Three 1960s Bolo stories by Keith Laumer

Like a lot of people, I am interested in war and weapons and violence.  For example, I recently read Charles Lamb's memoir of service in the Royal Navy as a pilot of Fairey Swordfish, War in a Stringbag, and highly recommend it to anyone interested in World War II's early stages, naval aviation, and stories about secret agents and getting lost in the desert and getting captured by the enemy* and that sort of thing.  So it is only natural that I continue my exploration of Keith Laumer's body of work by reading more of his stories about the robotic tanks known as Bolos; besides, I found the very first Bolo tale, "Combat Unit" AKA "Dinochrome," to be one of the better stories in Nine By Laumer, the collection of Laumer stories we read last month.  So let's check out three Bolo stories from the 1960s which first appeared in John W. Campbell's Analog and Fred Pohl's Worlds of Tomorrow.

*Lamb was captured by the Vichy French, so War in a Stringbag is also a good book to read if you have some personal animus against the French or Arabs and would relish being exposed to a surfeit of examples of Frenchmen and Arabs behaving in a cruel and disgusting manner.

"Night of the Trolls" (1963)

This is the one that first saw light of day in Worlds of Tomorrow.  It would go on to appear in numerous Laumer collections and a couple of anthologies, both of them produced with Martin H. Greenberg's involvement: The Mammoth Book of New World Science Fiction (presented by Isaac Asimov) and Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow (edited by Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg.)  I read the magazine version of "Night of the Trolls" in a scan at the internet archive.

Our narrator, Jackson, wakes up and climbs out of the suspended-animation tank to find the lab deserted--he hasn't been in suspended animation for three days, as planned, but for decades!  The Pennsylvania military base where the research facility is located is a wreck, full of rats and even a dead body; outside Jackson finds that the ICBM silos are open, the missiles launched--there must have been some kind of war or revolution!  Bad news!  Then worse news--there is a Bolo fighting robot, a thing like a pagoda on treads as big as a freighter and covered with gun ports, patrolling the facility grounds, and the Jackson doesn't have his ID with him!

Luckily this Bolo has not been maintained in a while and is not currently living its best robot life--Jackson is able to escape it.  He explores what turns to be the kind of post-apocalyptic world that we SF readers are always encountering.*  The narrator went under suspended animation back in 1979 as part of the testing of the systems of Earth's first star ship; Jackson learns that that was like 70 or 80 years ago when he meets a friendly old man who can't even remember a pre-apocalyptic world!  The old geezer helps him out with food and so forth, and tells him that the area is now controlled by a Baron.  The Baron lives in a palace that was a hotel back in the 1970s, and this aristocrat has not only an army with 20th-century AFVs but a Bolo of his own that sits in front of the hotel.

One of the noteworthy things about "Night of the Trolls" is how often Laumer uses silly metaphors that put me in the mind of hard-boiled detective stories.  "He folded like a two-dollar umbrella."  "...got to my feet and staggered off up the grade that seemed as steep now as penthouse rent."  I guess this suits how Jackson acts.  At the start of the story I thought he was some kind of scientist, but in fact Jackson is an astronaut, presumably a tough military veteran or test pilot.  He sneaks into the Baron's palace by hiding in the shadows, bluffs his way past guards through fast talk, and disguises himself by beating up people and stealing their clothes.  Jackson makes his way to the Baron, who it turns out is a fellow 20th-century astronaut, one of Jackson's colleagues who came out of suspended animation twenty years earlier and built himself up into the feudal suzerain he is today.

The Baron is ambitious (maybe he saw a sign at a shopping mall), and wants to rule the entire East coast, but there are rival barons with armies in neighboring states, so he wants to make use of the Bolos and the equipment stored in the star ship at the research center.  But to access that equipment he needs Jackson's help reprogramming his own Bolo, which ain't workin' right, as well as the Bolo defending the star ship.  When it comes out that some of the other astronauts at the facility have emerged from stasis and been killed by the Baron, Jackson's eagerness to take the role of the Baron's right hand man wanes.

Jackson is compelled to get the Baron's Bolo under control, and then the Baron rides off in it to attack the Bolo defending the star ship.  Jackson escapes, somehow gets to the Bolo at the research facility before the Baron's attack force does, takes command of it and in a Bolo vs Bolo duel defeats the Baron via trickery and superior technical knowledge.  Our sense of wonder ending is that Jackson sends the star ship off into space (there are still astronauts aboard in suspended animation who will be automatically roused when they get to Alpha Centauri) and Jackson, now leader of Pennsylvania, determines to rebuild a decent civilization on Earth.

I think it noteworthy that both this story and the first Bolo story, "Combat Unit," are about characters who wake up after a long period and find themselves in a changed world, and both are about Bolos that are not working at their full capacity.

"Night of the Trolls" has a good plot, and all the Bolo stuff is good, and much of the relationship drama stuff (Jackson's memories of family and colleagues from the 20th century and the revelation that that old man is Jackson's son) is good.  But the story is a little too long.  The biggest problem is Jackson's infiltration of the Baron's palace, where he beats up a guy and takes his clothes, then beats up another guy and takes his clothes, then beats up a third guy whose clothes he doesn't need--he just beats that third guy up because that guy is a jerk.  I guess we are supposed to enjoy all this beating because some of the victims are effete or obese aristocrats and we should like seeing their pretensions burst by a muscular man's man, but, really, one beating would have been sufficient.  There are also too many instances of the narrator getting past guards and other people by yelling at them in a parody of what people who hate aristocrats think aristocrats talk like.  I guess Laumer thinks this kind of dialogue is funny in and of itself and so laid it on thick instead of just providing one or two instances to demonstrate the narrator's ability and to achieve's the plot's requirement that Jackson meet the Baron.  (I have a feeling that a recurring theme in Laumer's work is the manly man who shows up his social superiors--a lot of writers work out their class resentments in their writing.)

I'm willing to give this one a thumbs up, even though the middle section at the palace drags and the jokes undermine the serious components of the story somewhat.

*Here are handy links to five MPorcius Fiction Log blog posts that each discuss a post-apocalyptic short story that I feel is  somehow noteworthy or memorable but not particularly famous:

"Magic City" by Nelson S. Bond (1941)
"Day of Judgment" by Edmond Hamilton (1946)
"Song from a Forgotten Hill" by Glen Cook (1971)
"Ring of Pain" by M. John Harrison (1971)
"The Kelly's Eye" by Robert Hoskins (1975)

"Last Command" (1967)

"Last Command" first appeared in Analog, and seems to have been well received by the SF community, evidence by the fact that it appears in many anthologies, including those put together by Analog editor John W. Campbell (Analog 7), Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison (Best SF: 1967), Damon Knight (A Pocketful of Stars) and Gordon Dickson (Combat SF.)  It also appears in My Favorite Science Fiction Story--"Last Command" is Anne McCaffery's favorite SF story, and in the intro to the story she talks about how she would like to make a half-hour TV show of it.

I read the 1999 printing of the story in My Favorite Science Fiction Story, which is available at the internet archive.

This is another story about a Bolo in poor shape waking up after being "asleep" for a long time.  Are they all like this?

Pete Reynolds is an engineer on the planet New Devon, the head of a construction crew blasting apart a rocky area near a highway, clearing ground for a spaceport.  His blasting arouses a Bolo that was buried under 200 meters of rock a long time ago--the local government didn't bother to check the records and so didn't tell Reynolds this site was where a lot of military ordnance was buried after the last war.  Oh, those government bureaucrats!

The story features italicized passages in the first person, presenting the point of view of the war robot, and third-person sections in which we observe Reynolds trying to figure out what is going on as the earth shakes and cracks when the Bolo begins digging its way out and then everybody scrambles to resolve the crisis.  The local mayor and a journalist get in the way as Reynolds tries to evacuate the area and the submerged Bolo, travelling like a huge mole (it towers forty-five feet high and its treads are ten feet wide) wrecks a highway overpass.  The Bolo thinks the war that ended seventy years ago is still on and, when it surfaces, assumes that the city a few kilometers away is an enemy fortress!

The Bolo's weapons have no ammo and it can only crawl along at like two mph, but its armor is intact and the conventional weapons of the planetary defense force cannot knock it out.  Luckily, the ninety-year-old dude who commanded the Bolo way back when is still alive, and if he can get up close to the machine maybe it will recognize him, maybe he can stop it.  Of course, the Bolo is dangerously radioactive from being hit by enemy weapons seven decades ago, so the old man is on a suicide mission, but he is willing to give up his life for the community.

Everything in this story is obvious--the way that fighting men and engineers are portrayed sympathetically and politicians and other government wankers are denounced, for example.  (N. B.: I said "obvious," not wrong.)  And the story is really just a variation on the same themes we saw in "Combat Unit."  However, the story is well told, with every element being interesting or exciting, even if they are not surprising, and Laumer doesn't make the mistakes in "Last Command" that he made in "Night of the Trolls"--here there are no weak jokes to distract you and no padding to tire you.  This is a good one. 

I read the paperback version of The Yngling back in
 2016 and found it to be a "pedestrian" tale of a psychic
 swordsman in a post-apocalyptic feudal society

"A Relic of War" (1969)

After first appearing in Analog, in addition to a bunch of Laumer collections, "A Relic of War" has been reprinted in Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh's Robot Warriors and David Drake's Dogs of War.  I once owned a copy of the Laumer collection The Big Show, which includes "A Relic of War," but I can't find it anywhere, so I read the version in the internet archive scan of Dogs of War.  Drake penned a brief afterword for this edition that provides a little insight into Laumer's service in WWII and into what Drake likes about the Bolo stories.

"A Relic of War" is about an old Bolo unit that is not working at full capacity.  It served in an interstellar  war a century ago, and now sits in the town square of a small settlement that is surrounded by jungle; where the settlement now sits was the site of a ferocious battle one hundred years earlier, and the jungle is full of the wreckage of Terran and alien AFVs, artillery pieces and military aircraft.  The Bolo is still "alive," and has sat still for a century, chatting to settlers about its war service and just shooting the breeze.

A government tech comes by to deactivate Bobby, as the locals call the twenty-five foot wide war machine.  When the tech turns on the transmitter that will shut Bobby down, its signal is picked up by an alien war robot that has been lying dormant since its force lost the battle long ago.  This robot attacks, and Bobby outfights it, saving the settlement.  The townspeople have a little celebration and present Bobby a medal and then the tech (after making sure there are no more active enemy units around) finally shuts down Bobby.

This story is good, maybe a little slight.  In a smaller way it explores the same sorts of themes as "Last Command" and "Combat Unit:" the sacrifices made by those who defend the community, and how that community shows its gratitude.  The idea of an old veteran being called back to duty must really have resonated with Laumer, because he employs this idea again and again.  Maybe he felt he--and/or other veterans--didn't get the recognition they deserved for their service?

 
**********

These stories are good (though "Night of the Trolls" has some problems) but since they seem to all have quite similar plot elements and themes, I think I'll hold off on reading any more Bolo stories for a while.

"The Long Remembered Thunder," "Cocoon" and "A Trip to the City" by Keith Laumer

Behold!  Before you lies the third and final installment of MPorcius Fiction Log's look at the 1967 collection of Keith Laumer stories titled Nine by Laumer.  I've felt that the first six stories were pretty good, though preferring the straight serious stories with cool war machines ("Dinochrome" AKA "Combat Unit" or weird aliens ("Hybrid" and "End as a Hero") over the satirical ("Walls") or joke ("Doorstep") stories.  Let's hope we have three super cereal tales today.

Before we begin, allow me to recommend Charles Platt's Dream Makers: Volume II, which includes a profile of Laumer which I reread before reading the stories I will be talking about today.  Platt, who famously pissed off Harlan Ellison and David Drake to the point that they sought revenge (the former in physical violence, the latter by naming unlikable characters in his fiction after Platt) describes how he pissed off Laumer--by forgetting the name of Retief's sidekick, who apparently appears in every Retief story.  The profile is interesting and sad, describing as it does the diminished state of the formerly healthy and industrious Laumer after a stroke in 1971.  As Platt tells it, Laumer in the early 1980s was prone to fits of rage during which he would scream at the top of his lungs and strike furniture with his cane and even a saber.

(If you don't have a copy of Dream Makers: Volume II handy you can check out a version of the Laumer profile that appeared in the Winter 1982 issue of Science Fiction Review along with a striking illustration by Allen Koszowski, an article about pulp by Algis Budrys, and multiple reviews of Robert Heinlein's Friday.)

"The Long Remembered Thunder" (1963)

"The Long Remembered Thunder" was first printed in the inaugural issue of Worlds of Tommorow, edited by Frederick Pohl.  The story is illustrated by Virgil Finlay, and one of Finlay's two full-page illos is printed in two colors; I guess World of Tomorrow was experimenting with color as a way of gaining attention.  Apparently Laumer was considered a powerful draw--an ad on the inside cover meant to entice subscribers boasts about six authors ("All Your Favorites!") whose work will soon appear in Worlds of Tomorrow, and Laumer's name is at the top of the list, above Judith Merrill, Jack Williamson, Damon Knight, Brian Aldiss, and Daniel Keyes.

Some old dude, apparently some kind of foreigner, named Bram has lived in an old house outside of the little rural town of Elsby for as long as anybody can remember.  Reclusive, this guy has never been seen out of doors at night, and only comes in to town once a week for supplies.

Jimmy Tremaine grew up in Elsby, and was one of the few to have any sort of intercourse with Bram, who took a particular interest in Tremaine.  Tremaine is now an engineer or scientist or something, working for the federal government.  A strange transmission has been detected coming from the Elsby area, a transmission that interferes with the top secret hyperwave project Tremaine has been heading.  So Tremaine comes back home to Elsby to investigate, and Bram is on top of his list of suspects!

Tremaine does the stuff we see in detective stories and weird stories all the time, like going to the municipal hall to look at old real estate records and to the local library to look at old newspapers, and interviewing people who might know something about Bram, like a woman who had a crush on him back in 1901, one Linda Carroll.  There's also that thing you see on cop shows, the state police resenting how the feds, in the form of Tremaine, are muscling in on their turf, trying to hog all the glory of solving the case.  The staties even try to sabotage Tremaine's operation, enlisting Tremaine's childhood rival to pick a fight with him.  Luckily, Tremaine isn't just a genius at electronics, but at boxing, too.

It turns out that Bram is a space cop from "the Great World,"another planet in another dimension.  At the turn of the century, the peeps of the Great World detected that the evil reptilian Niss were trying to build a space-time portal (or whatever--it's complicated, with harmonics and matrices and all that stuff) from their worn out husk of a world to our beautiful young Earth!  If the lizard men finish the portal they will suck all the oxygen off of Earth to their own planet, killing us all!

So Bram came to Earth to try to stop them.  Every night, for sixty years, he has gone down from his kitchen via a secret passage to the cave where sits the Terra end of the half-built Niss portal, and uses his brainwaves, amplified by a device on a tripod, to push back against the Niss, who are pushing from their side, trying to get in.  It is this battle that has been sending out the radiation that Tremaine's new hyperwave project has detected.

(Luckily the portal can't be opened when the sun is up, so Bram can rest during the day.  And if it seems goofy that the Niss have been trying to break through for sixty years without trying a different tack, remember that time here runs differently than time on the Niss planet, so for the Niss this battle has only been going on a few days.)

Tremaine, an electronics whiz, improves the device on the tripod and massacres the Niss with his mind.  The amplifier gives him god-like power, so Tremaine reaches back in time, changing history so that the Niss were defeated back in 1901 so Bram need not stay here on Earth sixty years but instead can take a 20-something Linda Carroll away with him to the Great World.  Then Tremaine decides to stay in 1901 America himself--after all, back in the 1960s the cops are after him, and in 1901 there will be no annoying TV.

This story is kind of lame.  The plot of Bram opposing the Niss by going down to a cave every night for 60 years is sort of thin, and Laumer fails to sell it.  Instead of imbuing this idea with Lovecraftian cosmic horror or Lucasfilm gee whiz swashbuckling or anything that might generate some kind of feeling in the reader, Laumer just piles on a lot of boring gumshoe goop about looking for clues, a lot of boring hicksville merds about how the rural police are corrupt jerks and the rural lower-class goobers are violent jerks, and Bram's boring saccharine romance--Linda Carroll, now in her eighties, actually accompanies Tremaine down into the cave where Bram is waging his nightly psychic battle with the alligator men.  All this slosh that just makes the story more contrived, busy, slow and long--it is 39 pages in this edition of Nine By Laumer, and few of those pages are interesting.

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  As on so many topics, I disagree with Fred Pohl on the subject of "The Long Remembered Thunder"--he selected the story for inclusion in the reprint magazine The Best Science Fiction from Worlds of Tomorrow.  (Maybe Fred just wanted to include those Finlay illos in the reprint mag?)

"Cocoon" (1962)

"Cocoon," which was first printed in Fantastic, was also included in a reprint magazine, 1970's SF Greats.  Let's hope it is an improvement over "The Long Remembered Thunder."

Remember when we read William Spencer's "Horizontal Man?"  Joachim Boaz read it, too.  In that 1965 story a guy in the future sat in the same room for thousands of years being fed through a tube and experiencing virtual reality sex and adventure programs.  Well, here in "Cocoon" a guy in the future, Sid, has been in a cocoon with screens connected to his eyes for two hundred years, watching sitcoms and doing clerical work.  (His work is indexing all the TV shows, I think.)  His wife is in the cocoon next to him; she watches shows that induce orgasms.  The couple haven't touched each other or looked upon each other for two centuries; they communicate via the electronic network, and are represented on each others' screens by stylized symbols.  People in this future are so alienated from their own bodies that they consider the human face to be ugly and don't even like to use the word "face."

The plot of the story consists of Sid gradually learning, via malfunctions of the cocoon and network as well as unauthorized transmissions made by rebellious types, that the city is being engulfed by a glacier.  He leaves the cocoon, drags his atrophied body to the elevator, rides up to the roof to look upon the real world one last time before he dies.

This story feels long, as Sid calls his wife, calls his friends, calls the police, calls the government, etc., trying to figure out what is going on.  Besides being too long, it covers much of the same territory covered by "Walls," which also appears here in Nine by Laumer.  Why include two stories in the same book in which people watch too much TV and get disconnected from the natural world?  Oh, well.

Barely acceptable.

"Cerebrum" is a story by Albert
Teichner; God knows why Teichner's
name isn't on the cover--I thought Laumer's
story was going to be about a city ruled
by a giant evil brain!

"A Trip to the City" (1963)

Like "Cocoon," "A Trip to the City" was proudly announced on the cover of a magazine edited by Cele Goldsmith, this time Amazing.  I guess Laumer was considered a powerful selling point not just by Fred Pohl, but other editors as well.  "A Trip to the City"'s original title was "It Could Be Anything," and, like "The Long Remembered Thunder," is illustrated by Virgil Finlay; "It Could Be Anything" was even reprinted in a 1974 issue of Thrilling Science Fiction touted as an "All Virgil Finlay Issue."  Ted White also included the story in the Best of Fantastic volume under the "A Trip to the City" title. 

Brett Hale grew up in a small farm town.  His relatives and friends think their little community has all any of them will ever need, but Brett has read a lot of books and wants to see some of the world he has read about; he's also not crazy about working all his life on a farm or in the local factory.  So he gets on a train, heads off to see cities, mountains, the ocean.

The train stops while he is in the bathroom, and when Brett emerges from the lavatory he finds the train's engine, and all the crew and passengers, have vanished.  The passenger cars sit in the middle of a field.  Brett sees something in the distance, and marches towards it; it turns out to be a walled city.

Brett explores the city, and he (and we readers) gradually learn what is going on in this nameless burg.  The city is like a Hollywood set, the walls of most buildings being thin facades with little behind them.  Most areas of the city are abandoned, with no people or cars, unless a "scene" is taking place, and then robot extras (the word "golem" is used) play the parts of police and cheerleaders and spectators at a parade, or of a married couple crossing the threshold of a hotel room to start their honeymoon, or whatever.  Within the fake city there is a small handful of real people, apparently people from other dimensions who got cast away here as Brett did.  If these real people interfere with a scene, amoeba people called Gels arrive to take them away and throw them into a pit filled with the bones of earlier victims.  The real man who explains the golems and Gels to Brett, Awalawon Duvah, is captured by a Gel, and Brett sets out to rescue him from the bone pit.  Reunited, the two men sabotage the city, blowing it to bits and killing all the Gels and rendering inoperative all the golems.

As the story ends the two men wonder if their home worlds were a scam like the now destroyed city behind them, if all the people they knew before getting transported to the mysterious city were golems, if all the buildings they never went into were just empty facades.

"A Trip to the City" is long and tedious, full of detailed descriptions but no excitement or emotion.  Why did Harlan Ellison and Ted White love it so?  (Ellison claims he reread the story seven times to prep for writing his introduction to Nine by Laumer!)  I guess because it is trying to make some philosophical point; I expect this point is that we can never confidently know anything and that people with power are always trying to deceive us.  Brett never finds out who the Gels were, where they came from, why they maintain a fake city full of fake people, or how he himself got to the city.  We might also say the story is a celebration of those people who refuse to accept the facts given to them and instead have to see things for themselves, first hand.  (No doubt Harlan Ellison thought of himself as just such a man.)  One of the real people in the city is satisfied with the fake environment the Gels have set up, and he opposes Brett's efforts to rescue Duvah and to blow up the city.  Laumer makes sure we know we are not supposed to sympathize with this collaborator--not only is he a big fatso, but as the city begins to crumble this fat guy refuses to accept that his life is based on a lie and runs to the epicenter of the explosion to be killed.  Laumer may want us to admire those who seek the truth, but he doesn't shy away from letting us know that the pursuit of truth may not lead to happiness: early in the story, on Earth, there is a long scene in which Brett explains to a young woman he is attracted to that the ads in her movie magazine are just a sanitized, gussied-up version of real life, a total scam.  This mansplaining ruins his relationship with the woman, who would rather enjoy her illusions.

Long-winded, cold, tedious, and with an unsatisfying plot, I have to give "A Trip to the City" a thumbs down.  I'm all for making philosophical points in a science fiction story, but the story still has to be fun or interesting.  Spoonful of sugar and all that, old man!

**********

Whoa, what happened?  I was on my way to becoming a Keith Laumer fan, having really enjoyed three of the stories in the first half of the book ("Hybrid," "Dinochrome," and "End as a Hero") but this last third has been pretty dire and has cooled my ardor, as we say.  Well, we'll give Laumer another shot in the future, but first we'll work on a different project.

"Dinochrome," "Placement Test," and "Doorstep" by Keith Laumer

British editions of Nine by Laumer

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading Nine By Laumer, a 1967 collection of SF stories by Keith Laumer, famous creator of space diplomat Retief and the Bolo robotic tanks, two long popular series.  Laumer also wrote a book on how to design and build flying models.  Some people have really intense hobbies! 

In our last installment we tackled the first three tales in the book, and today we read the middle three.  Presumably there is some logic to the order in which the stories appear.  I considered reading the stories in chronological order, but, as in so many things in life, after playfully indulging in a reasonable course based on logic, I opted for the path of least resistance and am just reading them in the order presented.

"Dinochrome" (1960)

"Dinochrome" is one of the aforementioned Bolo stories, in fact the first one.  Its initial airing was under the title "Combat Unit," in F&SF, and it has been republished in quite a few different Laumer collections.

"Dinochrome" is a straightforward, but entertaining, story told from the point of view of a giant robotic tank.  Centuries ago the tank's entire brigade was knocked out, and the enemy deactivated the robots' simulated personalities that allowed for autonomous activity, removed their main guns, and used them for construction work, demolishing buildings and the like.  All this stuff we learn in dribs and drabs as the narrator does, after its personality is accidentally awakened by a researcher interested in the high technology of the past.  It turns out that the interstellar war the robot was fighting in has dragged on, so severely that the technological level of the civilizations conducting the war has reverted to a pre-atomic and pre-FTL level, a level at which they can no longer produce the kind of computers that operate the tank.

While its primary weapons were removed long ago, the tank is still a clever and formidable foe.  It wipes out the successor population of the people who captured it 300 years ago and awakens its comrades--the narrator tank's unit is now the most powerful conglomeration of technology in existence and may well decisively conclude the war after two centuries of stalemate!

Laumer comes up with all kinds of interesting ways for the decrepit tank to fight without its main guns, and fun speculations on how an artificial personality might perform its duties and interact with its human masters.  A good story.  It is obvious why Laumer would want to write, and why SF fans would want to read, more Bolo stories.

"Placement Test" (1964)

This is one of those stories in which the government controls every aspect of your life via an incompetent and merciless bureaucracy; we see quite a few of these in SF.  When I was young and the Berlin Wall fell and Slick Willie declared the era of big government over I thought that such stories would become obsolete, but I have been proven wrong—these stories are perhaps more prophetic than ever!

Mart Maldon is a 28-year old engineering student who resides at Welfare Dorm 69, Wing Two, Nineteenth floor, Room 1906.  Second in his class, he is three days away from graduation and the start of a career in his chosen field of Microtronics.  But he is called in to see the guidance counselor and told that, due to unexpected budget cuts, he has been “quotaed out”— tossed out of school without a degree through no fault of his own.

Without a degree, Maldon can’t get a professional job. He applies for low-skilled and no-skilled jobs, like receptionist or laborer, but his IQ is too high for such positions—the government knows that smart people in such menial jobs become bored and rebellious. The government has a solution to the problem of being unemployable—you can abandon all hope of social status and live off meager welfare benefits, or, accept one of their readily available and no-cost “adjustments.”  What is an adjustment, you ask?  Well, a medical professional sends carefully a calibrated electrical current through your brain to lower your IQ to 80 or so--then you'll savor the excitement and responsibility that comes from being a janitor or meter reader.

Maldon manages to get his hands on the circuit schematics for the adjustment machine and when he goes in for his adjustment he is able to sabotage the machine—it appears to work normally, but the puissant electrical current is just routed through the machine itself, not into Maldon's noggin, so the procedure has no effect on his brain.  (Maldon puts on a stupid act until he gets out of the office.)

Defeating the adjustment machine and getting a job as a toll observer on a bridge is just the first step in Maldon’s long and complicated campaign of using disguises, bravado, fast talk, his technical skills, and an ability to crawl through air conditioning ducts to get to the central computer and update his own file so it shows that he has in fact earned his Microtonics degree and is eligible for a good job.

As "Placement Test" proceeds it becomes increasingly absurd, with more and more jokes until it climaxes with a satirical twist ending.  I rarely enjoy broad farce and absurd satire, so I can't deny that I was disappointed by the turn taken by "Placement Test" in its final pages.  Everywhere I look I see snide sarcasm and childish irony--and I am as reprehensible an offender as anyone--and so I seek sincerity in the fiction I read, and would have preferred Laumer to have played "Placement Test" as straight as he did "Dinochrome."  I think the satiric twist of the ending also irked me because it undermines what I kind of was taking as the story's point, that government is incompetent and the people at the top of government are selfish and corrupt--the twist makes it seem like the people atop the government hierarchy are devilishly clever and committed to (however ruthlessly and anti-democratically) solving public problems.

Another perhaps noteworthy aspect of the story that might give readers pause is the apparent contempt in which Keith Laumer--Air Force officer, diplomat, successful novelist and guy who designs and builds flying models in his spare time--holds those who make a living cleaning toilets and answering phones.

But, taken as a whole, I liked "Placement Test," which moves at a brisk pace and is well constructed.

After first appearing in Amazing (in an issue in which Robert Silverberg reveals that he hates Edgar Rice Burroughs ("silly...crude") but loves Robert E. Howard ("intellectual stimulation"), "Placement Test" has been included in a number of anthologies, including that Canadian textbook we mentioned in our last episode, SF: Inventing the Future, a 1977 book called Psy Fi One: An Anthology of Psychology in Science Fiction, which I can't find a cover image of anywhere (if a reader has access to an image of the cover, said to have been illustrated by Stanislaw Fernandes, I would like to see it!), and one of those anthologies with Isaac Asimov's name on the cover over Martin S. Greenberg's and Charles H. Waugh's, this one called Those Amazing Electronic Thinking Machines!: An Anthology of Robot and Computer Stories.  I guess "Placement Test" counts as a computer story because Maldon has to figure out how to get access to the computer database which records everybody's education and employment status. 

"Doorstep" (1961)

This one first appeared in Galaxy, where it is described as a "short-short story."  It is, in fact, a five-page joke story (six and a half in Nine by Laumer) that, I guess, is a lampoon of military overreaction.

A huge object lands from space in rural America.  The Army surrounds it, investigates it, men climbing over it and so forth.  When it opens, I guess like a woman's compact or a clam shell, a soldier is knocked off and killed.  Monstrous appendages, like those of a giant crab or scorpion, emerge from the vehicle, and the general in charge of the investigation, a veteran of Operation Overlord, orders his men to open fire with machine guns and mortars.  The giant creature inside is blasted to bits.  Then comes the punchline--the boffins have decoded the message that came with the vehicle: "Please take care of my little girl."

When I realized the story was going to be a joke I had hopes the punchline would be that the aliens were sending ahead live food supplies, or offering us a toothsome delicacy as a gift.  Of course, that would have been a silly joke, and Laumer instead chose an ending with a sort of satirical sting, an attack on American, or human, or military (there is a scientist who tries to stop the general from giving the command to fire) belligerence.

Innocuous filler. I'm grading this one barely acceptable.

Besides in a bunch of Laumer collections, "Doorstep" would reappear in one of those Asimov/Greenberg/Waugh anthologies, this one called Young Extraterrestrials in early editions and Asimov's Extraterrestrials or just Extraterrestrials in later, revised, editions.  It is hard to believe Greenberg and Waugh couldn't find a better five-page story for their anthology, but maybe they legitimately liked it...or maybe there aren't a lot of stories about alien babies out there.

They changed the title but they still put a baby on the cover.  Tricky!

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"Dinochrome" AKA "Combat Unit" is the stand out, though "Placement Test" has merit and even the slight "Doorstep" is not repulsive.  In our next episode we finish up Nine By Laumer with three more stories by the inventor of the "Twin Lizzie" and the "Dub-L Dek-R."  Hopefully these will be straight tales of adventure and science like "Dinochrome" and "Hybrid" and not satires or goofs.

"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.

**********

"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!

Battle on Venus by William F. Temple

"Emotionally, spiritually, morally, intellectually you remained immature, with only one aim: pleasure--crude, immediate pleasure.  There's nothing in you of timeless serenity, the spirit of contemplation.  No wonder you're bored.  The boon of immortality is wasted on you.  Let me have it."

Let's continue our look at Ace Doubles with 76380 from 1973, starting with William F. Temple's Battle on Venus.  Battle on Venus actually was featured in two Ace Doubles, first in F-195 in 1963 (paired with Robert Silverberg's The Silent Invaders) and then ten years later in the book I own, which includes two Temple novels, the other being The Three Suns of Amara, first published in 1962.  (If Battle on Venus isn't terrible, in our next episode we'll talk about The Three Suns of Amara--no pressure though, BoV!)

Captain Jonah Freiburg, a middle-aged veteran of many risky space flights who is "losing his nerve," is the commander of the first Earth expedition to Venus.  Along for the ride with the astronauts is George Starkey, a young and optimistic "professional explorer."  When their ship breaks through the cloud layer that surrounds Venus it is immediately fired upon by anti-aircraft guns, and when the ship makes an emergency landing the crew is subjected to an artillery barrage and then surrounded by tanks!  The Earthers become the center of a battle between unmanned drone armored columns, and while the side protecting them wins, they suffer fatalities and their space ship is damaged.

Starkey takes the ship's helicopter and goes to look for Venusian natives, and, though his chopper gets shot down, he does meet some.  Luckily, the Venusians he meets aren't lizardmen or insectmen or blobpeople or anything like that--the first he meets is Mara, a beautiful and intelligent young woman, apparently the sole survivor of her village, and she and Starkey begin a love affair.  Soon the lovebirds meet Senilde, an immortal genius who has been the dictator of Venus for thousands of years.  He exterminated almost all Venusians centuries ago (those dense clouds are the residue of his genocidal poison gas campaign) and the worldwide war between armies of robot AFVs and aircraft is a game he cooked up for his own amusement.  Battle on Venus turns out to be like one of those Star Trek episodes in which the crew of the Enterprise meet a mischievous and amoral immortal (that's like half of them, right?)  Then the wisest man from Mara's village, Leep, a mystic who has psychic powers, shows up and matches wits with Senilde, hoping to attain the secret of immortality for himself.

The giant saw blades are in the novel,
but I felt they were not really well-
integrated into the plot.

Starkey, Mara, and Freiburg manage to get back to Earth to live happily ever after, but the fate of Senilde and Leep is unknown--as the Earth ship leaves, Venus is engulfed in an inferno of nuclear explosions as Senilde makes a last ditch attempt to stop the Earthlings (and the last of Venus' hot chicks!) from escaping.

Battle on Venus feels short and quick (it is like 105 pages of text), and is a pleasant entertainment.  I appreciated that Temple tried to give each of the named characters a believable personality and motivation, and addressed psychological and philosophical issues, however shallowly, in the context of what is essentially a light adventure. Also, we are always hearing how "old" SF either has no women characters or features females who are merely damsels in distress, but Mara is smart and independent and solves problems and makes bold decisions.  A minor novel in the scheme of things, but enjoyable.  The Three Suns of Amara, here we come!

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There are three pages of ads bound in the middle of Ace Double 76380; let's look at the titles the Ace people were pushing on the page headed, "The World's Best Award-Winning Science Fiction Comes from Ace."

Ace's Armageddon 2419 A. D. is a sort of fix-up or consolidation of two stories by Philip Francis Nowlan from late 1920s issues of Amazing Stories which constitute the first appearances of Buck Rogers.  I have often considered reading this (or the originals, available for free online) but have yet to do so.  The Ace edition advertised has a pretty cool cover, depicting a dirigible-like aircraft attacking a ground target with a lightning-like weapon, but the cover on the earlier Ace edition (F-188) featuring jetpack-equipped infantry (including a woman!) is even better.

The Big Show by Keith Laumer is a book I owned at some point, and I love the cover, but I can't find it on my shelves now; maybe I sold it when I left New York.  Laumer is one of those writers I want to like, and the profile of him in Charles Platt's Dream Makers: Volume II makes him seem like a strange and fascinating figure, but most of the stuff I have read by him was just OK.

The Black Star Passes by John W. Campbell, Jr, a collection of stories originally published in Amazing in the early '30s, is in the same series of space operas about three scientists as Invaders From the Infinite, which I read in 2011 and thought boring, as I told the customers of Amazon.com.

I read Gender Genocide by Edmund Cooper back in 2015, and still own the edition advertised here.  (The cover on this one is kind of embarrassing.)

I read Barry N. Malzberg's The Falling Astronauts in this edition in 2011 and wrote about it on Amazon.  I love the cover.  I got mine, which suffered significant water damage before it came into my custody, at a church thrift store on Route 69 outside of Osceola, Iowa.

I own the advertised edition of George Zebrowski's The Omega Point, and read it and wrote about it back in 2015.  Terrific wraparound cover.

I own a pretty worn-out copy of the Ace edition of Bob Shaw's Tomorrow Lies in Ambush with a Woolco price sticker on the cover.  All you history-of-North-American-retail nerds (and I know you are out there) already know what I just learned five seconds ago on wikipedia, that Woolco was founded in Columbus, Ohio, the current location of MPorcius Fiction Log's HQ, in 1962 and went out of business in the US in 1983.  I like Shaw and am eating broccoli this week in hopes of living long enough to fit reading this collection of thirteen short stories into my schedule.

Veruchia by E. C. Tubb is the eighth installment in the 33-volume saga of Dumarest of Terra, the wandering space gladiator, and I read it in 2014 in a digital edition.  The cover on the edition advertised here in Ace Double 76380 is a nice "arty" one.

Warlord of the Air is one of Michael Moorcock's Oswald Bastable novels.  In my teens I was crazy about Elric and the whole Eternal Champion idea, and I amassed and read a huge collection of Moorcock novels, including Warlord of the Air.  One of Moorcock's recurring themes is the presentation of (at times metaphorical or alternate reality) Britain and/or USA as the villain, and another is the guy who goes native or turns against the people he was supporting in the first part of the story because they are imperialistic or whatever.  Both of these themes turn up in Warlord of the Air, and I believe all the Bastable novels; Bastable is an English adventurer who finds himself in an alternate reality in which China goes to war against the West and Bastable comes to sympathize with the Chinese.  More memorable (to me at least) was the second Bastable book, in which Africans build a tank the size of a battleship and conquer the world, the final scene being a battle between the African megatank and (I believe, memory may be failing me) an iteration of the U. S. Capitol building that bristles with heavy guns.  For whatever reason I never got to the third Bastable novel, in which, I am guessing, Bastable comes to sympathize with communist Russia.  (Moorcock fans better-read than I should feel free to set me straight in the comments.)

I am unenthusiastic about Ross Rocklynne, Ken Bulmer, and Mack Reynolds, having read some of their work and had very mixed feelings.  Ace's The Men and the Mirror is a collection of stories; I read the title story and wrote about it earlier this year.  Ken Bulmer writes violent adventure stories, but is not as skilled a storyteller as E. C. Tubb nor as unusual and interesting as Andrew J. Offutt; I wrote about Diamond Contessa in 2015 and Cycle of Nemesis in 2014.  Mack Reynolds, who under dubious conditions was for a while heralded as the most popular SF writer in the world, seems to write mostly about utopias and socialism in stories and novels that are short on character development or plot and long on trivia and philosophical speeches.  Do all three of these guys deserve another chance from me?  Of course they do, and, if I was going to live forever like a Venusian dictator, they would definitely get it.  Seeing as the grim reaper awaits me as it awaits us all, well, we'll see what happens.  Rocklynne is represented in my small collection of Ace Doubles, so maybe he will crop up in MPorcius Fiction Log's current series of posts on Ace Doubles.

I don't have enough direct experience of the work of Margaret St. Clair, Arthur K. Barnes, and John Rankine (a pseudonym of Douglas R. Mason) to have any opinion about them.  I find in the realm of 20th-century SF that there are always new frontiers to explore, and maybe someday I will be able to scribble something on these blank spaces on the map.

Five Fates, Part 2: Harlan Ellison and Keith Laumer

An edition from 1975

Five Fates, copyright 1970 by Keith Laumer, is a SF experiment.  The book is a collection of stories by five Hugo-winners, each based on the same one-page prologue in which William Bailey goes to the Euthanasia Center, receives an injection, and is directed to his slab.

In our last episode we read Poul Anderson's, Frank Herbert's, and Gordon Dickson's offerings. All three authors took the experiment as an opportunity to denounce the kind of society that would have Euthanasia Centers and to advocate for individualism.  Unfortunately, of the three only Herbert used the experiment as a chance to tell an entertaining story.

Today we will be reading Harlan Ellison's and Keith Laumer's contributions to Five Fates.  Will either or both of them buck the trend and produce a story as good as Herbert's?  Will either of them come to the concept of the Euthanasia Center with an open mind and provide us a vivid picture of all of its good points?  Let's see!

"The Region Between" by Harlan Ellison

"The Region Between" is a sort of wild New Wave experiment, at least in its form.  The text switches between different font sizes and formats, with a few sections actually rotated 90 degrees, to indicate different speakers and settings.  Some of the chapters have odd headings (there are chapters "1 1/2" and "1 3/4.")  There are numerous sentences that consist of lists ("It was not a force, not a vapor, not a quality, not a potentiality, not a look, not a sense, not a capacity, not anything he could pinpoint,"), one line paragraphs, and repetitive paragraphs.  For the most part Ellison doesn't do these things just to be wacky, but with some kind of mood-setting or story-telling purpose, so they add to the story, rather than detract from it. One section, in which the text is a spiral, did challenge my poor eye sight.

Some printings of the story (though not the one in my copy of  Five Fates) are adorned with numerous decorations and illustrations by Jack Gaughan.  I am lucky enough to own a copy of Angry Candy which includes Gaughan's contributions, and I quite like them.  I'd be curious to see how they looked in the issue of Galaxy in which "The Region Between" first appeared. 

As for the story itself, it includes lots of striking images, some abstract, like souls stretched out to encompass all of space and time or a mind floating in a vast uniform emptiness, others sharp, such as the furry blue cyclops who crew intergalactic bombers on a suicide mission deep into enemy territory, or the half-cat/half-spider scout creature conducting reconnaissance in a sinister forest.  Ellison uses the death of Bailey as a springboard to tell a tale which ranges across all of space and several different universes.  Various alien entities, some known as Thieves, others as soul-recruiters, steal the souls of living creatures.  The foremost soul-recruiter is known as the Succubus; he harvests souls from a small number of planets and is able to sell them at a tremendous profit, for his souls are the finest on the market.  The Earth is one of the planets where he obtains these exquisite souls, and the Euthanasia Centers are the device that facilitates his recruiting.  (On other planets the Succubus employs gladiatorial combat, bogus religions, drugs, trapped teleporters, and similar schemes.)

Bailey is one of the souls captured by the Succubus and put in the bodies of the Succubus's customers, and we follow Bailey's soul from one body to another.  Bailey is a unique personality, unlike any of the souls the Succubus has dealt with before: a rebel, he tries to undermine the rulers of the societies he finds himself in.  "The Region Between" is quite anti-authoritarian; in its 46 pages we encounter multiple bogus religions and exploitative elites.  

The pace is fast, and while I didn't have any emotional connection to the characters or plot I was curious to see what crazy image or event Ellison was going to unveil next; I found the story to be totally unpredictable, though each component part was logical and believable.  "The Region Between" is also the most mystical of the stories in Five Fates; while some of the others deal with identity transfers and noncorporeal beings, they seem pretty materialistic and don't use the word "soul" or appear to take anything supernatural seriously.  "The Region Between" includes a meditation on what God is, and in the final confrontation with the Succubus, Bailey turns out to be God, the First Cause and the creator of the universes, and the story ends when Bailey destroys all of creation.

A good story, leaving us, so far, with two good stories and two not so good ones.

"Of Death What Dreams" by Keith Laumer

I was just saying I should read more Keith Laumer, and so here is my chance.

William Bailey is an independent thinker, a rebellious type in a collectivized, caste-bound, authoritarian world.  Food, housing and clothing are rationed and distributed by the government, and everybody needs to carry around a stack of ID papers and work permits.  People are given ranks that reflect their social class: "Class Three Yellow" is kind of low, like a technician might have, but "Class One Blue" is that of an aristocrat, a "Cruster" who dwells "Topside."  Bailey feels life is hopeless, so he goes to the Euthanasia Center to be put to death, but then he wakes up outside the Center.  How did he escape?  He can't remember!

Bailey sneaks into the underground levels of the city where an entire society of people live "off the grid."  A skilled statistician, Bailey goes into business as a bookie.  In an amusing wrinkle, people in this world don't bet on sports, they bet on government-released economic and social statistics!  Bailey makes enough money (the underground levels are full of rich criminals) to get a fake ID and to have his brain programmed with the education and mannerisms a One Blue would have.  In this disguise he bluffs his way up up up, all the way to the top of the social order, hobnobbing with decadent aristocrats and then confronting a high level magistrate, Micael Drans.

Bailey suddenly realizes why he has engaged in this arduous adventure: he has been programmed to murder Drans.  A genius from the future cast his mind back in time to recruit Bailey for this assassination mission, because Drans is going to bungle First Contact with aliens and start an interstellar war!  Who was this genius who was able to send his thoughts back through time?  Drans himself!

Somewhat diminishing the drama of a man organizing his own murder, Bailey is persuaded that he need not kill Drans, because if Drans is a good enough guy to contract his own murder to stop a war, he must be a good enough guy not to cause the interstellar war.  But wait, didn't he cause the interstellar war?  If he hadn't caused the war, why would he even come up with the idea of hypnotizing a guy in the past to kill him before he can cause the war?  (These time travel stories rarely make sense to me.)

Despite the problem with the time travel ending, this was a competently told and entertaining story, so it gets my recommendation.  I have to admit I also enjoyed that a minor character in the story was named "Lord Monboddo," presumably after the pioneering evolutionary theorist and minor but memorable figure in the writings of James Boswell.  Was Laumer a Boswellian?  I'll never forget finding out in Number of the Beast that Heinlein was in the anti-Boswell/anti-Johnson camp, and secretly cherish the hope that Heinlein was just kidding.       

**********

With three stories I can vouch for, I can feel comfortable recommending Five Fates and proclaiming this literary experiment (presumably set into motion by Laumer) a success.

All five of the stories are basically anti-authoritarian, from Anderson's conventional center-right small-government thinking to Ellison's depiction of God as a deranged madman.  All the stories suggest that power is corrupting, and in each the Euthanasia Center is the symptom of a sick society and/or some kind of trap.  I was hoping one of the stories would take a sympathetic view of the Euthanasia Center.  Pioneering science fiction writer H. G. Wells seems like the kind of guy who might cotton to the idea of Euthanasia Centers, and I'd be surprised if he was alone.  Many SF writers have expressed worries about overpopulation and human impact on the environment--what better solution to these perceived problems than government-sponsored mass suicide?  In the same way that Theodore Sturgeon's story that appears to advocate incest was effective in part because it is so "out there," a story in which a network of Euthanasia Centers is a critical component of a utopia might have been worthwhile due to shock value alone.  No such story appears in Five Fates, however.   

(There also was no explicit "Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey" joke; I was kind of expecting such a joke.)

***********

The last page of my copy of the Paperback Library edition of Five Fates has an ad for "exciting science fiction novels by the most imaginative s-f writers in the world...." Considering the reliability of ad copy everywhere, we shouldn't be surprised that about half the advertised books are collections and anthologies of short stories. 

The line up advertized actually seems like a pretty strong one.  With the possible exception of the de Camp, I would give any of these nineteen books a try.  I own the listed edition of M33 in Andromeda, which includes some of Van Vogt's famous Space Beagle stories, as well as "The Weapon Shop" and "Siege of the Unseen," both of which I liked.  I've not read House That Stood Still but I want to.  The collections Monsters and The Proxy Intelligence also include stories I've enjoyed, and stories I would like to read.

I own all the Jane Gaskell books listed (well, sort of; see below), which together make up the Atlan Saga starring Princess Cija, who has a love affair with a reptile-man in a war-torn fantasy version of the pre-Columbian New World.  I bought them all at once at a used bookstore in Columbia, Missouri when my wife was attending some kind of conference at the college there.  While my wife was at the conference I went to the art museum at the university and sat in the local library reading Gene Wolfe's "King Rat" in the 2010 anthology celebrating Fred Pohl.  (I always enjoy myself when my wife has to attend a conference.) 

My copies of Atlan and The City are Paperback Library editions and have covers I quite like, but my edition of The Serpent is from Pocket and has a cover by Boris Vallejo.  In 2012 I read The Serpent and wrote a pretty hostile review of it at Amazon, claiming it was too slow and full of anachronisms.  Somewhat confusingly, the Pocket edition of The Serpent is apparently only half of the full novel, so I can't read Atlan or The City until I track down a full edition (like the one advertized here in Five Fates) or the DAW or Pocket editions of the second half of The Serpent, published as The Dragon.  (Even though I wasn't crazy about The Serpent, a series of books about weird sex in a dinosaur world deserves a second chance, am I right?)  

It is funny to see that Quark, the title of Delany and Hacker's anthology series focusing on experimental work, was trademarked.  I own and have read the entire contents of Quark/3, as followers of my blogging career may remember.

   

Five Fates, Part 1: Poul Anderson, Frank Herbert, & Gordon Dickson

At the big antiques mall just off Route 80 in Des Moines I spotted Five Fates, a 1971 paperback.  Having a big pile of unread books at home I hesitated before purchasing, but the odd gimmick behind the book was too compelling to resist, and I had never seen, or even heard, of this book before; if I left it behind would I ever see it again? Besides, Five Fates would provide an opportunity to read some important SF authors I had been avoiding due to lukewarm experiences with them, authors I should probably be more familiar with if I want to have a comprehensive view of the field.

I paid $1.50 for my copy of Five Fates, which was previously owned by a Paul Bradly or Blakely or Bealdy or something like that.  The book is 272 pages long.  I think the illustrations on the front and back covers are interesting and eye-catching, if not exactly beautiful.

The clever conceit of Five Fates is that five Hugo-winning SF authors were each given the same one-page prologue, and challenged to write a story from that little kernel.  In this prologue William Bailey goes to the Euthanasia Center where a brusque functionary injects him with something and directs him to his "slab."  First up is Poul Anderson.

"The Fatal Fulfillment" by Poul Anderson

William Bailey is a sociologist living in a world faced with an epidemic of mental illness.  How will the government and society deal with this terrible plague?  (In some ways, the idea behind this story is similar to the basic idea of Anderson's 1953 novel Brain Wave, in which the people and animals on Earth suddenly have greatly increased IQs.  In "The Fatal Fulfillment" the number of people who are insane suddenly increases.)

"The Fatal Fulfillment" is a series of vignettes, exploring various governmental/societal responses to the insanity epidemic.  The vignettes come off largely as conservative or libertarian satires of leftist or welfare-state liberal thinking; one depicts an authoritarian US government which tries to suppress mental instability by taking absolute control of the arts, limiting what books people can read and art they can see, and setting up public televisions which spit out vacuous pro-diversity propaganda.  Another depicts a society of pacifist environmentalist hippies; in another minorities strive to be categorized as victims by the government so they will be eligible for free benefits and exemptions from various taxes and regulations.  Anderson hits lots of the hot button issues you still hear about from small-government advocates today, like how the commerce clause is used to justify government overreach, public schooling stinks, and taxes inhibit economic growth.

In the end it turns out that each of these vignettes (including the prologue at the Euthanasia Center) is a simulation--William Bailey is hooked up to a computer and is examining different theories of how to deal with the mental illness epidemic.  (He's been in "The Matrix!")

I'm sympathetic to Anderson's politics, but as a story "The Fatal Fulfillment" is not very good.  There is no tension as soon as we realize Bailey is just in a dream world, and is not really in danger of being tortured or killed.  The characters are flat stereotypes, props to illustrate Anderson's arguments.  This is a story with no human feeling.  (A good contrast is Jack Vance's Wyst: Alastor 1716, also a satire of left-wing utopianism, but quite funny and a good adventure story.)

Disappointing.        

"Murder Will In" by Frank Herbert

In my youth I started Dune but abandoned it very quickly, and since then have never even tried anything by Herbert.  I tentatively plan to give Dune another try next year.  As I started "Murder Will In" I wondered if it might be so great that I would be inspired to shift Dune to the top of my schedule, and in fact the story is quite entertaining--I may be joining the ranks of Frank Herbert's fans!

William Bailey lives in a world in which man has surrendered much of his individualism to the collective and to machines.  Bailey is also the host of a parasitic non-corporeal extraterrestrial entity; this creature, the Tegas, has been on Earth for thousands of years (it recalls the Roman gladiatorial arena, for example), moving from host to host, leaving a host as it dies.  For untold ages before its arrival on Earth the creature lived in hosts on other planets.

Herbert comes up with various rules that govern the Tegas's ability to move from one host to another; the new host has to be within 20 meters, the Tegas can only survive in a dead host for a certain number of seconds, the new host can only be accessed if it is experiencing a certain level of emotional activity, etc.  Like the rules about sunlight and silver and garlic and running water in a vampire story, these rules introduce danger into the life of a potentially invincible creature, and the Tegas runs into some real trouble in the Euthanasia Center in which William Bailey dies.  The Tegas has still more trouble when it becomes apparent that the technocratic ruling class of Earth suspects its existence, and tries to hunt it down.

"Murder Will In" reminded me of a Van Vogt story, in which secret forces struggle and a guy has weird powers and grows into those powers, though Herbert's writing is more clear and elegant than my man Van's sometimes tortured prose.  Herbert also manages to pull off the "sense of wonder" ending so many classic SF stories strive to achieve; at the end of  "Murder Will In" the Tegas has survived the challenges posed by the Euthanasia Center and Earth's rulers, learned a lot about its abilities, and decided to use its power to change Earth society, to revive individualism.  The story leaves us not with a sense of finality, but of exciting, perhaps endless, future possibilities.

Really good.

"Maverick" by Gordon R. Dickson

Gordon Dickson's version of William Bailey is a kind of trouble-making individualist in a caste-bound, technocratic world.  It is a world in which there is no war, poverty or crime, but also no freedom, and Bailey has "broken the Self-Protection rules, time and again."  He's lost caste and wasted all his money, so the powers that be want to put him in an institution or execute him.  (So far all the stories have been attacks on overbearing government and collectivism--none of these authors seems willing to embrace all the wonderful possibilities of having a local Euthanasia Center!)

The authorities give Bailey one last chance--if he can accomplish a dangerous mission they will restore his caste and give him a sizable pension!  It seems that the New Orleans Euthanasia Center keeps having its dead bodies stolen in some way nobody can figure out.  The government wants Bailey to go to the Center, and be poisoned and put on a slab so everybody will think he is dead.  He will be supplied with an antidote pill, and after he takes it in the privacy of the morgue he can maybe figure out what is happening to the corpses.

Bailey learns that what is happening is that aliens from a planet hundreds of light years away have opened a portal between their planet and Earth, and are taking the cadavers.  These aliens are similar to humans, but have wings and hollow bones and different sized eyes and different numbers of fingers and toes.  Perhaps most important, their society is based on honor and loyalty, not authority and planning like Earth's.  Bailey's consciousness leaves his Earth body and ends up in the body of a birdman gladiator, after a brief stint in the body of a birdman troublemaker who, like Bailey back on Earth, has squandered his resources and been a disappointment to his caste.

This story is pretty boring.  It feels slow and tedious, even during the fight scenes.  There are many scenes consisting of bird people talking, including a long hearing before the avian people's advisory council that is supposed to be the climax of the tale.   At the hearing everybody tries to figure out if Bailey is really from Earth and how his mind has been moving across space and between bodies, and Dickson even includes three charts made of boxes and arrows to illustrate the course and final destination of various people's minds and bodies.  They look like a decision-making flowchart or something from a political science journal article.  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Dickson's writing style is not good.  Dickson spends too much time on boring descriptions of rooms and on how people's facial expressions or eye movements indicate their emotions.  Dickson uses the same words and phrases again and again instead of varying them; for example, every time a character abruptly stops walking or talking, the author uses the verb "to check."  This is distracting, and makes the story feel like a draft that was not revised.

There are a few clever things in the story.  The winged people think life on Earth must be horrible because Earthlings can't fly, so they call Earth "The Planet of the Damned" and christen Bailey "Bill duDamned," which I found amusing.  The scenes in which Bailey learns to fly are not bad.  

Dickson tries to do a Van Vogt "sense of wonder" thing, like Herbert does.  Bailey in a way that is not explained develops super-vision that allows him to detect if a body contains a different identity than it started out with, and he can also see through walls.  In the end of the story he sets on the course of reforming both Earth and bird people societies, tempering the collectivism of the former and the extreme individualism of the latter.  He also reveals that he has the power to travel to any of dozens of planets in the universe.  Unfortunately, the story is so lame that at the end I didn't feel a thrilling sense of limitless possibilities, but rather relief that the story (75 long pages) was finally finished. 

The components and themes of "Maverick"--individualism and freedom, exploring a new world with a different society and a new body that enables you to fly--could definitely be the basis of a good story, but Dickson's sluggish pacing and poor style ruin the whole thing.    

**********

Frank Herbert delivers the goods, but Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson have let the team down.  Hopefully Keith Laumer and Harlan Ellison can put in winning performances and leave use with a score of 3-2.  (And maybe in Ellison or Laumer the under-appreciated Euthanasia Center will find a supporter?)  We'll see in Part 2.