1927: Denny Lanning is suddenly confronted by a vision of a beautiful girl in white holding a stupendous crystal, in which she reveals a utopian city of the future. After she warns our hero that a woman of malevolent aspect will shortly appear to tempt him, he indeed experiences another manifestation when an equally bewitching yet martial maiden in red armor materializes before his astonished eyes. Both women represent different possible fates for Earth and Lanning is the fulcrum upon which reality itself will pivot. Each scenario exists only as a probability and Lanning's actions will determine if the civilization of the lady in white or the dystopia of the scarlet siren will prevail. Ten years later, while flying a plane over China in the war against Japan, Lanning is about to perish when an uncanny ship coalesces out of nowhere: The Chronion is crewed by a legion of dead men, travelling into the alternate futures of Earth along the geodesic arcs of probability. Lanning is about to commit himself to the final, terrible battle that will decide which world shall triumph and which woman will be his.

Although it is far from being one of Williamson's best written works, The Legion of Time has a raw vitality and entertainment value typical of its time. Most significantly, it extrapolates a theory that was later conceived by a physicist in the fifties: Hugh Everett proposed a parallel worlds hypothesis to account for some of the vagaries of quantum mechanics, similar to that described in Williamson's book. Science writer John Gribbin has praised Williamson's early understanding of quantum theory and the latter's command of the ideas is impressive. Although social SF often yields prescient metaphors for changes sparked by the evolution of technology, cases of hard SF actually anticipating fundamental theories concerning the nature of reality itself are rare, hence our belief that The Legion of Time is a seminal book. Williamson has continued to write in the genre regularly until the present, the last survivor of the Golden Age of magazine SF, providing a sense of continuity to the field since the 1920s.

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