Jack Williamson wrote The Legion of Space for F. Orlin Tremaine’s Astounding Stories, April-August 1934. In that novel a group of brave Earthmen face off against a cruel race of aliens called the Medusae. These creatures are hideous to look upon:
“John Star had glimpsed one of the Medusae on Mars, that thing in the gondola swung from the black flier, whose weapon had struck him down. A swollen, greenish surface, wetly heaving; a huge, ovoid eye, luminous and purple. But these were the first he had fully seen.
They drifted above the wall like little green balloons. Their eyes were tiny dark points in their bulging sides— each had four eyes, spaced at equal distances about its circumference. From the lower, circular edge, like the ropes that would have suspended the car of a balloon, hung a fringe of black and whiplike tentacles. John Star could see the superficial likeness, the dome shape, the fringing tentacles, that had earned them the name Medusa?” (The Legion of Space by Jack Williamson)
The H. G. Wells inspiration isn’t hard to see with the “wetly heaving”. Wells described his Martians as “The body heaved and pulsated convulsively.” The Medusae are very much giant heads with tentacles like the invaders in The War of the Worlds (1898). Williamson would certainly have read it in book form or as a reprint in Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories.
The Medusae live in a tall, black castle-like building with no doors. Since they float in the air, the entry ways are all above.
The heroes, led by John Starr, but accompanied by Jay Kalam, Hal Samdu and Giles Habibula, go on a mission to save Aladoree and the universe. That quest takes them to the deadly planet orbiting Barnard’s Star:
“This red and fearful air! Already it’s choking me to death! Poor old Giles! Ah, it’s not enough that he should be flung into the unknown ocean of an alien, monstrous planet, to die swimming like a luckless rat in a tub of buttermilk…Thick, fleshy black stems rose close about them, twisted together overhead in an unbroken tangle, bristling with knife-sharp, saw-toothed blades. The dense roof of thorns hid the crimson sky completely; merely a ghastly blood-hued twilight filtered to the jungle floor.” (The Legion of Space by Jack Williamson)
Star Wars fans will be quick to think of Dagobah, the swamp planet as we venture through the thorns and muck. The creatures of this terrible place are equally horrible. Giles Habibula and the gang encounter the following:
The Black Fin
“They saw a curving, saw-toothed black fin, cutting the oily yellow surface not far away. It swept toward them, cleaved a complete circle about them, and vanished for a tune, only to appear again and cut another circle…John Star was all but grasping for it, when he felt sharp jaws close on his ankle. A savage tug dragged him strangling under the surface. He bent himself double, hands jabbing at a hard, sharp-scaled body, free foot kicking. His hands found something soft that felt like an eye. His fingers gouged into it; jabbed, hooked and tore. The thing writhed under him, rolling and twisting furiously. He jabbed again, kicked desperately. His ankle came free; he struggled for the surface, strangling. His head burst above the yellow water, and he cleared his eyes to see the curved black fin cutting straight at him.” (The Legion of Space by Jack Williamson)
Seeking shelter from the jungle in a cave, John Star and his friends encounter the original inhabitant. They kill it with spears made from tree thorns.
The Cave Monster
“With a screaming, evil-odored blast of air and sound, the creature tossed up its head, splintering the shaft against the roof. A black tongue, hooked with cruel spines, darted at him. He ducked too late. It impaled his shoulder through garments and flesh, yanked him spinning toward black-toothed, yawning jaws. He struck with his torch the seven great eyes set in a crown of armor, and thrust it ahead of him into that hot, reeking maw. The monster screamed again. The tongue lashed, flailing him from side to side of the passage; it drew him back, numb, bleeding, half-conscious, into that black, fetid throat. Hal Samdu’s spear came past him, sank deep in the roof of the yawning mouth. He was vaguely aware of the gigantic club, raining pile-driver blows on the crown of eyes and the armored skull. Then he saw the black fangs, closing down.” (The Legion of Space by Jack Williamson)
The cover art for collected novels features the Dragonfly Creature. John Star uses its wings to build a one man glider.
“The creature was low when he saw it, diving at the sleeping girl behind her little screen of branches. Somewhat it resembled a dragon-fly grown to monstrous size. It had four thin wings, spreading thirty feet. It was, he saw, like the creature that Giles Habibula had once battled for his bottle of wine. He caught his breath, startled by its strange and wicked beauty. The frail wings were blue and translucent; they glittered like thin sheets of dark sapphire. Ribs of scarlet veined them. The slim, tapered body was black, oddly and strikingly patched with bright yellow. The one enormous eye was like a jewel of polished jet. A single pair of limbs stiffened under it; cruel yellow talons spread to clutch the girl’s body. And its tail, a thin yellow whip, scorpion-like, armed with a terrible black barb, arched down to sting. John Star leaped straight in the path of it, swung his club for the jet-black eye. But the brilliant wings tilted a little, the creature swerved up; it struck at him instead of the girl. His blow missed the solitary eye; the thin, pitiless lance of its sting came straight at him. He flung his body down, twisting his blow to fend away the stabbing barb. He felt the impact as his club struck the whipping tail; the venomed point was driven a little aside, yet it grazed his shoulder with a flash of blinding pain.” (The Legion of Space by Jack Williamson)
The Green Slime senses its prey and slowly oozes toward it. John Star avoids it by swimming to the other side of the log. It almost instantly senses where he has gone and starts oozing in the other direction. This gelantinous creature may have been part of the inspiration for the Green Slime monster in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
“John Star saw the thing he had already observed as a greenish excrescence on the other end of the log. A huge mass of muddily translucent, jelly-like matter, that must have weighed several tons, in color a dull, slimy green, it clung to the black bark with a score of shapeless pseudopods. Slowly, with baleful, unknown senses, it became aware of them. Semiliquid streams began to flow within its formless bulk, as they watched in puzzled horror; it thrust out extensions, flowed into them, and so began an appalling march down the log, toward them.” (The Legion of Space by Jack Williamson)
The Purple Rope
John Star and his friends rescue Jay Kalam by cutting the rope with knives. : Jack Williamson may have been inspired in part by Fred M. White’s “The Purple Terror” (1899).
“A little choking cry cut off his grave voice. John Star turned to see him carried off the ground by a long purple rope. Hanging from the crimson gloom above, it had wrapped itself twice about his body, and clapped a flat, terminal sucking-disk to his throat. Struggling savagely, he was helpless in the contracting, inch-thick tentacle. Swiftly, it drew him up into the tangle of black thorns…Hanging on with one hand, he sawed at it with his dagger in the other, above Jay Kalam’s shoulder. Tough purple skin cut through; a thin, violet-colored fluid streamed out and down his arm—sap or blood, he did not know. Hard fibers, inside, formed a core that did not cut so easily.” (The Legion of Space by Jack Williamson)
The Green Monster
The Green Monster had, in fact, been a man. The red gas of the Medusae have perverted the man into a cannibalistic death machine that hunts the ruins of an American city. After WWII monsters of this type became stock-in-trade. Jack Williamson created a mutant monster ten years before the dropping of the first nuclear bomb. “It had been a man. A gigantic man. It must have survived through the days of terror by sheer brute strength. Nearly seven feet tall, its body half naked, half clad in the ragged, filthy fragments of a Legion uniform—the uniform of the Green Hall Guards. Its skin was a mass of bleeding sores, scabbed and crusted horribly with hard green flakes. Red-rimmed eyes, green-clouded, hideous, stared from the horror of its face, half sightless. Its lips were gone. With naked fangs it was gnawing avidly at a fresh red bone that John Star knew, shudderingly, from its shape, to be a human humerus.” (The Legion of Space by Jack Williamson)
Williamson’s classic of 1934 has been sited previously as one of the inspirations of Star Wars, with the entire rescue of Princess Leia coming from this book. The Legion of Space and its sequels are often recognized as the best in Space Opera, far above the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon comics and serials that followed. Williamson filled the books with adventure, color and best of all…monsters!
Great article on the series