"Hybrid," "End as a Hero" and "The Walls" by Keith Laumer

First edition

In the August 1967 issue of Amazing, Harry Harrison of Stainless Steel Rat fame dismisses Harlan Ellison's 12-page introduction to the 1967 collection of Keith Laumer stories Nine by Laumer as a pretentious waste of time that you should ignore.  And he wasn't kidding!

Oy!

For fear of spoilers, I only read the first page of Ellison's intro, in which he says that the nine stories in this book are "completely unlike" the Retief stories for which Laumer is famous.  In fact, Ellison warns that Retief fans may be "shocked and bewildered" by the stories in Nine by Laumer.   Harlan, are you trying to help sell your friend's book, or drive people away from it by insulting them?  Well, I've read, I think, two Retief stories, and I wasn't really crazy about them, so this claim of Ellison's is not driving me away--maybe Ellison is pulling some effective reverse psychology on me and other SF fans.  I've been thinking for years that I should read more Laumer (and I did like Laumer's portion of the experimental book Five Fates) so let's read this collection over the course of three blog posts.  I am reading the scan of the first edition which is available at the internet archive, and reading the stories in the order in which they appear in this volume.

"Hybrid"  (1961)

"Hybrid" made its debut in an issue of F&SF with a great cover and has been reprinted in Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison's Decade: The 1960s and The Best of Keith Laumer; I guess this one has been embraced by the SF community.

"Hybrid" is about a sentient tree, a tree whose crown is like a mile across and whose thousands-years-long life cycle includes an ambulatory faun stage during which it lives as a parasite/symbiont with another creature.  Laumer comes up with a whole biology and ecology for this creature which is convincing and compelling, and he succeeds in making the tree an actual sympathetic character.

The tree is not the only character in the story, though he may be the most sympathetic one.  The tree is near death, alone on a planet where its species is practically extinct, when it is discovered by three squabbling space men.  These three guys are so frustrated, so unhappy, so pathetic, it was depressing reading about them.  You've got a violent bully, a physically feeble and socially inept nerd (there is a vague hint that he may have grown up on the Moon) who is always screwing up and then making resolutions to better himself which he never follows through on, and the captain, who tries with little success to keep these two from beating the hell out of each other and to guide their business to profitability.

The story's problems are resolved when the nerd and the dying tree come into mental contact and become symbionts.  The tree's tendrils invade the egghead, alter his body so he is strong and resistant to disease, alter his mind to diminish psychological problems caused by unhappy memories, install within him spores so he can spread the tree's offspring throughout the galaxy (by the pleasant expedient of impregnating human women--the children those women will give birth to will, when they get close to their hundredth birthdays, take root and become trees themselves.)  The tree's consciousness resides within the spaceman's mind, so he not only now has the strength and confidence to defend himself from the bully and achieve success with women, but also has a friend for life.

Quite good.  I can totally see why Ellison (and Aldiss and Harrison) would like a story like this.  Hopefully the rest of the stories in Nine by Laumer are going to be comparably interesting, affecting, and economical.

"End as a Hero" (1963)

"End as a Hero" first appeared in Galaxy, in an issue with a cover that reminds me of Walt Disney's The Black Hole. (I am one of the few people who maintains not only that The Black Hole is good, but that it is better than the overhyped and gimmicky Tron.)

The Earth is at war with vicious aliens, the monstrous Gool!  These space bastards are believed to have a "long-range telehypnotic ability" that can make a patriotic Earthman turn on his comrades and then forget he did it!  So when Earth space battleships Gilgamesh and Belshazzar are destroyed by sabotage, it is no surprise that Earth HQ is pretty suspicious of the sole survivor of the disaster, our narrator Peter Granthan, psychodynamicist.

As a trained psychodynamicist, Granthan is able to resist the invasion of his mind by the malignant Gool--in fact, he is able to follow the Gool brainwaves back to their source and read the Gool's mind and learn all about Gool society and technology!  Granthan learns that the Gool have matter transmitters and even how to build one, and perhaps more amazingly, he learns how to hypnotize people from thousands of miles away himself, stealing from those alien freaks their best trick!

Knowing how to hypnotize people he can't even see comes in handy pretty damn quick, because Earth HQ assumes Granthan is now a Gool slave, so when his life boat approaches Earth they open fire on it!  Granthan uses his new powers to manipulate the gunners of the Earth defense forces into holding their fire or missing their shots.  Granthan then uses his psychic powers to elude capture as he travels cross country, collecting the equipment and supplies he needs to build a matter transmitter.  He plans to use the matter transmitter to help Earth fight the Gool and thus convince Earth HQ he isn't working for the Gool, but what if people at HQ in Washington have been influenced by the monstrous aliens?  And what if he didn't steal the knowledge of the matter transmitter and telehypnosis from the Gool, but was given this paradigm-shifting info to further the vile E.T.'s own inscrutable and diabolical purposes....? 

"End as a Hero" is a fun fast-paced adventure spy thing.  The alien race, the use of psychic powers, and Granthan's flight across the galaxy and across the U S of A, are all well done, very entertaining.  "End as a Hero" kind of reminds me of a van Vogt story, with the rapidly expanding mental consciousness and powers bit and the mind-bending plot twists.  I like it!  "End as a Hero" was included in a number of Laumer collections, and was even expanded into a novel in 1985.
              
"The Walls" (1963)

Here's another story to add to the swollen catalogs of overpopulation stories and anti-TV tales.  (I just listed four SF stories decrying the boob tube in my last blog post!)  First presented by Amazing, "The Walls" would go on to be included in Laumer collections and in a 1972 Canadian anthology that looks like a textbook of some kind, SF: Inventing the Future.

It is the overcrowded future, in which people live in tiny apartments and eat yeast chops and never see their kids because travel between home and boarding school is too expensive.  The forests and beaches have all been paved over, covered in apartment towers and factories.  Flora is a thin, gaunt even, housewife who wants to go outside--she hasn't seen the sky in what feels like years!  Her husband Harry, a tryhard devoted to the cult of conspicuous consumption, tries to show up the neighbors and brighten Flora's time alone at home by having their little TV replaced with a costly state-of-the-art screen that fills an entire wall of their tiny flat.  Then he purchases a second full wall television, and a third, and finally a fourth so that he and Flora are surrounded by the brawling cowboys and shouting comedians and chattering quiz masters that are broadcast at them.  Flora goes insane--the proximate cause is all these intrusive TVs, but the "real" reason she goes bonkers is the fact that she has been totally alienated from the natural world of animals and trees, of the sky and the sea, the world of her childhood.

Laumer tries to do some literary things in "The Walls," mostly around Flora looking at the reflection in the TVs when she shuts them off.  When only one wall has been converted to a TV screen the reflection in its dark surface makes the room appear to have doubled in size, which is not unpleasant, but when two or more walls have been turned into glass screens they set up infinite reflections which are disturbing, and Laumer uses the reflections to presents various metaphors and symbols--when Flora is in bed and can see hundreds of other thin women in beds surrounding her, she feels like she is in an infinitely huge hospital or morgue, for example.

I can't point to anything wrong with this story, but somehow it just didn't move me.  Maybe I just feel like these topics are played out (which may be unfair to Laumer, as a large proportion of the overpopulation and anti-TV stories that contributed to my being sick of the subjects may have been printed after "The Walls") and this one doesn't bring anything unique or surprising to the timeworn themes.   I'll grade this one acceptable.

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"The Walls" was a merely acceptable standard issue SF piece, but "Hybrid" and "End as a Hero" were fun adventure capers full of weird science; so far I am enjoying Nine By Laumer.  Three more Keith Laumer stories from the early 1960s in our next episode!