20220610-welcome_to_the_alien_jungle.md (3317B)
1 In 2009 while on deployment I picked up a battered old sci-fi novel from the shelf of books in our equipment tent. 2 3 I remember something about a spaceship crashing on an alien world and the crew having to travel through a dangerous jungle. That is it. I don't remember the name of the novel or the author. I don't remember the characters, major plot points, or even what the cover looked like. 4 5 In the back of my mind I thought I know what the cover was but could never quite bring that image forward. 6 7 For years I have searched for this novel. It is very hard to search for "spaceship crash in alien jungle", there is a surprisingly large number of sci-fi novels with spaceships and jungles. 8 9 Sometimes I think I have come close but have never stumbled upon "the one". That was until last week. As happens on occasion I was going through another bout of searching when I happened on one of the cover images for "The Legion of Space" by Jack Williamson ([ISFDB](http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?222345){target="_blank" rel="noreferrer"}). The cover caught my eye and so I read the plot summary on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legion_of_Space#Plot_summary){target="_blank" rel="noreferrer"} and while most of it didn't sound familiar there was one paragraph; 10 11 > Through the machinations of his uncle, a powerful politician with a hidden agenda, John Ulnar is assigned to Aladoree's guard force at a secret fort on Mars. When she is kidnapped by a huge alien spaceship, John and the three other survivors of the guard force follow her kidnappers to a planet of Barnard's Star. They crash-land and must battle their way across a savage continent to the sole remaining citadel of the Medusae. 12 13 I decided to give it a read, hoping for a moment of remembrance. First I had a look on [Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/68){target="_blank" rel="noreferrer"} to no avail. They have some "Astonishing Stories", which Legion of Space was serialised in before being published, but I didn't know the issues and didn't really want to go digging through them all. 14 15 I checked my local library but they also did not carry a copy. Thus I succumbed to Amazon. The novel was available on Kindle so I purchased it, excited that this may finally be it. 16 17 My first thoughts were that my search had failed again. Nothing was sparking any memories. The plot, the characters, I didn't remember a thing. 18 19 Soon the writing, Williamson's descriptive prose, started to feel familiar. Yet still no sudden recollection. Then the spaceship crash on a alien planet and the crew having to venture into a deadly jungle. The only plot points I vaguely remember, and yet, I couldn't be confident this was the same book. 20 21 After finishing the novel a few days ago I have tried to accept that The Legion of Space is probably the novel I read back in 2009. I also am having to accept that for some reason I cannot, and probably never will, actually remember. There are lots of memories I have from that deployment, almost all of it (I think), but not the name, or even the cover art, of that novel. 22 23 Hopefully by finding The Legion of Space I can finally lay this quest to rest. At the very least I have read a(nother) decent sci-fi adventure novel about a spaceship crash in an alien jungle.