Everyone would agree, I think, that the events in ["The Legion of Time"] are impossible. About that there can be no serious argument—nor that this does not rule the story out of serious consideration.

Such being the case, let us consider it seriously. In so doing, I want to bear in mind not only the virtues and faults of this particular story, but to examine it as a typical work of science fiction.

First to the storyline. This is of a singular and masterly neatness. It tells of a fight between good and evil, embodied in two cities and two women. It opens well, it unfolds steadily with surprises based on the integral time premise, it reaches a minor climax …, and a major climax that ties in the minor one neatly …, and it then concludes with a resolution that carries novelty….

It is difficult to think of a sf novel as well designed as this….

As for the quality of the writing, although this is variable, it has stood up well to the passage of a quarter of a century, perhaps because it never grows too pretentious. Even in the descriptions of Jonbar, where one might expect inflated imagery, Williamson remains in control. (p. 18)

One could cut down the adjectives. One could certainly allow that [the] vision of the city beautiful seems hackneyed now. But at least Williamson gives little impression of attempting something beyond his powers—one of the marks of a bad writer….

The passage … where Lethonee likens the world to a long corridor down which consciousness must pass, has a fine simplicity of image, without being banal, that affects the reader like poetry.

Altogether, the first half of "Legion of Time" is more than successful. As the mystery reveals itself to Lanning, as we glimpse a grandeur of theme, as the beautiful women appear and fade, as Jonbar and Gyronchi become legends in our minds, we are moved and delighted. In this warring of good and evil, both in the guise of womanly beauty, in this setting out on a quest both hazardous and obscure, mythical elements stir, and in so doing stir that hidden part of us that thrives on myth and symbol.

Why then, is "Legion of Time" so offensive to a mature reader?

In brief, the answer runs something like this: that while the virtues of the story belong to Williamson, its defects belong to science fiction.

Science fiction is the most difficult of all contemporary prose media in which to write. There are several reasons for this, both internal and external. Two external reasons are, that there is no large, critically-informed audience to receive it, and that the financial rewards … are meagre….

As to the internal reasons why sf is so difficult to write well, these have been exposed elsewhere. One reason is undoubtedly that one has to create more; not only the usual foreground of characters, motives, emotions, and events, but the entire background to the story, which must, by its novelty, become more than background and a positive environment that has its influence on the characters.

Another difficulty is that one must write of things far outside one's own experience. This is not a major obstacle, given sufficient thought and sympathy (or abhorrence!) with what one is writing. (p. 19)

The major difficulty in writing a good sf novel is simply this: that the genre has not yet established its canons [particularly in respect to character-drawing]. (p. 20)

There is another point on which many sf writers before me must have stumbled. This is the fact that as yet there is no formula for a sf novel. To write to a formula is no good thing, but to illustrate my meaning, consider this: there is no sf novel that is purely an sf novel. At some stage, all sf novels turn into something else. (p. 22)

All that can be said here is that the idea of creating or reading a 'pure' sf novel should excite every writer and reader; that an author incorporates 'foreign elements' into sf at his own risk; and that the incorporation of credible characters—for reasons given—is far from meaning the same as incorporating a foreign element.

"The Legion of Time" sags badly when the foreign elements enter its bloodstream.

When it drifts away from sf into a sort of adventure story, it drifts away from conviction. The bloodshed and what may be termed the formic-acid-shed is so poor in contrast with the grandeur of the theme that the writing reflects this poverty. (p. 23)

Which brings us back to the inescapable question of characterisation. Perhaps Williamson had too many events to record to have time for dealing with character very effectively? The answer to that is, that had his characterisation been better, his events would have been more effective. As it is, we only laugh at the cardboard deaths.

Lanning himself has at least a vocal habitation and a name. We are given a little of his history, we know the name of a book he wrote, we understand that he can be attracted by the rival beauties Lethonee and Sorainya. Very usefully, Williamson gives us at least a glimpse of Lanning reporting on dictators' wars, to prepare us for his greater engagement in the war between Good and Evil that lies ahead of him in time.

Yet this too is to lead to its falsities later. If Lanning is a journalist, why is he, the only non-combatant, put in charge of the Legion, that tough international bunch of soldiers? The answer to this crucial question will put us a good way along the road to understanding what Williamson really means.

And the fact that Lanning is championing Good against Evil is rather blurred by the obvious way in which it is sexual attraction for Lethonee, quite as much as a conviction that Jonbar is worth saving, which moves him.

This ambiguity of motive is even more noticeable in McLan's case. He shows Lanning in the chronoscope that 'if mankind follows the way of Gyronchi—that is the end of the road'. The city will be eventually destroyed by its own evil; mankind will become extinct. This McLan wants to avoid. But even more strongly he wants to revenge himself on Sorainya.

Perhaps these are only minor inconsistencies; perhaps they are not even that, for men's motives are generally mixed. But a sentence or so, the briefest glimpse into Lanning's or McLan's mind, could have indicated this.

About Sorainya and Lethonee we cannot feel such qualms. It must be plain to the dimmest readers that they stand respectively for evil and good; consequently we expect from them nothing but their propensities for good and evil, and their fateful beauty. (pp. 24-5)

Over the pseudo-science one feels even less qualms, though the liberal use of the word 'geodesic' is rather amusing; it means no more than the shortest distance between two points on a curved surface, yet Lethonee runs a 'geodesic laboratory' in Jonbar, presumably for the synthesising of points and shortest distances.

The paradoxes of time are there to tickle us intellectually, which they do; if we feel doubtful about them, they can all be explained in terms of the expenditure of millions of volts. Yet even within this liberal framework, inconsistencies occur. Only the most monstrous—an inconsistency of logic rather than science—need be noted here, since it mars our enjoyment of the climax.

The model T magnet has to be laid at young John Barr's feet. He walks through the field; he also walks near or actually through the 'Chronion', the Gyronic ship, Lanning, an army of anthropoid ants, and assorted functioning weapons. He does not see or feel them. Why? McLan says, "The boy won't be aware of us at all—unless we should turn the temporal field upon him."

We know this to be false Lanning in the skies above Shanghai saw the 'Chronion' clearly, even recognising Barry aboard, before the temporal field was switched on him.

The return of the magnet—remember this is the very heart and crisis of the book, the last effect towards which Williamson has been working, the scene by which we shall afterwards judge the Legion …—raises another doubt in our minds.

Behind it lies a brilliant idea: that here is one of the major turning points of history, here lies the very root of the good or evil with which we are by now familiar. Almost as strongly as Lanning, we feel that John Barr must find the magnet. True, it is a naive, even on analysis a fat-headed, idea to suppose that if the boy is to be dedicated scientist the failure to pick up a magnet at a certain time of a certain day will deflect him. Yet on reading we gladly accept this idea at first; for fiction must simplify, and moreover the dramatic conventions of sf help us accept it.

But the climax defeats its own object: for as the odds against Lanning become more and more impossible, we begin to worry about his whole policy. We feel that the 'bright curiosity—the very light of science' might have been born just as effectively in the boy if Lanning had saved himself a lot of trouble and dumped the magnet by the boy's bedside that night. (pp. 25-6)

There is one more factor to be dealt with before we turn from this fascinating novel…. (p. 26)

It is too little acknowledged—and not only in the sf field—that there are principles of literary criticism that can be applied quite unpretentiously to any work…. The principles referred to may be obtained by asking three questions: What was the author's intention? Was the intention reasonable? Has the author carried it out? (pp. 26-7)

These are the principles by which we conduct an objective discussion of "Legion of Time"; though one is inevitably swayed by one's delight in much of its design no less than by one's distaste for its flaws. One feels too, that having analysed a novel (particularly a wonder-novel like "Legion of Time") by these principles, something still remains….

[As Simon O. Lesser says,] "Like some universally negotiable currency, the events of a well-told story may be converted effortlessly, immediately, and without discount into the coinage of each reader's emotional life."…

It means that given a fair chance, we may develop our own myths from an author's work on a plane for which the criteria do not allow.

Jack Williamson is an author who gives us this fair chance; he allows us this myth-making facility, what is more, while remaining within reach of the criteria. In some of his other work, "The Equaliser", and "The Humanoids", he shows the same quality. (p. 27)

So far, we have dealt with the attractions and disappointments of "Legion of Time" only from the literary or commonsense standpoint. Now we have to venture into more troubled waters, and try to read the symbolism that will explain our instinctual reaction to the novel. In the case of "Legion of Time", I believe this to be singularly rewarding, which is why the novel can be used in this way, not as an example of good or bad sf but as an example of all sf amenable to criticism; it happens that "Legion of Time" has less sophistication and more allure than most and is perhaps more widely read, all factors which make it more susceptible to examination.

The surface attraction of the novel is unmistakable.

It begins at the beginning of the book, when Lanning, sitting alone in his study musing about time, hears a soft voice call his name, and finds before him—Lethonee.

"I have crossed a gulf more terrible than death," she tells him, "to beg for your help," and there can be few readers who do not begin mentally to put themselves in Lanning's position; this process of identification is naturally assisted by Lanning's lack of character; we happily—and unconsciously—fill in with our own specifications. Consequently Lanning's election as Captain of the Legion, rather than disconcerting us by its illogic as it would do in normal circumstances, merely tends to confirm our secret convictions that, given a crisis, we could lead men. As we shall see later, Lanning's captainship means something rather different to Williamson.

Whereas Lethonee plays a kid sister role, Sorainya, warrior queen of the Gyronchi, is Womanhood incarnate, the Scarlet Woman of fear and desire. She is voluptuous: there she is evil. Our minds have a fine time with this typically Anglo-Saxon racial symbol.

Mention of race brings us to one of the most distasteful aspects of the book. There are many references to foreigners in "Legion of Time", almost all characterised by xenophobia. This unpleasant malady runs rampant through sf…. (p. 28)

We have seen that the legion itself is multi-national, and the legion is on the side of good. Yet even here the author's unwillingness to explore anything foreign leads him into producing stereotypes that must have been risible even in 1938. Operating on this level of naivety, he can be detected killing off the legionaires in order of acceptable nationality—acceptable, that is, to an average power-conscious American of that year. Storming Sorainya's citadel, the Austrian dies first. Then the Spaniard, then the Frenchman, the Jew, the Briton, and last the German, after a burst of heroics; thus only the two Americans survive. (p. 29)

This feeling for the inferiority of foreign races explains a point that puzzled us earlier. The soldiers accept the leadership of a mere journalist from racial rather than strategic reasons. For the same reasons, we may presume, only the two Americans survive while the rest die.

That the legionaires are resurrected later is beside the point. By then the sorting of the men from the boys is finished, and Williamson is riding a horse of a different colour.

Too fanciful an interpretation? Perhaps. But note the foundation of the two rival civilisations, Gyronchi and Jonbar, the fact on which the whole conflict of the book depends. The beautiful Jonbar is to be established direct by a fine young native boy from the Ozarks, Arkansas, U.S.A. The hateful Gyronchi is to be established by 'an exiled engineer from Soviet Eurasia, working with a renegade Buddhist priest'. Here the xenophobia rises naked to the surface. And just so that we shall not mistake it, the inhabitants of this foreign power are transformed with a wave of the magic pen into anthropoid ants.

The job of a critic consists of knowing when he is being bored, and why. The xenophobia of "Legion of Time" bored me; at the same time, I did not understand all its ramifications, though the clue lay under my nose. I knew that on the surface, despite the few flaws from which even the best novels may suffer, the novel pleased me—yet I also felt obscurely that on a deeper level I was rejecting it.

On reading the novel through a third time, I naturally knew how it would end, with Lanning getting it both ways and winning Lethonce and Sorainya…. Only when I could do the job of keying this ending in with all that preceded it did I realise how deep the river of fear-of-forgiveness ran. (pp. 29-30)

A fear of foreignness is closely connected with a fear of power, particularly in primitive minds, where anything strange is to some extent a threat…. Power and foreignness, in fact, can become acceptable if we come to terms with them—if, in other words, they pass from others to us. And this is the secret theme of "Legion of Time", the theme on which Williamson did not know he was writing…. One of the pleasures of "Legion of Time" is that it does not attempt subtility; it is presented as a not-too-complicated conflict between Good and Evil, represented by Jonbar and Gyronchi, or by Lethonee and Sorainya (for often woman and city seem oddly synonymous). Our concern throughout is not between two conflicting ways of life but with the hope that the Good Fairy will lick the Bad Fairy—with the aid of Prince Charming, of course. (p. 30)

Many readers, I suspect, unconsciously accept the story on this level. Others take it as an imaginative work of sf…. We shall see how both classes of reader are served.

We find at the very end that Lethonee's tower stands where Sorainya's red citadel had been. In other words, the two civilisations occupy the same position in space; but on divergent time streams which fan out like the arms of a V from the time-point where John Barr discovers the magnet. A little thought will reveal that this is not a logical or a historical possibility: whole peoples are not capable of turning suddenly wicked and becoming suddenly enslaved for endless generations under sway of a new invention—not even when it is operated by exiled engineers from Soviet Eurasia and proverbially loathsome types like Buddhist priests.

In 1938, with Hitler strutting about Europe, the proposition might admittedly have seemed more feasible. But the way the proposition operates in the plot makes it seem untenable at any date. For the plot makes only a token mention of the peoples of Jonbar and Gyronchi: the magnet is all, the magnet assumes the magic powers of a talisman, the magnet is the factor that will decide whether the world will be good or bad.

This is the exaltation of a pseudo-scientific device at the expense of human values. (pp. 30-1)

Another magic device is recommended to the reader's attention: the silver cylinder carried by McLan like the magic charm it is. There is magic too, the magic of immunity, conferred on Lanning when he manages to fit himself snugly into Sorainya's armour. This armour should, by rights, have vanished with the warrior queen when her probability was cut from under her; that it still survives seemed less like an author's lapse than a proof of his unknowing regard for the magic of such objects. (p. 31)

Unfortunately the regard is at the expense of people. The most baffling thing in "Legion of Time" is: what habpened to the U.S. between the moment when John Barr picked up the magic magnet to the time when the warring cities were established?

We don't know, and we can't know, because we aren't told. Is New York turned into a pumpkin by the same prestidigitation that brings the legion to life again? How can we tell?

We can tell by trusting to the underlying feelings we have already uncovered. For both Jonbar and Gyronchi, remember, are foreign. And for Williamson, the fact that they are foreign takes precedence over the fact that they are Good and Evil. So we see what happens to the U.S.: it vanishes, and is recreated on the final page.

This works in the following way.

The novel ends, as we know, by Lanning's finding that Lethonee and Sorainya have become one. He embraces the new being with delight.

Williamson is too intelligent not to know that if a man loves a woman he does not want her changed; yet he changes her, and Lanning accepts her, without an apparent qualm. He is too intelligent not to see that he has been offering Sorainya and Lethonee as symbols of Evil and Good; yet he dilutes the good of Lethonee with bad and expects us to like this.

I did not like it. Conspicuous examples of people having cake and eating it offend both scientific and aesthetic scruples.

At first this seems one's chief objection to the ending. But in truth Williamson is not doing the cake trick at all. He is still assuaging his xenophobia, and with it his mixed feelings about power. (From being powerless to the point of vanishing underfoot, now the new Jonbar has all the power—which, personified by the new Lethonee, comes running to him. And now indeed he may embrace her, for is she not, by being less of an abstraction, also less foreign?) For in those last pages Williamson forgets the purposes for which he has used the two women up till now; he remembers only that they are foreign.

So he merges them without scruple. He merges Jonbar and Gryonchi. And Lanning embraces—a personification of the U.S., re-emergent and strengthened by war. (pp. 31-2)

[Earlier] I asked why "Legion of Time", despite all those attractions to which one is not blind, is ultimately offensive to mature readers. I gave the provisional answer that while the virtues of the story belong to Williamson, its defects belong to sf. The meaning of that gnomic utterance should be clearer now.

Williamson showed a pleasant inventiveness. He produced some nice elaborations to his plot. He did not introduce the chunks of preachments or paragraphs from encyclopaedias that in the eyes of pedants turn some contemporary sf into serious writing. Though his dramatis personae remain little more than names, they are always clearly distinguishable one from the other. Above all, the whole thing goes over with éclat—even the massacres have their own gruesome relish—which suggests that Williamson, obeying one of the prime dictates of creative writing, 'had his heart' in what he wrote.

It is the more unfortunate then, that behind everything lies the unfaced fear that we have been tracing. (p. 32)

I am making no allegations against Williamson…. What I am saying is this: unfaced fears simultaneously make and mar the majority of what we regard as the most typical, most popular sf.

Further, I suggest that this pressure has been elevated almost to a principle by sf-dom. This is why I say that "Legion of Time"'s virtues are Williamson's and its defects sf's: for sf has unconsciously given license to this pressure. Behind all the parade of knowledge and the big strong talk lies the squeak of unease; in every superman, a small boy screams for release. What is more, the hard core of sf's readers—and its writers and editors—prefer it this way. Like calls to like.

Here you have an explanation of why sf is held in general disregard by those outside the fold….

We know how the majority and its readership reacted when they first came under the scrutiny of literary or sociological critics. They cried, "We can't be judged by ordinary standards!"

That this foolish defence stood for so long was only because the critics themselves were off beam. In a sense, sf can be judged only partially by ordinary literary standards; unfortunately, when judged by its own standards it is often found wanting.

The commonest material of sf is the confrontation of man by a hostile unknown, whether an alien, a mutant, a BEM, a being (like Sorainya) from our own future, some sort of a machine, or an invention. This is good and useful material—provided it is handled properly…. We have seen how it was handled improperly in "Legion of Time". There, forces which had been equated with Good and Evil throughout the book, suddenly slipped, turning merely into two facets of foreignness; as a result, the end appeared a cheat, and we were left unsatisfied…. (p. 33)

Brian Aldiss, "Judgement at Jonbar" (copyright, ©, 1964 by SF Horizons, Ltd.; reprinted by permission of the author), in SF Horizons, No. 1, 1964 (and reprinted by Arno Press, 1975, pp. 13-37).