INTRODUCTION by Jack Williamson
It’s a long time since 1933, when I wrote a serial novel I called The Legion of Space. That was in the middle of the Great Depression. Times were hard for nearly everybody. Certainly for me. I had been writing science fiction for several years, selling enough of it to let me go on writing science fiction, but the magazines that bought my stories were running into trouble. I had spent the summer before riding freight trains to tour a little of the West.
By fall, a couple of delayed checks had come in, money enough to enroll at the University of New Mexico. I recall it as a fine year. The school was small then, and I made good friends. Most of them were anthropologists. Visiting the Indian pueblos with them, watching ceremonials, I got my first glimpse of other cultures, their different beliefs and ways of life.
In 1933, I had gone home from the university with only six dollars left, but an idea for Legion. One of my best courses had been a lecture series on “The Great Books,” by a great teacher, Dr. George St. Claire. He told us how the Polish novelist, Sienkiewicz, looking for characters for his historical novels, had borrowed the three musketeers from Dumas and Sir John Falstaff from Shakespeare.
If that had worked for past history, I thought it might do as well for the future. Reading Dumas, I had thrilled at the daring exploits of his musketeers. I didn’t know Shakespeare so well, but Falstaff’s speeches soon gave me Giles Habibula. (Shakespeare, I might add, was the same sort of borrower; Falstaff himself, the old soldier with more courage for talk than action, came from the Miles Gloriosus, a stock figure in the theater for two thousand years before Shakespeare transformed him into a real human being.)
Luckily, I could live for nothing on the family ranch, doing a few chores to help pay for my keep. I spent that six bucks for paper and typewriter ribbons and wrote The Legion of Space, sleeping and working in an old building with a tarpaper roof. That was before air conditioning, and I used to work stripped to the waist.
Those summer days were long. I did one chapter each morning, another in the afternoon. Three weeks for the first draft, three more for another—I had been sending stories out in first draft and selling most of them, but the Legion had become something special.
In those days, when the term “science fiction” still bewildered most of my friends, there was no book market for it unless you had already made a name from writing something else. I had hoped to sell the story to the old weekly Argosy, which was publishing such heroes of mine as Max Brand, Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt, but Argosy said no. Part of the reason, I think, was that they didn’t like stories to contradict one another. My superweapon, AKKA, had destroyed the moon, which they wanted to preserve for other authors.
My best market had been Astounding. Its publisher had gone bankrupt, but a stronger firm, the old Street and Smith, soon brought it back to life. Luckily again, when they decided to publish serials, I had Legion ready. They ran it, and readers seemed to like it. One fan tabulated comments from the letter columns that ran in the back of the book and found that Giles Habibula had been the most popular character in the magazine during the 1930s.
I’m delighted that he’s still alive. When you look back at titles of the best-selling books of fifty years ago, most of them are long forgotten. Somehow—thanks, I guess, to Shakespeare—old Giles had been remembered. All told, I have written four more stories in the series, the latest is about a girl who grows up to be “The Queen of the Legion.” The books have stayed in print in several languages. My Italian publisher is just bringing out a four-volume boxed edition.
I’m delighted with the way Andy Keith has continued the history of the Legion through another century in The Legion at War. This game form, like the orbital satellite and the station in space and the robot explorer, is another exciting new invention since 1932. The game lets the player become an officer aboard his own space fleet, making his own battle commands.
The Legion stories—including all those that will be invented by players of the game—are “space opera.” The term derives from “soap opera” and “horse opera”—that, of course, was a name for the old films of cowboys and Indians in the American West. Some writers I know don’t like their work called space opera; they want it to be Literature. Capital L. Myself, I’ve never denied the name. I’ve enjoyed writing space opera. A lot of people like to read it. A lot more, I think, will enjoy commanding their battlecraft of space in The Legion at War.
I like to defend space opera. The best of it—if not necessarily the Legion books—can even be called literature. When I came across the theory of the epic in college literature classes, it struck me that some of the great pulp writers had a good deal in common with Homer. Without claiming that Max Brand’s Westerns are destined to live forever, I can see strong similarities to such hallowed classics as The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Those great Greek epics, like the Norse sagas, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, Vergil’s Aeneid and the myths of many other people, all tell the adventures of some folk hero. Often he’s the legendary founder of his race or his nation. He’s always drawn larger than life, armed with wits, courage, and sometimes extraordinary powers which he uses to defend great causes. His world is large; his noble missions carry him to unknown frontiers, often beyond. His victories are not for himself, but for a great family or a proud race or all humanity. If he dies, his death is a noble sacrifice.
Odysseus, for a fine example, was a man of craft and courage, equally skilled with words and his bow. Returning from victory in the Trojan War, he met and defeated such monsters as the Cyclops and the enchantress Circe. He wandered the half-known fringes of his world and even visited the underworld. Home at last, after twenty years away, he proved his strength and skill by stringing his old bow and slaughtering the horde of suitors who had been trying to seize his wife and his kingdom.
At least in theory, epic is an oral art, older than the art of writing. It originated as a way of preserving unwritten records, the history and beliefs that had to be saved because they carried the spirit of the nation or the people. The metric form made it easy to memorize. Mastering his art, the epic bard learned patterns of words that he could choose and vary to fill out the meter and fit whatever story he had to tell.
In print by such pulp masters as Max Brand, “horse opera” shows striking similarities. It tells and retells the story of the American West, the drama of a great continent conquered and a proud nation founded. The settings are vast. The values are good and evil, sharply etched and simple. The hero fires a deadly gun. Even his horse is heroic.
If the folk epic was an oral art, pulp was akin to it. Brand was famous for pounding out four thousand words a day, so many that he sold them under twenty-odd pen names—his real name was Frederick Faust. Those millions of words were printed with no revision, in pulp magazines usually no more permanent than the chanting of a bard.
Brand had wanted to be a poet. Looking at his stories, I noticed that long passages of his prose scanned like iambic verse. He repeated patterns of words not very different from the epic similes. His landscapes were vast, his characters heroic enough, his villains sufficiently evil to deserve what they got.
On film most horse operas were cheap Grade B productions, shot in a few days for very little money, but John Ford did better with The Iron Horse, the story of the first railroad to cross the continent, and his great classic, Stagecoach—his original is better by far than any remake.
I like to think of science fiction, or at least the most popular sort of it, as the epic of a technological age. The hero is heroic; sometimes he saves the world. His mental powers may seem supernormal. More commonly he depends upon his mastery of future science and engineering. Though his alien enemies are seldom magicians, they are armed with their own superscience—I think it was Arthur Clarke who pointed out that really far-out science can’t be told from magic.
In the history of American science fiction, Edgar Rice Burroughs prefigures the themes of space opera. Tarzan, brought up by apes in a mythical Africa, has every trait of the epic hero. John Carter crosses space, if only by wishing to, and wins his own kingdom on Mars. Burroughs was no scientist, but he wrote with the speed of a reciting bard, and his tales still grip the reader.
E.E. “Doc” Smith followed with his own brand of space opera. It was my own admiration for his Skylark of Space that led me to try doing my own, but I think it was John W. Campbell who did more than anybody else to mold American science fiction into the epic shape I think it has.
Campbell began writing as a rival of Smith, both of them hammering out space operas that look pretty crude to most of us now. He soon learned to do better, with more care for character and style, and truth to his own optimistic vision of a magnificent human future in space. Editor of Astounding/Analog from 1937 until he died in 1971, he shaped science fiction through its Golden Age, sharing that vision with a whole generation of such able writers as Heinlein, Sturgeon, de Camp, and del Rey.
Epic has always been optimistic; even when the hero dies, he dies victorious. Campbell liked forecasts of progress toward a great human destiny—he never cared much for aliens in space. Much of the best science fiction shares that same theme. Clarke’s The City and the Stars shows mankind surviving for another billion years. Gordon Dickson is still at work on his ambitious “Childe Cycle,” a series of novels about human evolution. The list of hopeful dreams could go on and on.
There are, of course, pessimists too. C.P. Snow saw us divided, a culture of science in conflict with a culture of tradition. I think science fiction reflects that division. The scientists are making the future; they understand and welcome it. The traditionalists, on the other hand, have their emotional stakes in the past; they tend to distrust the scientists and fear future change.
Great science fiction has come from both cultures, but space opera clearly belongs to the culture of science. In spite of all the pessimists, its epic appeals are still alive, in countless new novels, in the reruns of Star Trek, in the Star Wars films.
The world is vastly changed since I wrote that first Legion story in 1933. Men have actually walked on the moon, and such robot explorers as the Mariners, the Vikings, and the Voyagers have gone a lot farther. But the mythic human values that informed those old epics still matter to us. You’ll discover them again in this game, as you command your Legion fleet in a desperate defense of the League of Worlds against a brand new set of utterly evil alien invaders, the ruthless Ka’slaq.
Good hunting!
—Jack Williamson