goes from a series of random events to something more cohesive. Snish is not exactly Williamson’s best attempt at humor, being the closest we have to a comic relief character, so him being absent for most of the latter half of this installment is no loss. It’s here that we meet Talos, the living statue who serves Minos’s will, although sadly unlike his depiction in Jason and the Argonauts he’s not the size of a goddamn building, just a twelve-foot-tall man with an odd skin condition. He also talks. Then there’s Ariadne, Minos’s daughter, who serves the role of the single female character of any significance. (There’s also a haggard old woman who is implied to be a prostitute, but that’s the closest this novel gets to acknowledging sexuality thus far.) It took a while to get started, but once we’ve met all the key players, including Daedalus, Minos’s right-hand man, it’s time to (quite literally) let the games begin. Took long enough.

There Be Spoilers Here

Entering the games at Knossos under the disguise of a “Northman” (a viking) named Gothung, since apparently Minos was expecting Captain Firebrand to participate, the plot gets funneled into a series of action scenes wherein Theseus proves his might against a series of opponents, first bulls and then other men. This ties into the nature of the minotaur, which as said is part bull and part man, and of course there will be the final trial: judgment by the dark god himself. This section of the novel is the strongest part, but even so the action is not as grippingly written as it would be in a Robert E. Howard or Fritz Leiber fantasy adventure. There’s a bit of gore, but surprisingly it’s not as violent as the back end of the other Williamson novel I’ve covered, The Legion of Time, despite Williamson giving himself the perfect pretext for blood and guts. It could be that in an attempt to write something more dignified he wrote something that’s not as fun.

You may be thinking, “Brian, what are you saying? Violence isn’t fun!” And in the context of real life I agree. Violence, in the real world, is usually horrific and completely unnecessary. As Asimov said, violence is the last refuge of the incompetent—and there are a lot of incompetent people out there. But in fiction, especially when it’s a couple degrees removed from reality, violence can be immensely satisfying. Unfortunately that level of carnage was reserved for the “pulpy trash” of Weird Tales, which John W. Campbell wanted to counter. As such, even in this opening installment’s most gripping moments, it seems underwritten—like it’s afraid to go all out.

Anyway, Theseus succeeds in his trials, and a little too easily at that. This skepticism turns out to be justified as Minos, Daedalus, and the bitchy Ariadne pull a fast one on him and reveal his true identity. It’s implied that Minos knew Theseus would come to Crete in disguise well in advance, and just as it looks like Theseus will take to the throne as the new ruler of Crete, the rug gets pulled out from under him. We know that something like this had to happen, because this is the first part of a three-part serial, but we also know, and are all but told at the beginning, that Theseus will ultimately succeed in ending the Cretan empire’s reign of wizardry (get it?). It’s possible Williamson has a few tricks up his sleeve, but I have to wonder how much he can change given that ultimately he has to abide the trajectory of the myth. Or does he? We’ll have to wait and see… and hope.

A Step Farther Out

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

At first I wasn’t feeling it, and even by the end of this first installment I wouldn’t say I was onboard. Something is wrong here. It could be that I need to catch up on my Greek mythology, but this seems like a straightforward retelling of a myth that would’ve probably been common knowledge for readers in 1940. That Theseus starts out as a pirate and mostly uses his wits instead of his brawn to get the job done can only go so far. The thing about much of the material published in Unknown is that while a lot of it would now be called urban fantasy, the stuff that wasn’t still had a sense of humor—you could say a lust for life—that defined the magazine. Yet at least so far Williamson’s retelling of the minotaur-and-labryinth routine is humorless, and Williamson is not one for straight-faced action—pulpy action, sure, but not something trying to be this serious.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: August 2023

August 1st, 2023
(Cover by M. Isip. Unknown, March 1940.)

What the hell, a whole month went by and nothing crazy happened that wasn’t work-related. Well, the SFF magazines are being choked out by big daddy Bezos and Twitter is now no longer Twitter, but aside from that, everything has been pretty normal!

I’m being sarcastic.

To keep your mind off the fact that the short story within the context of genre publishing is an endangered species and that readers can hardly be bothered to support the lifeblood of the field, let’s read some stories! We have a curious set this month, focusing more on fantasy, which is not normally my thing; indeed the only science fiction stories covered this month are the novellas. Much like pushing myself just a little bit when trying a new food, fantasy is a genre I treat, paradoxically, with both caution and enthusiasm. Enough wasting time, though…

For the serials:
1. Skull-Face by Robert E. Howard. Serialized in Weird Tales, October to December 1929. Howard wrote for only twelve years, debuting in 1924 and stopping with his suicide in 1936—at age thirty. Most writers barely get their feet off the ground by the time they’re thirty, but not only was Howard a natural-born storyteller, he wrote at a blistering pace such that he still accumulated a vast body of work. Skull-Face is a standalone fantasy, predating Conan by a few years.
2. The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson. Serialized in Unknown, March to May 1940. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Novel. This was not published in book form until 1964, a 24-year gap that normally would imply the author had died in the interim—only Williamson was not only alive but had another 42 years left in him. Was not Williamson’s first go at fantasy, but it marked his first appearance in Unknown, a new fantasy magazine with more exacting standards.
For the novellas:
1. “Immigrant” by Clifford D. Simak. From the March 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The review for this will be posted on Simak’s 119th birthday, which is the least we can do for the man. With the wave of “empathetic” and pastoral SF in recent years, especially the works of Becky Chambers, some have looked back to Simak (rightfully) as a direct ancestor. “Immigrant” hopefully will see Golden Age SF’s most compassionate writer in good form.
2. “Singleton” by Greg Egan. From the February 2002 issue of Interzone. I was gonna tackle “Oceanic” originally, but that seemed too obvious and maybe not characteristic of Egan’s work. I’ve been quasi-binging Egan’s short fiction as of late, because he interests me. Egan’s one of the major voices in transhumanist science fiction, as well as one of the first Aussie writers to leave a mark on the field. He’s also notoriously aloof; there are no pictures of him on the internet.
For the short stories:
1. “The Dreaming City” by Michael Moorcock. From the June 1961 issue of Science Fantasy. I’ve read a couple Moorcock stories before, but truth be told he’s one of those authors I’ve been slow to get around to because of a bad first impression. Let’s just say I’m not a fan of his essay “Starship Stormtroopers.” But still Moorcock has been an earnest chronicler of fantasy for the past six decades, and to celebrate we’re going back 62 years to the start of his Elric saga.
2. “Travels with My Cats” by Mike Resnick. From the February 2004 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Hugo winner for Best Short Story. Resnick was one of the most popular and frequent contributors to Asimov’s in the ’90s and 2000s, winning three of his five Hugos there, with his Kirinyaga series being one of the most decorated in genre fiction. I intentionally picked a standalone story because the Kirinyaga stories kinda bug me, and also I like cats. 🙂
For the complete novel:
1. The Dwellers in the Mirage by A. Merritt. From the April 1941 issue of Fantastic Novels. During his life and in the years immediately following his death, Merritt was one of the most beloved American fantasists, at least among pulp readers; he even got a magazine named after him with A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine. Nowadays Merritt is obscure enough to have “won” the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. The Dwellers in the Mirage was first published in 1932, but its printing in Fantastic Novels was the first time Merritt’s preferred ending was incorporated, making it the preferred version.
One last thing I wanna mention is that I’ll be revamping my method for reviewing serials. I’ll be writing about the first installment in the same way as usual, but I’ve come to realize that for subsequent installments there are a couple sections of my review formula that are really unnecessary; for example we don’t need an introductory section where I give context to the author if we’re already in the middle of a work by said author. As such you can expect a more streamlined reading experience when we get to the second installment of Howard’s Skull-Face. Things will look a bit different, but this is less a radical change and more like tweaking. Other than that, my review schedule should be back to normal.

Won’t you read with me?
Serial Review: The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson (Part 3/3)

September 27th, 2022

(Cover by Howard V. Brown. Astounding, July 1938.)

Who Goes There?

Almost like chameleon, Jack Williamson blended in enough with his surroundings during his long career, from his debut in 1928 to his death in 2006, having work published in Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, and other publications across a span of 78 years. While he is most known today for his novelette “With Folded Hands…,” truly one of the most haunting stories ever written about man’s relationship with robots, Williamson wrote a great deal of notable science fiction and fantasy. On top of his fiction, Williamson also pioneered the study of SF in academia, having earned his M.A. in the ’50s and writing a respectable thesis on the SF of H. G. Wells. Williamson remains the oldest (as far as I can tell) person to win a Hugo, having won the Hugo for Best Novella with his 2000 story “The Ultimate Earth,” which became part of his novel Terraforming Earth.

Williamson was the last of the Campbellian authors, even outliving other incredibly long-lived persons like L. Sprague de Camp and A. E. van Vogt (though van Vogt spent the last decade or so with Alzheimer’s), but more impressively, he was the last of the Gernsbackian authors. Having encompassed and taken part in virtually all of 20th century SFF, Williamson’s contribution to the field is nigh-incalculable.

Placing Coordinates

The final part of The Legion of Time appeared in the July 1938 issue of Astounding, which is on the Archive. This particular issue of Astounding is quite interesting. We have the final part of Williamson’s novel, but we also have “Rule 18” by Clifford Simak, the story which marked his return to writing SF (this time he would not look back), and which would win him a Retro Hugo. There’s Ross Rocklynne’s “The Men and the Mirror,” being an early example of what we’d now call hard SF. Then we have L. Ron Hubbard’s SFF debut, “The Dangerous Dimension,” marking the beginning of one of SFF’s great pulp adventure writers long before he became one of SFF’s great villains. To cap things off we get one of L. Sprague de Camp’s most memorable essays, “Language for Time Travelers,” which even got a follow-up essay from Willy Ley titled “Geography for Time Travelers.” All around this is an impressive issue, and I’m actually surprised it doesn’t get cited more often as being at least historically notable.

Enhancing Image

Since Part 3 is basically like the third act of a movie, in which the action comes to a head, it’ll be hard to keep the spoiler and non-spoiler sections separate, but I’ll try.

At the end of Part 2, Dennis Lanning and best buddy Barry Halloran had made it into the depths of Sorainya’s fortress, finding a black brick containing the object whose presence determines whether Jonbar or Gyronchi come into being, only to be trapped when Soraniya appears out of thin air. But that’s okay! The Chronion, the time ship which Lanning and Halloran had been rescued by before, manifests and comes to the rescue once again. We get a deus ex machina in the first five pages, which is whatever, but of course Our Heroes™ are far from out of the woods yet, as they have two objectives now: to return the mysterious object to its proper time, and to defeat Sorainya. With the help of former college friend and current mad scientist Wilmot McLan, Lanning takes the brick and escapes Sorainya’s wrath for the time being. Now, the question becomes: Where and when does this object go and what even is it? The object turns out to be a magnet, nothing special in itself, but it’s where and when the object is supposed to be that things get interesting.

The question burning in his eyes. Banning whispered: “Did you find—anything?”

Solemnly, the old man nodded, and Banning listened breathlessly.

“The time is an afternoon in August of the year 1921,” whispered Wil McLan. “The broken geodesics of Jonbar had already given us a clue to that. And I have found the place, with the chronoscope.”

Banning gripped his arm. “Where?”

“It’s a little valley in the Ozarks of Arkansas. But I’ll show you the decisive scene.”

Arkansas, 1921. We meet a character who, it turns out, serves as the turning point for the story, despite not (as far as I recall) having a single line of dialogue. John Barr (get it, John Barr, Jobar…) is a twelve-year-old kid in 1921, but depending on whether he finds that magnet by happenstance or not he’ll go on to either become a revolutionary scientist or a still capable but unambitious good-for-nothing. We by now know why it’s vastly preferred for Barr to cause the existence of Jonbar than for his lack of action to cause the existence of Gyronchi so we don’t need much of an explanation beyond who Barr is in the first place. If you’ve been following things then you’ll remember that time travel in Williamson’s novel is based on probability, as opposed to predetermined futures, and it’s a sneaky way for Williamson to throw in this last-minute rally for the good guys so that the event of Sorainya stealing the magnet can be corrected. It raises the question, of course, of why Sorainya would keep the magnet locked away in a tiny vault and not, say, simply destroy the thing, but we’re not here to think about that.

I suppose you could poke a ton of holes in the narrative, but Williamson moves the action along so quickly that the reader is not incentivized to dwell on the story’s mechanics—a tried and true way to get over spotty exposition. Williamson would take the inventiveness apparent in The Legion of Time and fine-tune it for his remarkable werewolf novella “Darker Than You Think,” but he unquestionably set the standard for time war narratives with his earlier effort. Interestingly, while many novels (especially time-spanning ones) broaden in scope as they approach the climax, The Legion of Time shrinks, furthering a great shrinkage of scope that had occurred in Part 2. John Barr isn’t a character so much as a plot device with legs, and since Lethonee had “died” early in Part 2 and Our Heroes™ don’t fix things until towards the end of the final installment she’s also basically a non-factor here. If Sorainya is far more thoroughly characterized than Lethonee it has partly to do with the fact that she gets a lot more time on the page. I think it’s also because deep down we prefer the whore over the Madonna, which I suspect Williamson thinks as well; more on that later.

There Be Spoilers Here

The final fight with Soraniya is epic, brutal, and approaches some pretty weird and grotesque territory. While the solution for dealing with Sorainya is stupid (and makes McLan look like even more of a fool than he’s supposed to be), the result is quite… something. A dying McLan rolls a tube Lanning’s way as he’s also on his last leg, his fight with Sorainya not going in his favor, and tells Lanning to smash it, which he does. The tube, filled with a mysterious liquid, is connected to Soraniya’s past and how she was supposed to die young from a plague, only to be saved by the giant ants with an antedote. Once the tube breaks, Soraniya’s past is rewritten and she dies in a remarkably gruesome fashion. Why didn’t McLan use this much sooner……? Still, get a load of this:

The bright blade slipped out of her hand, rang against the dome, and fell at Lanning’s feet. The smile was somehow frozen on her face, forgotten, lifeless. Then, in a fractional second, her beauty was—erased.

Her altered face was blind, hideous, pocked with queerly bluish ulcerations. Her features dissolved—frightfully—in blue corruption. And Lanning had an instant’s impression of a naked skull grinning fearfully out of the armor.

And then Sorainya was gone.

Lanning and Halloran are FOR THE LAST TIME rescued once the battle is over and Our Heroes™ are brought to the now-existing Jonbar where they can spend the rest of their days, since they’re not allowed to return to their own time periods. You can imagine my shock when the futuristic machinery that literally brought Lanning and Halloran back from the dead was not able to save the severely injured McLan.

But aside from that it’s a happy ending! The future is saved, and Lanning even gets his beloved back—only… Lethonee is not exactly as she was before. Their reunion is described ambiguously, but it seems that Lethonee and Soraniya were, in fact, the same person, or rather extensions of the same germ of a person. The resurrected Lethonee seems to have Sorainya’s voice and is even dressed in red, although her memories of Lanning were not erased. While the twist of Jombar and Gyronchi being the same place, made only different by circumstance, is predictable, the implied twist of Lethonee and Soraniya now being combined into a woman who bears Lethonee’s name but who also shares traits from both women is a far more curious choice. True, the whorish warrior queen is no more, but then so is the saintly love interest as well, and in a way it’s a shame that we get nothing like an epilogue for this story. Still, the ambiguity with Lethonee reuniting with her shadow counterpart borders on Lynch levels of surrealism and I’m here for it.

A Step Farther Out

Did The Legion of Time fumble the ball in the final installment? Maybe a little bit, but I still find it pretty memorable. Williamson pulls a deus ex machina or two, and pulls technobabble out of his ass to explain why some things happen and other things don’t, but the action which takes up the bulk of the installment is engrossing, the scope feels so epic despite actually being so compressed, and the very end gave me food for thought. I’m not sure if Williamson was consciously aware of what he writing the whole time, of what he meant by this or that, but it’s a pulp narrative that has a good deal more substance to it than one might expect. Williamson’s background as a Gernsbackian writer as well as a regular contributor to Weird Tales reveals itself in the brisk pacing and technobabble, but most importantly a willingness to get his hands dirty that would become largely unseen in Campbell’s Astounding, once that magazine under that editor further established its own voice. The result is a novel that feels both of its time and very much out of step, showing that Williamson was indeed one of the most capable of substantive genre authors of that era.

In the ’60s there was a very short-lived but prescient journal called SF Horizons, run by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison, and the most well-known essay from that journal was about The Legion of Time, titled “Judgment at Junbar.” Aldiss supposedly makes an argument for Williamson’s novel as an excellent work of pulp fiction—I say “supposedly” because I haven’t been able to read the damn thing yet. I have, however, read parts of Aldiss’s Trillion Year Spree, in which he calls The Legion of Time a delight but also “philosophically meaningless,” an assertion I don’t think I can agree with. Then again, Aldiss is eloquent and thoughtful as usual, even when he’s being disagreeable (which he often is), and you can bet I’ll get to him at a later date.

See you next time.
Serial Review: The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson (Part 2/3)

September 20th, 2022

(Cover by H. W. Wesso. Astounding, June 1938.)

Who Goes There?

Jack Williamson was the second person to be made a Grand Master of science fiction (after Robert Heinlein), which may sound weird to people nowadays because he’s a relatively obscure figure now. This is a shame, because Williamson has a pretty interesting career and if I did reviews of non-fiction books I would totally cover his autobiography, Wonder’s Child. Born in 1908, made his professional debut in 1928, and only stopped writing SFF with his death in 2006, which in itself is mindblowing, but there’s also the fact that while some authors from that same erakept being published based on their legacy value, Williamson did something considered nigh-impossible: he remained contemporary. Not only did he win a Hugo for Wonder’s Child but he would also win a Hugo and a Nebula for his 2000 novella “The Ultimate Earth,” making Williamson (as far as I’m aware) the oldest person to have won a Hugo. His 1947 novelette “With Folded Hands…” is still one of the most haunting robot-focused stories that I’ve read and that shit’s 75 years old.

Despite the fact that Williamson had not quite turned thirty yet when he wrote it, The Legion of Time came about a good decade into his career—a career that would ultimately span 78 years. You could say it marks a transition point not just for Williamson, who was coming out of his Gernsback phase, but also magazine SF at large, since John W. Campbell had taken over Astounding Science Fiction in late 1937, slowly but surely introducing his own eccentric vision into the field. More apparent in Part 2 than in Part 1, The Legion of Time feels like the missing link between adventure-based SF in the Edgar Rice Burroughs tradition (actually it reminds me more of Robert E. Howard, but I’ll elaborate on that later) and the cerebral high-concept SF of the Campbell era. For Part 2 we’re really leaning into the adventure part of the equation, but as it turns out, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Placing Coordinates

Part 2 was published in the June 1938 issue of Astounding, which is on the Archive. If you thought Part 1 was short (only about thirty pages in the magazine) then you might be surprised by Part 2, which is even shorter, clocking in at a little over twenty pages. I’m starting to get the impression that maybe The Legion of Time is actually a novella, although it would definitely skirt the line between novella and novel assuming Part 3 is the same length as Part 2. I wish I had a book version to compare the serial with, but rarely has The Legion of Time been printed on its own, most often being bundled with another Williamson story, the novella “After World’s End.” Confusingly, this bundle of two stories is just called The Legion of Time, because those double paperbacks Ace did back in the day weren’t a thing yet and nobody knew what they were doing. You can also get it as part of The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, but those volumes aren’t exactly cheap. Despite getting a Retro Hugo nomination and despite being well-liked by the few who’ve read it (Brian Aldiss was apparently a fan of it), it has not been reprinted that often.

Enhancing Image

I want to start off with a bit of a rant. The Wikipedia entry for The Legion of Time states that there is no “Legion of Time” in the novel, and that the title was probably chosen as a marketing move, since Williamson was up to that point most famous for The Legion of Space, though the two are not connected in any way. The latter is probably true, but first point is false. Maybe this is not the case in the book version, but in the magazine version the time-traveling army Dennis Lanning joins is called the Legion of Time at one point in Part 1; mind you, it’s also called the Legion of the Dead, and these titles don’t seem official, but to say there’s no Legion of Time would be inaccurate. Now with that out of the way…

Part 1 had ended on a foreboding note, with the dystopian society of Gyronchi decreasing to the probable existence of the utopian Jonbar to such a degree that Jonbar starts to face out altogether—or rather, its likelihood of ever existing approaches zero. Part 2 begins with Lethonee, being herself only possible through Jonbar, fading out of existence, and it’s a bitter scene despite our intuition that Lanning, Our Hero™, will somehow bring his beloved back into existence by the end. The way time travel works here is that Jonbar and Gyronchi are mutually exclusive in that they cannot exist in the same timeline; if one comes into being, the other is booted out. Existence is based on probability, and the less probable a future thing is, the less it can interact with the past, or rather Lanning’s present. Once Lethonee gets wiped from the timeline, Sorainya (her evil counterpart) becomes solid. What’s important to note is that Lethonee has not exactly died, as Wilmot McLan (our resident mad scientist) explains:

The ship, in a moment, was back in her timeless blue abyss, driving through the ceaseless flicker of possibility. Fanning hastened to join Wil McLan beneath the crystal dome, and asked a breathless, tortured question: “Lethonee is gone—dead?”

The sunken, haunted eyes looked at him solemnly.

“Not dead,” rasped Wil McLan, “for she was never born. Jonbar was merely a faint probability of future time, which we illuminated with the power of the temporal ray. This last triumph of Sorainya has—eliminated the probability. The reflection, therefore, vanished.”

Sorainya and her army of giant ants (more on those later) have all but succeeded in making sure Jonbar never comes into being; there is, however, still another way. The villains have found an object which McLan and his crew have been unable to identify, which apparently represents a fork in the road leading to Jonbar and Gyronchi. Whereas Lanning had been previously led to believe that he was said object, this turns out to not be the case—but rather something else from the past. Ignoring all the technobabble about temporal rays and whatnot, the idea is simple enough: if Lanning can find this mysterious object and return it to its proper place in time, then Jonbar has a chance. Where could this object be? If Sorainya has it in her possession, and if the Chronion is capable of interacting physically with past and future (how, for instance, they were able to pick up Lanning and other members of the Legion), then Our Heroes™ have but one option.

An all-out assault, practically a suicide run, on Sorainya’s front door.

In a movie, typically, we have three acts, and what often happens is that there’s a turning point, you could say a bridge between the second and third acts, where Our Heroes™ are at their lowest point and it takes either a good pep talk or a deus ex machina to pull them out of it. Not so with The Legion of Time, where Lanning and company reach their lowest point about halfway through, and why not: Lethonee is dead, or rather un-alive, and Sorainya has basically won. Whereas Part 1 is high-spirited and briskly paced, Part 2 still has that pacing, but the tone is now much darker. I’ll get into this in the spoilers section, but I do have to wonder if Williamson was maybe inspired by Robert E. Howard when it came to writing… basically everything about Sorainya’s fortress. While the timespan of Part 1 was considerable, starting in 1927 and ending in 1938 (if I remember right) before Lanning gets picked up by the Chronion, the timespan of Part 2 is far more compressed. This is not a bad thing, mind you. Williamson can write pretty good action when he wants to, and most of Part 2 is straight action.

In my review of Part 1 I brought up the novel’s overt sexuality, at least by the standards of ’30s SF, and how Williamson injects as much lust into his weird love triangle as—well, love. We don’t get as much of that here, since Lethonee and Sorainya are off-screen for most of it, but that’s fine, because a different problem crops up: what to do about Sorainya. Because the whole point is that we have to kill Sorainya, or at least set things up so that she was never born in the first place, but this is easier said than done. Lanning knows he has to kill the bitch, and he’ll do it, but despite the fact that Sorainya’s tried to kill him several times over the years, he can’t bring himself to hate her completely. The pussy is too good. Speaking of which, you may recall that Sorainya had captured and tortured McLan for yeeeeears, and you’d think this would make it easy for him to hate her.

Not quite so.

“Fifteen years—” came the slow whisper at last. “Fifteen years since I found that she is a demon. Lying, treacherous, savagely cruel, as near a female devil as could be. And still—beautiful. Somehow, glorious!” Some deep-hidden agony throbbed in his whisper.

“I hate Sorainya!” It was a savage rush. “She tricked me, tortured me, maimed me forever ! She—she—” Something seemed to choke him. At last came the voiceless sigh: “But still—for all her hateful evil—could I kill Sorainya? Could any man?”

What interests me about Sorainya, especially as a symbol, is that while usually with a super-attractive evil girlboss we get maybe a passing mention from Our Hero™ about her attractiveness, and ain’t it a gosh darn shame that she’s evil (Robert E. Howard does this sometimes, come to think of it), this is not so with Sorainya. Not only is Sorainya noted as being some hot shit, but her personality also entrances the men she meets; her sheer force of will is intoxicating, and in that sense she’s the ideal fascist woman. She’s blonde and fair-skinned, for one, but she also thinks that action for the sake of itself is glorious, and of course she’s a total warmonger. I’m pretty sure I’m wrong, but I get the feeling that Williamson is about the macabre eroticism of fascism, or rather fascism’s eroticization of death, and how that could be appealing for lonely white dudes like Lanning and McLan. The bitch must be destroyed, but we would be lying to ourselves if we said she was totally unattractive. I don’t think it’s coincidence that Gyronchi, Sorainya’s homeland, is not only a theocratic militarist state, but is (at least according to McLan) destined to destroy itself along with the rest of mankind.

There Be Spoilers Here

So, Lanning and a bunch of redshirts jump into the future and attack Sorainya’s fortress. The results are grim. Not to say these men are afraid of dying, they had already died before, but the ensuing carnage is fairly outrageous. Remember how I said Sorainya has giant ants for minions? Oh yeah. We’re talking ants the size of people, and they’re bipedal and intelligent; they use weapons, but they also have their big fucking mandibles that can cut off a dude’s head. Which yeah, that happens. Williamson started out writing for Hugo Gernsback, and he later became one of Campbell’s regular authors, but he also submitted frequently to Weird Tales in the ’30s. I just bring this up because Weird Tales occasionally published SF, but it was primarily a horror and dark fantasy magazine (the original horror and dark fantasy magazine), which where we saw a lot of Howard and Lovecraft and so on. The sequence that takes up the bulk of Part 2 of The Legion of Time reads like one of Howard’s Conan stories, but not as flamboyant. I’m not even sure what to single out here, since there are whole pages of gory man-on-bug action.

Okay, I’ve got one passage, and it’s not even one of the fight scenes. It’s this grim little moment in the depths of the prison—more of a dungeon, really.

A dreadful silence filled most of the prison. But from one cell came an agonized screaming, paper-thin from a raw throat, repeated with a maddening monotony. Glancing through a barred door, as he passed, Lanning saw a woman stretched out in chains on the floor. A crystal vessel swung back and forth, above her, pendulumlike. And drops of cold green fire fell from it, one by one, upon her naked flesh. With each spattering, corrosive drop, she writhed against the chains, and shrieked again.

The half-consumed body, Lanning thought, might once have been beautiful. Could this have been some rival of Sorainya’s? A cold hate turned him rigid, and quickened his step. A muffled shot echoed behind him, and the screaming stopped.

Not fun. Well, it does get fun later. When I reviewed Robert Heinlein’s If This Goes On— I took issue with how the first-person narration not only diluted the stakes but gave us a fainter impression as to what’s going on during action scenes, which that novella has quite a few of, especially in its second half. Williamson gets around this by not having a first-person narrator, but he’s also simply more capable as an action writer, or at least he’s more brutal as an action writer. The brutality is not disturbing, but it is surprisingly extreme for a story published in Campbell’s Astounding, yet considering it’s basically not horror at all it probably would not have sold to Weird Tales. I’m reminded of an earlier story of Williamson’s, “The Moon Era,” which I liked, mostly for a female character who was a) an alien, b) an active player in the story, and c) not objectified by the male hero (who, admittedly, would not be quite old enough to objectify much of anything). But that novella is about a boy who takes a rocket ship to the moon and gets caught up in a war between alien races. That story was also heavy on action, and by the time he wrote The Legion of Time it seems like Williamson had gotten even better at concocting gripping action scenes.

A Step Farther Out

So far I’m liking this a lot. The Legion of Time is this combination of Campbellian big-brain SF with pre-Campbell adventure pulp, with a tinge of weird fiction thrown into the mix. I’m pretty sure Williamson frequently appearing in Weird Tales in the ’30s (making him contemporaries with Howard and Lovecraft, though I don’t think he interacted with either of them personally) had changed his writing philosophy somewhat by the time Campbell came around, and we can see this in The Legion of Time as well as the stories he would later submit to Unknown. Ultimately, though, we still have an ingenious time travel narrative that hardly ever stops to catch its breath, being too eager to either explore its mechanics further or to indulge in some swashbuckling action. The pacing may be too brisk for you, and I suspect a lot of modern readers will be put off by the sheer artlessness of the whole thing, despite the concepts it puts forth. Unless the final installment drops the ball, I suspect I’ll rate it pretty highly.

See you next time.
Serial Review: The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson (Part 1/3)

September 13th, 2022

(Cover by Charles Schneeman. Astounding, May 1938.)

Who Goes There?

Jack Williamson made his debut in 1928 with “The Metal Man,” in Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories. While not the oldest author we’ve covered so far (Clifford Simak is a few years older than him), Williamson is remarkable for his versatility and longevity, and he debuted before Simak, first being published when he was only twenty years old. Williamson started out as an SF author of the Gernsbackian mode, being close contemporaries with E. E. Smith and Edmond Hamilton, guys who wrote fast and often sloppily in the hopes of getting as many stories published as quickly as possible—and why not? The pulps generally didn’t pay well, and Gernsback was especially notorious for being slow to pay his writers. Still, Williamson persisted, and when Astounding Science Fiction started hitting its stride in 1934 he jumped ship pretty readily, giving us perhaps the most notable SF novel of that year, The Legion of Space. But whereas Smith and Hamilton remained most known for their grand space operas, and while Williamson was no slouch in that department, he would soon branch out and reveal an almost startling intelligence.

When John W. Campbell took over Astounding in late 1937, not immediately making his mark but gradually reshaping the magazine in his own image over the next two years, most of the Gernsback-era authors failed to adjust; Williamson, however, was not one of them. While he would never again reach the level of productivity of his first decade, Williamson not only survived the coming of Campbell but became one of the brighter (albeit relatively infrequent) stars in Campbell’s stable. From this period (1938 to about 1950), Williamson wrote the famous novelette “With Folded Hands…” and its follow-up novel …And Searching Mind (published in book form as The Humanoids), the equally inventive and deliciously atmospheric horror novella “Darker Than You Think” (published in Unknown, Astounding‘s arguably superior sister magazine), and the short novel that we’re starting today, The Legion of Time. Contrary to what its title may imply, The Legion of Time is not connected to the Legion of Space series, but is indeed a totally standalone work; the folks at ISFDB seem confused about it, since it’s classified as part of a series there—a series where it’s the only entry.

In the ’50s Williamson devoted much of his time to going back to school, where he would write a respectable thesis on H. G. Wells and would, in the process, become one of the first people to bring SF to the world of higher education. Still, he never strayed from the field as a writer for too long, with the occasional solo effort or collaboration (especially with Frederik Pohl) popping up to remind people that Williamson was still in the game. In 1985 he won a Hugo for his autobiography, Wonder’s Child, which details not only his early life but his long and ongoing relationship with SF. He won another Hugo in 2001, this time for Best Novella, for “The Ultimate Earth,” which became part of his novel Terraforming Earth. Williamson was 93 when he won that second Hugo. When Williamson died in 2006, he was still very much active, and he immediately stood out as having (to this day, as far as I can tell) the longest career of any SF author at 78 years. Like Hailey’s Comet, which can appear at the beginning and end of a person’s long life, Williamson lived to witness not only the prehistoric dawn of the Gernsback era but the neon sunrise of 21st century SF.

Placing Coordinates

Part 1 of The Legion of Time appeared in the May 1938 issue of Astounding. It’s on the Archive. Despite being long enough to qualify as a full novel (albeit barely), The Legion of Time has mostly been printed in book form as part of a bundle, most often with another short work of Williamson’s from that period, “After World’s End.” It has also been collected in Spider Island, which is the fourth volume of Williamson’s collected stories. It’s worth noting that The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson has eight volumes, and stories published between 1928 and 1938 comprise the first four. Despite not being reprinted too often (I’ve never seen a copy in the wild), and despite not being one of Williamson’s most famous works (though it is undoubtedly considered major), it garnered a Retro Hugo nomination for Best Novel. You could argue the pool for eligible novels (never mind the quality) from 1938 has to do with it, but I would also argue the nomination was well-earned.

Enhancing Image

We start out with a quartet of college boys: Dennis Lanning, Wilmot McLan, Barry Halloran, and Lao Meng Shan. Lanning passes the time by himself in the apartment he shares with the homies by reading a scientific paper by McLan, the latter seeming to be the most intelligent and well-read of the bunch, and of course it’s about time travel.

Deep-hidden in its abstruse mathematics, Lanning had sensed an exciting meaning. He leaned back, with tired eyes closing, trying to complete the tantalizing picture he had glimpsed through the mist of symbols on the page. The book began with Minkowski’s famous dictum: “Space in itself, and Time in itself, sink to mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two retains a kind of independent existence.”

Was Time, then, another extension of the universe; to-morrow as real as yesterday? What if one could leap forward—?

It takes all of three pages (I’m not kidding, three pages) for the plot to kick in as, in the midst of reading his friend’s paper, Lanning comes into contact with a mysterious woman—or rather the specter of a mysterious woman, who appears spontaneously out of nothingness. The woman is almost impossibly beautiful, and because Lanning is a young man circa 1927 who’s had zero pussy in his life, he instantly falls for her. The woman is Lethonee, someone from a future society called Jonbar, and while she can’t interact physically with Lanning, she stays long enough to warn him about her dark counterpart—an evil girlboss named Sorainya who comes from another future society called Gyronchi. Jonbar has milk and cookies while Gyronchi is a shithole, apparently. Lanning at first doubts the validity of this chance encounter, after Lethonee has vanished, but because this is a pulp SF story from the ’30s it doesn’t take long for him to get over that small hiccup.

A few things struck me immediately. The first is Williamson wastes absolutely no time in introducing the conflict, and he also makes no bones about who’s good and who’s bad. It’s not a spoiler at all to say Lethonee is the good girlboss while Sorainya is the bad girlboss, and that Lanning will, at some point, come to the side of Jonbar, which is obviously the goody-two-shoes side. What makes this interesting is that while Sorainya is a villain, she’s by no means unattractive or unappealing, embodying one of my favorite tropes in old-timey pulp fiction: the sexy villainness whose assertiveness and cunning makes (let’s face it) the female love interest look bland by comparison. While there’s no question that Lenning will ultimately end up with Lethonee, it’s not as quite as east as that, but more on that later.

Another thing that struck me is that we’re not given a totally conventional depiction of time travel here, and it still feels somewhat unorthodox in the year 2022. This is not like The Terminator or Back to the Future, or even Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps,” because future actors cannot directly impact the subjective present. When Lethonee and Sorainya appear to Lanning they appear as ghosts, being seen but unable to interact physically with the present; they can, however, influence the present in more indirect ways. Lanning and Halloran are both aviators, and Lethonee convinces Lanning to not go flying solo on a specific day, as she suspects Sorainya has a trap for him—a trap that seems to instead get Halloran, who dies in a freak accident but whose body is conspicuously not recovered. You probably have an idea as to what happened with Halloran, but I urge you to hold onto that thought. The point is that Sorainya basically tempts Lanning more than once to kill himself, or rather to put himself in a situation where he dies in an untimely manner. Good pussy will do that.

I’m not sure if The Legion of Time was bought by Campbell or by F. Orlin Tremaine, Astounding‘s previous editor. Sure, Campbell was in full control by then, but story purchases tend to be carried over between editors, and Tremaine had only been gone a few months; still, Campbell had say on what got published, and this feels out of character for him. I say this because Campbell, while he was undoubtedly a Promethean figure and an innovator in the field, was a puritan (among other things). Sex, even implicitly or metaphorically, rarely showed up in the fiction of Campbell’s Astounding, yet The Legion of Time stands out as being unquestionably and almost unapologetically horny. We get something like a love triangle where the two female leads (having two female leads, imagine that) each try to get the male hero to do her bidding, and at least part of this is done via sexual temptation. The descriptions of Lethonee’s physical beauty are one thing, but Sorainya’s sexual ferocity is not only undeniable but plays an actual role in the plot, as I’ll explain in the spoilers section.

This is not to downplay the story’s ingenuinity with its time travel mechanics, which are quite intriguing. Lanning, unbeknownst to himself, plays a pivotal role in the advents of Jonbar and Gyronchi, and Lethonee does an admirable job of throwing exposition at him to explain how these two societies are related and how the interplay between present and future works. Mind you we’re talking about the subjective present (Lanning’s present), and not some kind of past; the past has already happened, but conversely, the future is but a phantom of itself.

“The World is a long corridor, from the Beginning of existence to the End. Events are groups in a sculptured frieze that runs endlessly along the walls. And Time is a lantern carried steadily through the hall, to illuminate the groups one by one. It is the light of awareness, the subjective reality of consciousness.

“Again and again the corridor branches, for it is the museum of all that is possible. The bearer of the lantern may take one turning, or another. And so, many halls that might have been illuminated with reality are left forever in the darkness.

“My world of Jonbar is one such possible way. It leads through splendid halls, bright vistas that have no limit. Gyronchi is another. But it is a barren track, through narrowing, ugly passages, that comes to a dead and useless end.”

Not unlike how the Time Traveler in Wells’s The Time Machine jumps forward 800,000 years to see the grotesque future of mankind, divided between the feeble-minded Eloi and the ruthless Morlocks, Lanning glimpses into a future where mankind either flourishes or devolves into a kind of techno-fascism. The catch is that these are two different futures, and they do not exist on the same physical plane. It’s here that we are introduced to what has to be one of the first (if not the first) time wars in SF history, involving not just one future timeline but several conflicting timelines. That Williamson came up with this premise circa 1937 is astounding in itself, but it’s how he rationalizes what sounds pretty far out that gets me. It’s an adventure yarn, sure, but it’s an adventure yarn brimming with ideas, not to mention red hot blood in its veins.

There Be Spoilers Here

We only get something like a clear answer as to the mechanics of time travel in this story’s universe when Lanning dies—or does he? As it turns out, it was more important that Lanning live long enough to get to a certain point in his life than for him to perform a specific action; Sorainya spends much of Part 1 trying to kill Lanning, so as to prevent him from bringing about the existence of Jonbar, but conversely there’s a right time for him to die, and die he does, under circumstances not dissimilar from Halloran’s. As if by magic, Lanning finds himself recovering on a ship called the Chronion, a time-traveling vessel that picks up soldiers at the time of their deaths, revives them, and recruits them into the forces of Jonbar. Lanning reunites with Halloran, who hadn’t died (not permanently, anyway) after all, but rather was snatched up at the time of his death; while years had passed for Lanning, time had only gone by a few days in Halloran’s subjective present.

Two things here. The first is that I honestly have to wonder if Fritz Leiber found inspiration in this for his Change War series, because the time war in that series is eerily similar to the deal with Jonbar and Gyronchi, what with people from throughout history being recruited into both sides. The second is that while this has to be a coincidence, I can’t help but feel like the Chronion is a distant precursor to the Epoch from Chrono Trigger. Sorry, was that a video game reference? Pardon me. I’m curious about what influence this short novel has had on future time travel fiction, considering it doesn’t get brought up often, and yet it must be said that Williamson’s concocting of the time travel shenanigans here is genuinely innovative, even if the prose itself doesn’t indicate as such.

Not only is Halloran aboard, but so is McLan! Unfortunately, despite the fact that it had only been a decade for Lanning, many more years have passed for McLan, who’s been (from his viewpoint) in this fight for a long time. Not only that, but his own encounter with Sorainya was not a happy one; she fucked him up pretty good. Now a decrepit old man, McLan now acts as Mr. Exposition—which is an important title for this sort of thing. Lethonee had explained to Lanning how time works before, but McLan’s explains the situation more concretely and with 50% more technobabble.

“The crux of it all is this: If Jonbar exists, Gyronchi can not. And equally, if Sorainya exists—Lethonee never comes to be. Each of those cities—each of those women—represents a possible future, a possible epoch. And—they represent different possibilities of the same epoch.

“Each has the secret of Time. But neither can, by any means whatever, reach the other! They can see each other—but they cannot reach or affect each other. Those doctors of Jonbar aboard the Chronion—they cannot reach Gyronchi, even though this ship goes down the geodesics that lead there. They cannot—for Gyronchi and Jonbar, and all things of either city are mutually exclusive. Either is possible—but not both!

“Each is possible—but because of my blundering, I know now that the geodesics of Gyronchi are far stronger. The probability of Gyronchi is far greater.”

Now, when it comes to time travel there’s always the big question: Is the future fixed or flexible? Are things predetermined to happen? Does everything work in a loop? A rule of thumb is that the more flexible the future is, the more optimistic the story is, in which case The Legion of Time is very much optimistic; the future in this novel is a work in progress. Williamson comes close to entering multiverse territory by playing with probabilities and divering paths, with Jonbar and Gyronchi trying to prevent the other’s existence by making that existence increasingly improbable. The reason why actors from the future aren’t able to physically interact with the present is because said actors are little more than theoretical in their existence. We very much want Jonbar to win because the alternative is a future where mankind is ultimately destroyed by a race of giant uplifted insects. That’s right, we get BEMs here, but Williamson gets away with it by focusing on the human drama.

A Step Farther Out

So far I’m excited about The Legion of Time, but I’ve been burned before. The two previous serials I reviewed started out strong but then weakened by the end, with the authors seemingly frontloading their stories with their best ideas and most disciplined writing. I suspect the same will be true of Williamson’s novel to some extent, but I hope it’s only minor. I honestly struggle to imagine how you’re supposed to top the latter half of Part 1, but then again, we’re only just being introducsed to a conflict that’s way bigger than any one person. While none of the three leads are complexly characterized, they don’t need to be; for one it’s unusual to have two thirds of your main cast be female in an SF story published in 1938, but it’s also appropriate to think of our leads as like sentient chess pieces on a board. Williamson’s treatment of sexuality is remarkably frank for its time, and his formulation of probability-based time travel is nothing short of prescient. Some will take issue with the super-brisk pacing and the gosh-wow style that defined pulp fiction of that era, but I don’t mind it really. I don’t feel like my time is being wasted.

See you next time.