A Trace of Memory by Keith Laumer

"I seek only one thing here, my friend," Foster said; "my past."

Recently, blogger George in the comments to a blog post of mine about Theodore Sturgeon, talked about how, in the Sixties, "Killdozer" Ted was displaced as his favorite SF author by Keith Laumer.  The work that George suggests catapulted Laumer into the pole position was A Trace of Memory, a novel serialized in 1962 in Cele Goldsmith's Amazing, and then printed in expanded book form in 1963 with a cover by Richard Powers.  A Trace of Memory has been reprinted many times since, in at least four different languages, in books with noteworthy covers by Jack Gaughan, Karel Thole, and unnamed others, several of which are available for reading in electronic form to us cheapos at the internet archive.  There is also an audio version of the novel at the internet archive, and it looks like for each time somebody has looked at one of the scanned book versions of A Trace of Memory, thirty people have accessed the audio file--a striking sign of the evolution in how people experience the written word?  Anyway, I read a scan of a 1972 printing of A Trace of Memory from Paperback Library/Warner that has a wild surrealist cover--was this absorbing but uncredited painting created specifically for the novel, or is it some 1930s or 1940s canvas that represents the artist's response to war in an age of mass media?

A Trace of Memory is a pretty good fast-paced adventure story in which a guy travels around the Earth and then an alien planet, doing the usual adventure story things, like getting into fights, crawling through air ducts, meeting unusual people, getting captured again and again and each time managing to escape.  Adventure stories often have a sexual or "romantic" element--the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his imitators generally feature the hero meeting a princess, becoming a major supporter of her faction in some revolution or war and eventually marrying her after she wins the war, while guys like Tarzan and Conan are always being released from prison or spared from the sacrificial altar by women who are attracted to them; there is only a little of that in A Trace of Memory--Laumer's focus is instead on male friendship and camaraderie.  In fact, instead of meeting a girl and discovering she is a princess and helping her maintain her position, in this novel the protagonist makes a male friend and later discovers his new bud is a deposed king and helps put him back on his rightful throne. 

The ad read: Soldier of fortune seeks companion in arms to share an unusual adventure.  Foster, Box 19, Mayport.

Another theme of the novel is a sort of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, never-say-die optimism, the idea that you can make it in this universe if you don't give up, if you give it your all, and even if you don't succeed, at least you can be proud that you tried your best.  

A Trace of Memory also has lots of fun science fiction elements, like longevity/immortality treatments, consciousness downloads and uploads, interstellar travel, strange creatures, a modern high-tech society that collapses into feudalism, and a guy using his science knowledge to get out of jams.  Plus something else: I often point out here at the blog that SF people love cats, and one of the times our hero is imprisoned it is his pet cat who rescues him.  Meow!

A Trace of Memory begins with a prologue in the third person in which a guy wakes up aboard a large space ship that is full of dead bodies and haunted by monsters!  He records a guy's brain, and his own, and takes a boat down to the surface of a planet we readers figure is Earth.  On Earth he encounters primitive natives--this must be long ago--and these ignorant savages accidentally send the boat back up to the main ship, stranding the lone spaceman on Earth.

The novel proper is a first-person narrative in the voice of a man who identifies himself as "Legion," an odd Biblical name that I guess relates to some of the themes of the novel.  Legion is a US Army Intelligence veteran, a former music student, and former private investigator who has fallen on hard times; currently he is a homeless bum, seriously considering robbing a store!  But then he winds up in the company of a rich guy going by the name of Foster; Foster has been putting ads in the papers hoping to hire a brave adventurer, and he thinks Legion fits the bill!  

Foster wants somebody like Legion to help him solve the mystery of his life; he doesn't know a thing about his own existence before he woke up in a military hospital back during World War I.  The various clues Foster shares with Legion indicate to us readers that Foster is the alien spaceman from the prologue, that he has been stranded on Earth for thousands of years and every few centuries goes through a rejuvenating transformation, becoming young again; unfortunately, he loses much of his memory during these transformations, and today doesn't even remember he is from another planet!  Foster's previous incarnations kept an indestructible diary, but much of the diary is in a language nobody on Earth has been able to identify or decode, and the later entries, dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, may be in English, but are cryptic and fragmentary.  Also significant is the fact that several times over the last few decades Foster has been pursued by mysterious hovering lights, which has driven him to relocate cross country and build himself a fortified mansion.

Legion thinks this guy is wacko and doesn't want the job, but events force him to stick to Foster like glue.  The hostile lights appear and the two men flee, and the police start investigating the disappearance of Foster and suspecting Legion murdered him.  Legion would like Foster to reveal himself as alive to the cops and set the record straight, but Foster goes through one of his transformations so doesn't look the same and doesn't even remember meeting Legion.  Thus, Legion and Foster are both on the run, and figure they might as well try to solve the mystery of Foster's past while they avoid the cops and those glowing monsters.  

Clues from the diary and additional detective work lead the two men to England and Stonehenge, where they discover an alien transmitter that summons another boat from the spaceship that brought Foster here so long ago and has been orbiting the Earth since before the birth of Christ! 

On the ship they discover information storage units, rods or cylinders that you can hold up to your head so they will inject immersive stories or useful technical data (like how to repair something on the ship that is malfunctioning) right into your brain.  More elaborate such devices fill Foster's brain with general knowledge about his home planet and culture, like how to read and speak his native tongue--now able to read the diary, he solves some, but not all, facets of the mystery of his life.

At this point the novel is only like two-fifths over and I expected Legion to accompany Foster out into the universe on the big space ship.  But the narrator instead decides to remain on Earth!  Foster departs in the big vessel, headed for his home planet, Vallon, capital of a space empire, after Legion takes a boat back to the Earth surface.  Legion makes himself rich selling consumer goods he "invents" by applying insights he learns from studying some Vallonian items (like a super efficient film projector and its accompanying film) Foster let him take off the star ship.

With his new wealth, Legion buys his own private island off Latin America and builds his own fortified mansion on it, but after a few years the US government figures out he has access to invaluable alien technology and comes a calling.  The Feds are not interested in taking "no" for an answer from Legion, and neither are the Soviet agents who have also figured out that Legion has knowledge they'd like to have.  A battle erupts on Legion's island between Soviet troops and US Marines, and there are extensive chase and fight scenes as Legion struggles to keep himself alive and free of the clutches of both governments; his eventual success is owed to the help of a girlfriend and his new mental abilities, gained by using the Vallonian memory rods--in time of dire need, Legion can now take conscious control over his muscles and organs and give himself an extra burst of strength or endurance.

Earth being too hot for him, Legion, accompanied by his new pet cat, takes his space boat all the way to Vallon, where the final two fifths of the novel take place and where Legion hopes to hook up again with his pal Foster.  Using those memory rods, Legion downloads intro his noggin all the knowledge a native of Vallon would have, but of course all this knowledge is that of the Vallon of over three thousand years ago.  When Legion gets to Vallon it is no longer the bustling center of a vast space empire but merely the locale of a bunch of medieval fiefs!  People live on feudal estates outside the cities, which are taboo, and the knowledge of how to use the most impressive of Vallonian technology has been lost.  The nobles still make use of surface automobiles and air cars--Vallonian equipment and infrastructure are indestructible, so the vehicles still work fine and the roads are still in perfect condition--but space craft and the memory recording devices are strictly verboten.  As an outsider, Legion is immediately put on the bottom rung of the social ladder and find himself a slave.  Luckily he is a skilled musician and is made a piper in the court of the local noble.

Neofeudal Vallon differs from the typical Earth feudal model in that there is plenty of social mobility.  Like among a pirate crew in a piece of pirate fiction, where anybody can be captain if he challenges the captain to a sword fight and bests him, on this degraded Vallon you can take a guy's job by challenging him to a competition and outdoing him.  Legion challenges the head piper to a piping match and the result is Legion's promotion to head piper and his opponent's demotion to court jester.  Legion becomes buddies with the lord, in part because his expert driving skill gets them out of a fix when they are ambushed by motorized bandits during a road trip.  A lot of people, Legion learns as he mixes with the various social classes of feudal Vallon, would like to see Vallon return to the conditions of its high-tech past and get back to using the now taboo memory devices, and Legion has a series of adventures as he becomes the leader of the restoration movement, wins a title of nobility by challenging a noble, learns the truth of Foster's whereabouts and past, and plays a critical role in putting Foster, king of the whole planet before he was treacherously deposed over three thousand years ago, back on the throne.  Along the way the consciousness of the man who deposed Foster invades Legion's brain and Legion has to struggle to regain control of his own body--this is perhaps the most obvious of the novel's nods to that line from the Book of Mark, "My name is Legion."  Legion loses his life in the fight to return Vallon to its golden age, but before he expires, Foster downloads his Terran buddy's consciousness into one of those rods and when a healthy Vallonian body becomes available the king uploads Legion into it--Legion now has the immortality enjoyed by all his new friends.

A Trace of Memory is a competent adventure story--all the fighting and chasing and escaping is entertaining--and Laumer handles the SF stuff--the high tech equipment and the ramifications of a society of people who are basically immortal but who lose their memories every 100 years or so--pretty well.  I enjoyed it.  But I'm afraid I'm not going to remember A Trace of Memory for very long.  I've read the contents of the collections The Best of Keith Laumer and Nine by Laumer and even though I enjoyed quite a few of those fifteen stories I didn't remember a thing about them until I reread my blog posts about them.  Laumer's style is marked by a worldly cynicism but is otherwise quite bland, cold and emotionless.  There aren't vivid images or beautiful sentences or laugh-out-loud jokes or stirring human relationships in A Trace of Memory, nor does Laumer here make bold arguments about how you should live your life or run your society--the masculine virtue stuff I mentioned above is pretty subtle and pretty commonsensical, quite unlike the wild and crazy in-your-face stuff we often get from SF writers.  I didn't really feel the lack of these things while I was reading A Trace of Memory, but their absence I suspect lessens the impact the book will have made on me.  Still, a decent read.