Pandora's Legions has a complicated history.
The Pandora "cycle" began with the publication in the September 1956 issue of Astounding magazine of a novelette entitled "Pandora's Planet." (That novelette is included in this volume as "Part I.") In the years which followed, Christopher Anvil pursued two separate lines of development from that original story.
In one line, following the career of the Centran character Horsip who stars in "Pandora's Planet," he expanded the original novelette into a novel with the same title—Pandora's Planet, first published in 1972. The novelette "Pandora's Planet" constitutes the first seven chapters of that novel.
Periodically, in the course of that novel, references are made to the adventures of a human character named John Towers—but the adventures themselves remain entirely offstage. Towers' part of the story was recounted instead in a series of stories published in Astounding/Analog during the 1960s: "Pandora's Envoy" (April 1961), "The Toughest Opponent" (August 1962) and "Trap" (March 1969). The first was a short story, the later two were both novellas.
In addition, in June 1966, the short story "Sweet Reason" also appeared in If Science Fiction. Although it is placed in the same setting as the other Pandora stories, "Sweet Reason" is not directly part of the Horsip/Towers cycle.
When I set out to edit this volume, I re-read all the Pandora's stories for the first time in many years. As a teenager, Christopher Anvil had been—along with James H. Schmitz—one of my favorite authors appearing regularly in Astounding and Analog. But in the intervening years, I had forgotten how closely connected the series of Towers stories were to the novel version of Pandora's Planet.
I was a bit mystified, in fact. Why hadn't those stories been included in the novel? The Horsip and Towers stories fit together perfectly! And the end result of combining them would be a single story which was (in my opinion, anyway) better than either "branch" of the story published separately.
When I put that question to Christopher Anvil, his explanation reminded me how much the world of SF publishing has changed over the decades. My own fiction has all been published beginning in the mid-90s (a short story in 1993 and my first novel, Mother of Demons, in 1997). Like most full-time professional SF writers nowadays, I'm a novelist who (as a rule) only writes shorter pieces on invitation for anthologies. Anvil, on the other hand—like almost all professional SF writers of earlier generations—made his living primarily from short form fiction.
The decade of the 1970s, roughly speaking, was the period when SF underwent the sea change from being a short form genre to a novel genre. And many authors who lived and worked through that transition often found the seas choppy. As Anvil explained, in a nutshell, he'd originally intended the entire story to work as a whole, but . . .
By the time he sat down to write Pandora's Planet, the Towers stories had already been published in Analog—which meant that re-issuing them as part of a serialized novel in the same magazine seemed unworkable to him. And when he negotiated the rights to the Horsip story from a novel publisher, the Towers sequence got left out of the equation.
"For what it's worth," Anvil told me, "John Campbell told me later he thought I'd made a mistake by not including the Towers adventures in Pandora's Planet." But by then the novel contract was signed, and it was too late to do anything about it.
John Campbell was the editor of Astounding (later renamed Analog), and is generally considered the greatest editor in the history of SF (an opinion which I share, by the way). He was certainly right on this issue. Pandora's Planet, without the Towers episodes, is a workable novel. But it lacks the flavor and zest of the original novelette ("Pandora's Planet") which constitutes its opening episode.
The reason is obvious. Beginning with Chapter VIII of the novel, Horsip has enjoyed a major promotion. And while promotions are a splendid thing in real life (well . . . usually), they tend to be a problem in fiction. Put simply, admirals and four-star generals don't have as many hair-raising scrapes as lieutenants and captains. So, after the first eight chapters, Pandora's Planet winds up recounting a story which is almost intellectual in nature. While Horsip's story gives the overall framework for the Pandora cycle, his adventures, for the most part, are those of the boardroom, not the battlefield.
And it's such a pity—because, meanwhile, Towers and his crew are having as many hair-raising scrapes as you could ask for! Off-stage!
Can't have that . . .
So I proposed that we take John Campbell's advice, long after the fact, and Christopher Anvil agreed. As editor, I "broke apart" the various episodes of Pandora's Planet and combined them with the Towers episodes in a single story. Anvil then worked over and polished the manuscript, which resulted in this volume. (Since "Sweet Reason" was part of the setting, we included it more or less as an appendix.)
To sum up, after several decades, Pandora's Legions gives the reader for the first time the entire Pandora story.
—Eric Flint
July 2001