Keith Laumer: "Thunderhead" and "The Devil You Don't"

The 1976 collection The Best of Keith Laumer contains nine stories, and we have already read seven of them:

"The Planet Wreckers"
"The Body Builders"
"Cocoon"
"The Lawgiver"
"Hybrid"
"Doorstep"
"A Relic of War"

Today we finish up with the book, reading the two remaining stories, "Thunderhead" and "The Devil You Don't" in the scan of The Best of Keith Laumer's 1976 printing at the world's finest website, the internet archive. 

"Thunderhead" (1967)

There's only one small town on frontier planet Longone, and it sits under a giant mountain, Thunderhead.  James Carnaby is responsible for the Space Navy's beacon on Longone, and has been for twenty years, so long that much of his equipment, including his aircraft, have fallen into disrepair.  Over all that time he has never received a message from the Navy, much less been relieved.  But tonight a message finally comes through!  It is an emergency transmission calling all Terran stations, an urgent alert about an enemy blockade runner!  All beacons must be activated!  Carnaby, no spring chicken, has to climb Thunderhead to make sure the beacon is still operational!

This is a good military adventure story, with the sorts of themes we see so often in military-oriented fiction: Duty!  Snafus!  Do the top brass care about the enlisted men and junior officers or just blithely send them off to be massacred?  Do the top brass even know what the hell they are doing?  Do the soldiers on opposing sides actually have more in common with each other than with the civilians in whose name they are killing each other?  I don't know if we want to count "Thunderhead" as space opera or as hard sf, but it has plenty of the stuff we love from those subgenres, like space suits, ray guns, FTL, hostile telepathic aliens and three or four different space craft, and Laumer does a good job with all of it. 

The human drama of "Thunderhead" is centered on Carnaby, a man who has devoted his life to the Space Navy and in return been given a boring dead end job and then totally abandoned.  But we also spend time in the Terran space warships pursuing the spider-like aliens in their blockade runner, and in the actual spider-freakos' ship.  The spider peeps have developed some new weapons and propulsion systems, so even though their ship is a "converted tender" it can still give the Terran ships of the line a run for their money.  Even more alarmingly, the blockade runner carries what amounts to an egg sack with a bazillion spider babies in it that can spread the  arachnid menace to new sectors of the galaxy.  Laumer, through the spider people's dialogue rather than through exposition, sketches out a whole culture for these aliens, one obsessed with fate that prizes epic poetry.   

Accompanied by a 17-year old who admires him and who himself wants to join the Navy, Carnaby makes the treacherous climb up the mountain in a blinding snow storm.  In the scenes on the Terran naval vessels we learn why Carnaby has been left alone for so long, and in one of those coincidences we see in fiction all the time, the commanding officer of the Terran flotilla in this sector is Carnaby's brother, who has thought Jim dead for twenty years!  The naval officers direct James Carnaby to send a transmission that should attract the spider men to Longone.  Will the scheme work?  If Carnaby has to fight the spider peeps, will he survive or die in battle?  And what about that 17-year old?--I wonder if maybe he shouldn't have brought his asthma medicine with him for this climb up a nine-thousand-foot mountain in a blizzard.

Laumer handles the military stuff and the SF stuff well here--thumbs up for "Thunderhead!"  The tragic tale of Lieutenant James Carnaby debuted in Fred Pohl's Galaxy, in the same issue that saw the debut of Kris Neville's "Ballenger's People," a story about mental illness and democracy I read and blogged about back in 2015.  Laumer's story, which is pretty long but moves fast and feels just the right length, has been republished in multiple collections of his novellas and novelettes.

"The Devil You Don't" (1970)  

"The Devil You Don't" first saw print in an Anne McCaffrey anthology of original stories, Alchemy and Academe.  I guess people like AaA, as it has been reprinted quite a few times.  Personally, I am skeptical; after relishing the super serious nature of "Thunderhead," I am worried "The Devil You Don't" is going to be a joke story; after all, it was included in the 2002 collection Keith Laumer: The Lighter Side.          

Professor Dimpleby has a sexy wife who wanders around half naked even when there is company because she grew up in Samoa, her parents missionaries.  Today the company she is embarrassing by flaunting her impressive mammaries is none other than the Devil himself!  Satan embarrassed by female nudity?  It's true!  You see, as Lucifer explains, he is not really evil, like they are always saying he is, he's just a shy nice guy!  Lucifer doesn't actually want to trick you out of your soul, and he's opposed to murder and theft and all true evil.  The fact is, the powers that be have blackened Lucifer's reputation because he is a fun-loving guy, and the prudes in charge of heaven are against fun, and have declared most fun activities to be sins.  What we call "sins," Lucifer further explains, aren't really evil, just forms of fun that go against social norms. 

A large proportion of this story consists of feeble risqué jokes (to prove he really is the Devil, the Dimplebys' visitor summons a demon and said being has a huge penis and huge feet) and boring exposition about the nature of sin, Heaven and Hell that turns conventional Abrahamic thinking on its head--Hell isn't such a bad place, God is a pain in the ass, the Vikings and the Ancient Greeks had a more accurate view of the afterlife than do Christians, etc.  The plot concerns how aliens are invading Hell and messing with the laws of probability, so that everybody in Hell has bad luck.  This bad luck is starting to bleed into our world, causing a lot of slapstick accidents that Laumer describes at length (a guy trips, this causes another guy's mustache to be caught on fire, a third guy tries to put out the fire but the water hits a fourth guy in the face, etc.); we also get long stretches of pseudoscience babble dialogue about the particle physics behind entropy and probability.  Satan has come to Professor Dimplebys because he is an expert on particle physics, and the plot is resolved through diplomacy, convincing the invaders to eat a different kind of subatomic particle.

An irritating waste of time with terrible pacing and a poorly constructed plot that just serves as a frame upon which to hang lame jokes and weak criticisms of Christianity.  Did Laumer write this thing with the market of twelve-year-old boys who had just embraced "the Playboy philosophy" in mind?  

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Quite divergent reading experiences today, but part of the excitement of reading these old books is that you never quite know what you are going to get.  Stay tuned to MPorcius Fiction Log for more surprises.