"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.