Jack Williamson Books

I don't think I had read anything by Jack Williamson before picking this novel up. I grabbed it at a library sale 1) because it was one of the true science fiction novels left and 2) it looked like it might be half-decent and I knew my collection of unread sci-fi novels was becoming discouragingly low.

So I finally snagged it off my shelf and started reading. And I must admit, curiosity kept me going more than anything else. Williamson has come up with an entirely intriguing storyline here - not completely unheard off or new, but a definitely different approach to the "alien invasion" sort of novels that are out there. Sometimes I did almost get lost in the various story lines running in the book, but I managed to not lose track of the many characters too much and enjoyed seeing them grow, change, develop and adapt to the different situations they were thrown into.

This isn't science fiction on the scale of Webber's Harrington series or Asimov's Foundation series, but if you lower your expectations to that of a writer of lower caliber, you can enjoy this book quite a bit.

In the end, I barely recommend it. Mainly because it's just neat reading about the different aliens and things he's put in here. The future society he's created is solid, but not too diferent from many others, just a little tweak here and there that make it intriguing. But if you find this book on sale somewhere, don't be afraid to grab yourself a copy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Starchild_ (1965) was originally serialized in the January, February, and March 1965 issues of _If_. The cover illustration by Gray Morrow showed a spaceman holding a blaster in his left hand standing on a desert planet with some domes behind him. It was originally drawn to illustrate a scene from Jack Vance's novel, _The Killing Machine_, which was slated for that issue. But because of a publishing snafu, Berkeley Books published the Vance novel before it was serialized. The policy at _If_ was "no reprints," so the Pohl and Williamson novel was substituted. Fortunately, Pohl wrote in the letters column, the cover also illustrated a scene in _Starchild_ as well. With the best will in the world, I have tried to find that scene. But I have never been able to do so. Maybe a reader more sharp-eyed than myself can find it.

The main problem with _Starchild_ is the hero, Boysie Gann. In the preceeding novel in the Starchild trilogy, _The Reefs of Space_ (1963), the hero is a scientist who has seen the dark side of the Plan of Man at the outset of the novel. But Boysie Gann is a mindlessly loyal spy for the Plan, who can think of no higher honor than to be rewarded by the Planning Machine for double-crossing enemies of the state. We are constantly waiting for him to realize what we know at the outset-- that the Plan is rotten to the core. And, eventually, he does. But the trouble is that even when disillusionment comes, Gann cannot think of much to do except pretend to slavishly serve the plan. There is a mysterious figure in the background called the Starchild who makes demands on the current Planner, who messes with the Planning Machine, and who makes the sun go out for a short time. Everybody thinks that Boysie Gann is the Starchild. I don't know why. Boysie Gann is such an obvious pawn.

The actual identity of the Starchild is a bit complicated, and the authors are to be commended on the twists and turns that they take before the final revelation. There are a number of other things that are well done. There are some scenes in the reefs of space that are nicely handled. And there is a section in which Gann is taught to communicate with the Planning Machine-- a skillful blend of behaviorism and symbolic logic terminology. There is also a mysterious disease that eventually yields a clue to the identity of the Starchild. In short, _Starchild_ is a passably intelligent space opera, but it is not quite in the same league as _The Reefs of Space_.

There are conflicting references to the characters in the earlier novel. At one point, the current Planner says that they are still living, now in service to the Plan of Man. Later, we are told that they were killed on the reefs of space. Perhaps. Perhaps. But it seems to me that the reader might be allowed to construct still an another story. Maybe they survived to found a colony in the reefs? Who can say for sure?

The Black Sun is a solid, traditional SF story about a large team of astronauts/colonists who go on a one-way trip to a mysterious alien planet. The plot is good, and Williamson's characters are well-drawn enough that you care whether they fail or succeed. You'd probably call this "hard" SF, but it has some pretty effective Lovecraftian elements. Definitively worth a read.

This book falls just shy of being a solid piece of sci-fi. I was captured by the beauty of the descriptions while the characters were on Earth, in the stars, and on the new planet. The story moved along very nicely with intrigue and faux-science throughout the book, until the end came in sight. The desperate situations and the human strength to overcome them are prevelant throughout this novel (really could you survive on this frozen planet?). What I found to be the slowing point is the unending description of the day to day mundane chores and and slow travel across what is described as a gray lightless surface as the characters were coming to the ending of the story. That coupled with the idea that when given the ability to leave again, they chose to stay. I would have given 4-5 stars and put it on the shelf to read again down the road had it not been for the boredome suffered by both the characters near the end and finally the "everythings happy" ending. I would, however, read a sequal to this book in hope that it would redeem and previous titles ending.

Given what I'd hear about this Williamson character, I had fairly high hopes as I began reading this book - hopes that were dashed within the first chapter.

The characters are so ill-conceived, I was surprised to learn that the author, Williamson, was an aged (learned, even?) college professor. Across the board, the characters are so wooden and 1-dimensional (not even 2-dimensional!), I half expected the author to be a 16 year old kid. It's as if Williamson, before writing out this...book...sketched a little phrase-bank for each character, and then drew from that whenever it was a character's turn to say something. Mondragon: "Quien sabe?" Rima: "I don't trust him." Daby: "Me Me [stuffed animal] needs me!"

These characters (caricatures, more accurately) don't even act like humans. The act like plot devices. It's downright insulting.

To make matters worse, there must be at least 5 shrugs in each inane exchange between the doofuses populating this black hole of a book. I don't know if I've shrugged three times in the last 6 months; Williamson has someone shrugging every other dang page. Maybe that's the only way people communicate non-verbally where he comes from, but I doubt it.

Black Sun is the worst science fiction book I've read, and the 2nd worst book I've read in years. Don't try it for yourself. I would give negative-stars if that were possible. Alas, 1 is the least I can give.

I will be honest up front...I did not finish this book; I have a rule that allows me to read more good books - if, by page 50, a book hasn't sucked me in or it is just plain bad, I put it down and move on. I gave The Black Sun one star because by page 50 I was thoroughly bored AND for something published in 1997 as new, it sure read like a book from the heyday of pulp Sci Fi - both in prose and believability of the science and plot.

Essentially, on a ravaged Earth, the Starseed missions are meant to populate the stars with humanity giving it a second chance from Global Warming, etc. (some things like Global Warming seem inserted into a book written a long time ago to make the book seem fresh - which it fails to do). And, on the opposite side of the spectrum the Fairshare group opposes these missions on the grounds that man will corrupt the galaxy - essentially the banner of Alien Rights.

The Starseed ships are 1930s style bullet rockets that use the "quantum wave" catch phrase to get them to their destination faster than light. Bullet shaped ships launching for the stars from terra firma?? And this wasn't written in 1930-something? Oh, and the whole mission, even with protestors hanging out around the facility every day, has such bad security that Fairshare can 1) convince a star-struck youth to get on the grounds and stowaway in the final launching ship; and 2) can get (in the span of two pages) an illiterate capable enough to get an inspection job on the ships before launching so he can sabotage the missions.

The setup to the story is thin and flimsy; the characters are so one-dimensional and under-developed that to call them cardboard cutouts would be giving them more depth than they deserve. I have a theory about this book: it is the first draft of what became Williamson's book Manseed (which was originally published about 25 or more years ago), but was rejected and Williamson went back to the drawing board and recreated it into Manseed; and, then a few years ago, it was dusted off and made into this book.

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A Guide to my Book Rating System:

1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.
2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead.
3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted.
4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.
5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.

I found this book in my closet when I didn't have anything else to read at the moment. I should have left it there. It looks like an interesting story of interstellar colonization and adventure on a new world. However, it fails pretty miserably for several reasons.

First, the idea that people are going to sign up in droves to get on these seed ships that "may" take them somewhere if they're very lucky just wasn't at all believable. Then, if you try to look past that, the author makes it impossible by making the characters seem as if they didn't know what they were getting into. Then, once they got there, the story focuses on silly conflicts between the colonists and a vague alien presence on the world that is never explained very well. This story just never went anywhere. The most interesting part was a dream about the aliens that gave us the most background about them, but it wasn't enough. There was not enough attention paid to details, or enough tension in the plot to make the story at all worthwhile. The characters also weren't anyone you could get very interested in. They were poorly developed and their interactions didn't seem at all realistic.

I wouldn't recommend this book, and unless I see something that looks really good, I'll probably avoid anything by Williamson in the future.

I bought it after reading the words of praise from other writers, most notably from Arthur C. Clarke, whose comments on the front cover put him on par with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein? You gotta be kidding me! Now I wonder if this was the same Arthur C. Clarke of the Space Odyssey fame or some guy whose name is the same as Mr. Clarke and was paid a dollar to write those words.

Save your money and buy a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol instead. It'll help you with books by other writers like Mr. Williamson.

The wacko 'Leftists extremists', are stridently going to proclaim their independence from the wacko 'Government extremists'. This time science has given them a 'weapon' that may allow them to succeed, the impenetrable shield of Science Fiction. The 'Government' can't put down the rebels, if the army can't reach them...

This one is not a keeper. The 'Good' guys are in a fog, or just wacko. The 'Bad' guys have no idea. (The main 'Bad' character stands up in court, confesses that he did all of the things he has been framing the 'good' character for through the entire book, and commits suicide. In a spat of remorse for crying out loud.) The Hero instantly falls in love from a photo, and spends the entire span of the book in romantic fantasies about how his life could be with the woman who has spoken maybe 5 sentences to him. This book basically just took up time... Maybe Williamson wrote it when he was a teenager, and just put it out again.

At first I thought the author was trying to cash in on the antigovernment movements (maybe have it sold by that publisher that advertises in Soldier of Fortune), but then I kept reading. Rather than being another "one man saves the world" or propaganda for militias, this is a work that promotes freedom and responsibility in a believable way. It may use science fiction in a rather limited way but it shows the need for humanity and Constitutional law even in a libertarian paradise.

Gentle warning: tiny spoilers

Boy, this book had me hooked right away. Williamson's interesting and promising premise is enhanced by his excellent writing style and flair for drama. I didn't get enough sleep for a couple of nights; I couldn't keep from reading on.

However, though I won't explain the plot of the book, I must say that the ending is rushed to its [semi-] conclusion. With a Perry Mason-style unbelievable admission in a kangaroo courtroom, a lot of good reasoning and plotting is essentially thrown away.

Furthermore, a good portion of the latter half of the book involves the main character watching television and browsing content on the "infonet" (while in jail). Although the infonet and TV stories further the plot for the reader, there is a reason that there aren't a lot of books, movies, or TV shows about watching TV and web surfing. It's boring to "watch" people watching.

Ultimately, Williamson has opened so many doors by the end of the story that he can't close them all, despite his rush to the end. It's obvious that he left some of them open to pique the imagination of the reader. I can't imagine, however, why he leaves a romantic entanglement floating in the wind as the story closes. It's just symptomatic of the novel as a whole.

I wanted to like this book; I wanted to go with the author down the libertarian/encroaching government theme. But the book is awful.

The characters are less than 1 dimensional. So few motivations for the characters' actions are presented that it became a farce by the end. You could have fun only by creating reasons out of thin air for the characters actions. Kind of like Mad Libs as you read -- except you paid for this.

The plot is alternatingly high-speed and dead stop.

Neither of the 2 "breakthru technologies" are explained even a little bit. The reader is just told "hey, we invented this".

And the ending is so rushed, so contrived, and yet so open-ended it punishes you for having made it to the end.

Awful stuff.

Brother to Demons Brother to Gods is a sci-fi/fantasy about a frightening future where human cloning and genetic modification have resulted in a reality populated by four phases of creation: Premen, Trumen, Mumen, and Gods. And maybe some things called Demons. Plus a legend about a creation called the Multiman, or possibly Ultiman. Confusing? You bet, not to mention stiff and unpleasant. The so-called Gods have little use for humanity as we understand it, and are wholly self-centered and contemptible, cartoon-ish, really. If Williamson's point is that genetic manipulation is just a bad idea, he's made it, but he's written a very distasteful book in the process. The choice of suffering children as protagonists is just one of Williamson's bad artistic decisions. Not recommended.

This is the third book in Jack Williamson's "Legion of Space" series--a series that, for all I can tell, is considered classic mainly because it was written a long time ago.
Don't misunderstand me, these are very readable books, all of them, but they seem to get fluffier and more inconsequential as the series progresses. This one, "One Against the Legion," shifts from being a standard space opera to being a sort of futuristic Agatha Christie mystery novel--with a strange killer murdering every night's top winner at an interstellar casino. Most of the Legion of Space is absent or mostly absent from this one, except for the fat and skillful Giles Habibula, who finally gets yelled at and told to shut up and quit whining by the other Legionaires, and who has a somewhat sordid backstory revealed.
The action ranges from the Green Hall (Albuquerque) on Earth, to the New Moon (a massive machine built to replace the moon destroyed in the first book), to various other planets and asteroids and spaceships. It's a page-turning story, but is ultimately somewhat disappointing and forgettable.
One of my favorite things about it though, was how comically some of the 1939 terminology in the book has aged.
About an alien robot that carries a girl away, it says:
"Those serpentine tentacles that raped the poor lass away..."
And, in casual conversation about a girl's flirtatious colleague, it reads:
"He began making violent love to me. He was a vigourous and passionate man."
And there are others as well.
I recommend this series for fans of pulp sci-fi, and for people who enjoy reading about New Mexico's future as represented in science fiction, but...I don't know. Don't expect anything really intelligent here, or anything more than a somewhat fun read.

If there was a prozac for books, this book would need a dose of it. Dumb, pointless plot. Dumb, pointless characters. A substandard effort from Pohl, who is one of my favorite authors.

I urge to you stay away from this book. It is by far the worst novel, SF or otherwise, that I have ever had the displeasure to read. Its very, very few redeeming aspects did little to alleviate the extremely frustrating, annoying, predictable and dumb parts of this book. As an avid SF fan and huge admirer of Frederik Pohl's, I was deeply disappointed.

The characters were the most pathetic I have ever encountered - they were completely flat and one-sided, totally naive, and uttered such annoying dialogue that I wanted to smack most of them every time they opened their mouths. Except for one, who I loved, but by the time she next appeared she had given birth, and, mysteriously, was stripped of all the interesting parts of her character and became solely a mother to her child.

The plot was predictable and surprisingly uninteresting. For a book about a comet striking the Earth (almost - the best part of the premise, one of the book's few highlights, is not the damage the impacts cause, but the damage inflicted onto the ozone layer and electronic equipment, by the comet's gases and EMPs. Sadly, this gem of a premise is strangled by the poor story in which it is presented), _Land's End_ is remarkably lacking in any sort of tension, suspense, or credible emotion.

At first, I thought the story was supposed to be some sort of fable or satire - where such hollow, annoying characters and such a preachy plot (filled with extremely obvious references to our current polluting of the environment and relations with animals) would be successful. But _Land's End_ takes itself too serious to be a satire and aims for too tangled a complexity (in both plot and execution) to be a fable.

The only two redeeming features of _Land's End_ - the secondary effects of a comet strike and the underwater 18 Cities - do not redeem it enough to make this book worth reading. For a much more exciting, captivating, and realistic comet-strike book, try Niven and Pournelle's _Lucifer's Hammer_ (their _Mote In God's Eye_ is also a MUCH better novel on the topic of first contact with aliens; as is Carl Sagan's _Contact_. Actually, just about any book is better than this one, regarding aliens. Pohl and Williamson's "Eternal" alien was like something cast by a Hollywood agent with no imagination beyond a half-drunken viewing of "Independence Day" - cliche, boring, and so overwraught as to be unintentionally comical.)

If I could give a negative amount of stars to this book, I would. It is, by far, the poorest SF novel I have ever read.