Earthblood by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown

“I’m all Terry,” Roan said. “Raff was only my foster father. Ma wasn’t really human. They lived all their lives in a garbage dump on account of me and Dad got killed on account of me."

Back in 2022 I read two novels by Rosel George Brown, Sibyl Sue Blue and the sequel, Waters of Centaurus.  They weren't bad, but better was Brown's short story "David's Daddy," which I read in 2023.  Brown died at a tragically young age and only produced one other novel, a collaboration with Keith Laumer that was serialized in If in 1966 titled Earthblood.  As for Laumer, I have blogged about quite a few things by him and it is a real mixed bag; plenty of stories I liked, but also plenty of stories I judged filler and others I thought a waste of time.

Earthblood seems to have been a success, seeing reprint again and again, including in Swedish, Portuguese and German, as well as a Bluejay edition with many illustrations by Alan Gutierrez.  When I blogged about some of the other stories in an issue of If which includes a segment of the novel, one of my well-read commenters had nice things to say about Earthblood.  So let's snag a PDF scan of one of the paperback editions of the book (the Berkeley 1968 printing with a Richard Powers cover, one of, in my opinion, Powers' least effective covers) and check out this piece of work, one component of the regrettably brief catalog of Brown's fiction and of Laumer's large body of published work.  (I'll note here that this novel seems to take place in the same universe as the Bolo books, and Bolos make a brief appearance.)

The prologue introduces us to Raff, a human man, and his wife Bella, a Yill, some kind of almost-human alien with blue skin and eyes with vertical pupils.  Their species are only two among the many intelligent races that make up a chaotic interstellar civilization.  Raff and Bella want to parent a human boy, and so purchase on the grey market from a bird-man a human embryo, purportedly that of some kind of aristocrat with excellent genes; their purchase incurs tremendous financial sacrifice and Raff and Bella have to engage in a bloody fight with a multicultural gang of aliens who also want the superior human embryo

Bella has the embryo implanted in her womb, and she and Raff raise the boy, naming him Roan; the novel's 25 numbered chapters relate to us Roan's exciting life and career.  We follow the kid's growth in a poor ghetto inhabited by pterosaur-people.  Throughout the novel, and in these early parts especially, Laumer and Brown do a solid job making all the characters feel real--they exhibit believable emotions and behave in understandable ways and participate in meaningful relationships with each other.  The humans and the Yills (Raff and Bella have a Yill slave, one of the aliens they outfought when they secured Roan's embryo) have psychologies we readers can identify with, while the bird people and pterosaur people and fish people and lizard people and on and on have psychologies that are quite alien but make sense.

As Roan learns galactic history, so do we.  The humans of Terra were the first to develop space travel and they mastered the galaxy, founding an empire to maintain order among the many intelligent species which gained space travel by emulating humanity.  Raff and Bella's Yill slave asserts that only humans could have built the first space ship, and Raff just out and out tells Roan that humans are superior.  This superiority is demonstrated when we see Roan dealing with the other kids in the neighborhood.  The pterodactyl-kids goof on Roan because he doesn't have wings and try to bully him, but Roan is able to dominate them when he so chooses thanks to his superior ability to use logic to manipulate his environment.  When cruel upper-class lizard-people kids come to abuse the dim-witted pterosaur-kids, Roan tries to protect the pterosaur-kids, taking on the natural role of the human race, that of maintaining order and meting out justice among the lesser races.  (We are reminded of the lines in the sixth book of the Aeneid that assert that the role of Rome is to rule the world, to spare the conquered and battle down the proud.)   

Lately, though, Terra and its people have faced some tough times.  Extragalactic aliens, like five thousand years ago, invaded the Earth space empire and defeated its space navy and put a blockade on Terra, and nobody has left or landed on Earth for all those centuries.  Immediately upon hearing this, patriotic readers like myself are hoping Roan is going to lead the campaign to make Earth great again by sending these extragalactic bastards, the Niss, to hell and putting mankind and its buddies back where we belong, on top of the heap!  At the same time, twist endings being so common in SF, we are worried that Raff and the Yill slave are full of BS and that by the end of the story Roan will realize that Terra was evil and the Niss are the good guys--this generates some dramatic tension as we advance further into the 285-page novel.

In his late teens, Roan sneaks into a travelling circus without a ticket, gets nabbed, and tries to fight his way out.  Raff comes to help, but gets killed and the circus carries off Roan to other planets--the tentacled owner of the circus has never seen a pure-strained human before (most humans today beyond Terra are mutants or crossbreeds, genetically engineered to better fit alien environments) and wants to pay Roan to be a freak and wire walker in his circus.  (Roan again and again in the novel exhibits great agility and speed.)  In the way a guy today might have a hobbyist's interest in ancient Rome, and admire the accomplishments of the Roman Empire, this alien is a Terra buff.

Aboard the circus ship we get the idea that the galactic civilization, bereft of Terran leadership, has grown technologically stagnant and culturally decadent.  There is no music, for example, and the spaceships everybody flies around are relics from the time before the Niss attack that largely operate automatically.  Among the carnies and geeks, Roan demonstrates how different pure-strain Terrans are from aliens and from mutant humans.  For one thing, Terrans have empathy and a sense of justice, while other races are fatalistic and casually cruel.  Roan gets revenge on the fish-man who killed Raff and gets a human(ish) girlfriend, an erotic dancer.  When Roan worries someone will figure out he killed the fishman, his lover suggests nobody cares if some working-class brute got killed--Roan, she says is thinking like a Terran.  Similarly, Roan insists on helping an injured carny when everyone else is willing to leave him to die.  

Perhaps more interesting and "sciency" than the idea that pure-blood Earthers are more empathic and moral than aliens and muties is the idea that, for the most part, the many nonhuman alien races act on instinct--they know how to fly or whatever without study or education while, in contrast, humans must learn new things and need to practice new skills to master them.

The circus ship is taken by a pirate ship; all but two of the carnies--Roan and a hulking metallic professional fighter--die in the fight, crushed by the acceleration as the automatic vessel engages in evasive maneuvers.  The captain of the pirates is a human of pure or almost pure strain; he is a sort of privateer or long distance scout connected to the far distant remnants of the Terran space navy and he aspires to put the human race back in charge of the anarchic galaxy, and is searching the galaxy for pure-strain humans like Roan.  Initially Roan is bitter that the pirates killed all his colleagues (including his girlfriend) but a friendship with the pirate captain is cemented after the two human men save each others' lives during fights (this novel is chock-full of fights) and Roan visits an abandoned human city, largely intact after 5,000 years because human-built robots have maintained it, and sees how awesome the Terran Empire must have been.

For five years the two humans and their alien and mutant crew search for other humans and collect supplies by raiding aliens.  They come upon a rare Niss ship and their vessel is crippled in the fight; again those who have become Roan's closest friends are killed, but Roan and some of the mutant crew escape the wreck in a boat and board the miles-long Niss ship, which has been running on automatic for thousands of years, its Niss crew nothing but bones.  During the campaign which saw the Niss, in what now appears to have been a Pyrrhic victory, overthrow Terran rule of the galaxy, this Niss vessel captured a smaller Terran ship and Roan finds that this Earth ship is fully functional.  Roan commandeers it and he and his motley crew head to the planet where Roan grew up, he hoping to find his foster mother Bella the Yill, and her slave Yill, still alive and able to tell him who his genetic parents were.

Mom killed herself after Raff was killed and Roan kidnapped, but the slave is still alive.  Following clues, Roan and his pirates make a decade-long journey to Alpha Centauri, committing acts of piracy on the way.  Through trickery and violence, Roan and three of his senior pirates infiltrate the rump Terran space navy.  The current Navy is totally unconnected from Earth, which they think is behind an impenetrable Niss blockade, and the officers of the Terran navy prove themselves, in the main, to be brutal and incompetent bigots, no better than the ruthless and violent aliens and mutants Roan has spent his life interacting with.  The navy officers revere pure-strain humans, but most of them and their men are themselves mutants and crossbreeds.  Roan learns that he, as an embryo, was a rare specimen meant to be breeding stock that was stolen and fought over. 

Almost immediately, Roan learns that the ranks of the navy are riven, that a coup against the Admiral is planned, and he has to choose which side of the divide to join--which side is more likely to get Roan to Terra, where he is sure lies his destiny?  In the aftermath of the coup attempt, Roan is imprisoned in a slimy pit where he has to fight a rat and pass many days in a fever, near starvation.  His pirate comrades rescue him and they go to Earth, finding the Niss blockade ships little more than lifeless hulks.

At first Earth appears to be something of a paradise, with intelligent talking dogs and beautiful pure strain humans living in orderly and bucolic surroundings, in glass towers among lovely gardens.  But the upper-class Terrans are disturbingly feminized and there is a rigid class system in which some Terrans are docile dim-witted slaves, doing the work that in earlier ages was done by horses, like pulling carts, and others barely eke out an existence in slums built of huts among crumbling ruins of ancient cities.  Roan hopes to inspire the upper-class Terrans with the knowledge that Terra is no longer cut off from the larger galaxy, and tries to warn them that the corrupt remnants of the Navy, when they realize the Niss blockade is toothless, may try to raid or conquer Earth, but the upper-class Terrans are totally decadent, interested only in pleasure, unambitious and unable to defend themselves--the dogs, which have hands for paws and can walk upright, do their policing and fighting for them.

Roan learns that he is the son or clone of a Terran space war hero of thousands of years ago, a man of the formative crusading era in which the Terran Empire was established whose frozen body was discovered a few decades ago.  (The cycles of history stuff in Earthblood, and the idea that people on the frontier are hardy, brave and resourceful while people back in the metropole are decadent and perverted reminds me of similar material in Poul Anderson's work, and to a lesser extent in Robert Heinlein's.)  Several of the Terran chapters of Laumer and Brown's novel consist largely of parties and performances that demonstrate how deracinated and immoral the virtually immortal Terrans are; one shindig is the vandalism of an art museum where works of art familiar to us readers like the Mona Lisa are destroyed one by one, and one performance is a striptease in which the woman after shedding her clothes attempts to commit suicide with a knife.  Earlier in the novel it was brought home to us that Terrans have a will to survive that aliens lack, and Laumer and Brown highlight how far native Terrans have fallen by suggesting they have lost that will to live and taken the attitude toward death we saw among aliens.

Roan interrupts the dancer's suicide attempt and escapes into a disgusting slum in a ruin with the help of the dancer (our latest love interest, again an erotic dancer) and the dog assigned to Roan, who, dog-fashion, has become loyal to Roan over the native-born Terrans.  For a year they hide in the slum while police dogs hunt them.  Finally, Roan decides that he can hide no longer and has a showdown with the leader of the police dogs.  Roan gets the lower-class slum Terrans to rise against the dogs and the upper-class humans, and at just the right moment Roan's pirate comrades arrive in a Navy space battleship they seized and over the course of the last year crewed.  Roan and his people overthrow the decadent upper-class Terrans and we are lead to believe they will unite the pure-strain Terrans, the intelligent dogs, and the mutants of the pirates and the Navy into a decent polity and lay the groundwork for a new Terran Empire that will spread order and justice throughout the galaxy.

I can moderately recommend Earthblood, which is well-written on a sentence-by-sentence basis and has lots of action and lots of relationships and tackles interesting ideas, but it is good, not great, as there are problems when looked at as a whole that render it less than the sum of its parts. 

For one thing, the novel feels long, partly because the same sort of thing happens again and again--similar gory fights, imprisonments and rescues; Roan proving how fast he is again and again; people getting killed in the course of trying to help Roan again and again; people holding each other at gunpoint again and again; people being maimed again and again; mortally wounded people begging to be finished off again and again (as I have suggested, welcoming death is a recurring motif of the novel.)  At 285 pages, Earthblood is long compared to the SF novels I typically read, though I hear that 21st-century SF novels are typically even longer.  For people who read SF novels to meet likable characters and get cozy with them and spend pleasant times with them, long novels probably make sense.  If you read SF to encounter strange ideas and find surprises and experience awe and horror, a long novel is less welcome--the first time a guy discovers something amazing and almost gets killed and sees his friends and enemies torn asunder or burned to a crisp, it shakes you up, but if the same dude has those same sorts of capers again and again it loses its effect on you, or at least on me.

Another problem with Earthblood is that the milieus and scenarios Roan finds himself in get less interesting as the novel progresses.  Being the only human kid growing up in a pteranodon-man ghetto among flying people who are oppressed by haughty lizard-people is strange and compelling, as are Roan's relationships with his parents and all these reptilian aliens--this stuff is all fresh and exciting.  Running away to the alien circus is also kind of interesting, but not something we haven't experienced before.  Space pirates is even less novel.  And a decadent Earth doesn't feel fresh or exciting at all, and on Terra Roan doesn't have the affecting relationships he had earlier--Raff and Bella in the pterodactyl-people ghetto, and Roan's first dancing lover and his giant metallic friend among the carnies, are a lot more memorable than the Terran dancer and the talking dog.  Think of how King Kong, Dorothy Gale, and Luke Skywalker, the heroes of your favorite movies, get into increasingly crazier adventures in increasingly bizarre locales as their stories progress--poor Roan's career moves in the opposite direction, each segment of his novel being more and more of a SF cliche.

Still, a pretty good novel.

Galaxy, Feb '68: R A Lafferty and K Laumer

We read three stories from the February 1968 issue of Galaxy on our last outing (those by Poul Anderson and Fritz Leiber as well as a collab between Terry Carr and Alexei Panshin) and my plan for today was to read three more, the contributions of Brian Aldiss, R. A. Lafferty and Keith Laumer, but it turns out I already read the Aldiss, "Total Environment," back in 2016.  (2016 MPorcius liked it, even if 2025 MPorcius can't remember it.)  So we're just going to read the Lafferty and the Laumer and call it a day.

"How They Gave it Back" by R. A. Lafferty

It has been a long time since I blogged about R. A. Lafferty, but there seems to be demand for such content, so let's give this story a spin.  Besides here in Galaxy, you can read "How They Gave it Back" in Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?, a collection available not only in English, but also Dutch and French.

As regular readers of MPorcius Fiction Log already know, I loved living in New York City and not a day has passed since I left Gotham behind without regret.  But I recognize that the Big Apple is not for everybody and that a significant proportion of its constituting components are a fair target for the most withering of criticism.  So it doesn't bother me that Lafferty's "How They Gave it Back" is a sort of extravagant satire on how bad New York might get; the story is also a good example of the macabre and gruesome strain of Lafferty's humor and a reflection of his interest in Native American culture.  I often complain about satires and joke stories, but in our last episode I gave a passing grade to a joke story by Carr and Panshin and today I am giving a thumbs up to Lafferty's joke story here--it actually made me laugh.

We learn over the course of the story that, in the future it depicts, Manhattan has been taken over by violent gangs intent on killing each other and so the rest of he world has isolated the island.  The people of Manhattan would starve if they didn't have a supply of hostages which they trade for periodic food trains from the mainland; as our story begins, this supply of hostages is running out, putting pressure on the man who is mayor.

Few are those who want to be mayor of such a disaster area, and the current mayor, a black man who earlier in life harbored dreams of New York's potential, is chained to his desk in his office in the rat-filled and fire-prone city government building, and there are to be no further elections.  (One of the ways this story is "edgy" is this imagery of an African-American in chains, forced to work an unenviable job.)  The high-tech lock on the chain can detect psychic waves or whatever, and will open and free the mayor from bondage if he manages to legitimately offload the problem that is Manhattan to someone else by selling it to them for fair value, but who would buy this decrepit and dangerous nightmare island?

Three men in business suits with serious academic and/or professional credentials arrive who do want to buy Manhattan.  More important than their degrees and licenses are their ethnicities--in their veins flows the blood of American Indians--and their avocation--they are passionate hunters.  These sportsmen want to buy the island and use it as a game preserve where they and their friends can hunt the gang members and other degenerate people who now make up its population!  The three Indians pay for Manhattan in this future just what the Dutch paid the Indians back in the early 17th century (at least according to Lafferty's story): hatchets, smooth bore firearms, gun powder, and various other goods.  The bloody-minded current inhabitants of New York eagerly take up these weapons, which is all to the better in the eyes of the new owners, who like their game to put up a fight.  The mayor is liberated, but can he live long enough on this island of violence to affect an escape?  The story ends with a brief passage depicting "Ultimate Justice," apparently Cthulhu-like space monsters, who approve of the sale, and some old time New Yorkers who offer the story's perhaps superfluous punchline.            

A fun story that cheerfully presents a cynical view of mankind and such ideas as fair trade, freedom, the law, and justice.  

"The Big Show" by Keith Laumer

There was a time I owned the 1972 paperback collection of which "The Big Show" is the title story, but I don't think I ever read this piece--perhaps I avoided it because I suspected it was a joke story.    

And a joke story it is, a long, boring, mundane and obvious one of six chapters, a satire of TV and a cold war spy spoof.  Sleep-inducing!  

It is the future, when people receive a UBI and so have time to watch 300 TV channels!  Our hero Lew is an actor, star of a family sitcom which runs like twelve hours a day.  Lew has to split his time between his real family and his TV family, and he loses his job because he mixes up the names and extracurricular activities of his real kids and his TV kids.  The same day and for similar reasons, his wife divorces him.  We get lots of banal jokes about how sponsors control the TV networks and about the power of the screen actors' guild.  

In Chapter II, Lew is in Antarctica; thrown off the sitcom, he was offered a role in a documentary on the Eskimo.  (It's a joke, son!)  We get jokes about a robot polar bear which acts as a remote control camera (Lew at first thinks it is real and is attacking him) and about how the snow is fake and so forth.  The chapter ends with the revelation that Lew is just an extra in this Eskimo thing--he has really been brought down here to conduct a secret mission for the CIA.

The Soviet Union has, allegedly, set up an illegal spy station in a nature preserve in the South Pacific where live cannibals and head hunters.  The CIA needs a skilled actor to get in there, infiltrate the cannibal tribe, and pinpoint the location of the Soviet installation so it can be bombed.  Lew is the perfect candidate because he once was the star of a secret agent TV show.

Once on the jungle island, Lew is quickly captured and quickly escapes.  One of Chapter III's jokes is that from a distance Lew mistakes a pizza his captors are eating for a topographical map of the island.  He rescues a fellow prisoner, a beautiful native woman, but in Chapter IV she takes off her make up and we learn she is not a native after all but the daughter of a terrible villain.  Lew is taken captive again.  In Chapter V we get acquainted with the villain, an old man.  A former TV star, he feels TV is so bad for individuals and society that he has set up a base on this island to launch a rocket that will jam all TV transmission as it orbits the Earth.  Lew considers calling in the air strike on this rocket's launch pad in order to save TV.  But then he fortuitously learns that the USSR has set up a new super powerful TV transmission center that will drown out all other TV broadcasts and leave TV-addicted Americans and everybody else in the world no shows to watch but communist propaganda!  Lew decides to let the jammer rocket go up.  TV is over!

In Chapter VI, with no TV, Lew and the other people on the island are bored, so they begin working on a way to create and transmit TV shows locally.

Bad filler: the style bland, the pacing slow, the plot and the jokes tired.  Besides the aforementioned The Big Show, "The Big Show" has been reprinted in a 2002 collection of Laumer humor pieces.

**********

Have all the joke stories I have been reading in Galaxy left me yearning for the blood and guts of Weird Tales?  Has reading an economical and fun R. A. Lafferty story inspired me to read an entire Lafferty collection?  Stay tuned to find out!  

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.

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

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

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

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

"Thunderhead" (1967)

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

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

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

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

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

"The Devil You Don't" (1970)  

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

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

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

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

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

Keith Laumer: "The Planet Wreckers," "The Body Builders," and "The Lawgiver"

In 1976, Pocket Books published The Best of Keith Laumer, a collection of nine stories with an intro by our beloved hero Barry Malzberg.  Dated "Teaneck, N.J., August 1975," Malzberg's introduction suggests that while the Retief stories are "fascinating" and "amazing" and enjoy a popularity which is "immense," they are not Laumer's most serious and important work, and there are no Retief stories in The Best of Keith Laumer.  Let's read from the 1980 printing  of The Best of Keith Laumer available at the internet archive and see how far we can agree with the sage of Teaneck when he says that Laumer is "serious and gifted" and that his work shows "range, versatility and technical sophistication." 

We've actually already read and discussed three of the stories in The Best of Keith Laumer, "Hybrid," "Cocoon" and "A Relic of War."  That leaves six, so let's wrestle down three today and leave three for next time.  Among today's selections are two stories Malzberg particularly recommends in his intro, "The Lawgiver" and "The Body Builders," but we start with the first story in the book, "The Planet Wreckers."   

"The Planet Wreckers" (1967)

"The Planet Wreckers" debuted in Frederik Pohl's Worlds of Tomorrow, in an issue with an article about Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey ("next year's sf super-movie") and an ad for a jigsaw puzzle map of the moon.  Based on my 30 seconds of research on ebay, I'm saying this puzzle looks a lot easier than the jigsaw puzzle of Frank Frazetta's The Silver Warriors which I have been grappling with for weeks.  

I face "The Planet Wreckers" with some trepidation because it was reprinted in Berkley Medallion's 1968 It's A Mad, Mad, Mad Galaxy and Baen's 2002 Keith Laumer: The Lighter Side, leading me to fear it is a joke story.  Generally, I find joke stories annoying.  But let's press on!  

Sure enough, this is a humor piece, 33 pages long.  A lock and safe salesman staying in an uncomfortable hotel in a small town gets mixed up in interstellar crime and espionage.  A bunch of alien filmmakers hope to trigger various natural calamities on Earth--an earthquake, a meteor strike, etc.--to record for their latest disaster movie.  A lone alien P.I. hired by the galactic game and wildlife service is on Earth to stop them, but she has been captured and chained up in this very hotel.  Our hero, using his professional skills, liberates her and then accompanies her--clad in his pyjamas--as she tries--and mostly fails--to stop the natural disasters.  He rides a flying saucer, participates in fire fights, witnesses the wrecking of San Francisco.  Thankfully, New York City is preserved by the salesman's quick thinking and good luck, and not only does our hero become a galactic movie star, but hooks up with the female detective--when she takes off her monstrous alien disguise she is revealed to be almost human and absolutely gorgeous!

Acceptable filler with lots of violence and death and lots of obvious jokes.  

"The Body Builders" (1966)

Here's another story that was reprinted in It's A Mad, Mad, Mad Galaxy and Keith Laumer: The Lighter Side.  Where's Keith Laumer: The Grimdark Side when you need it? 

The style of "The Body Builders" is a parody of hard boiled detective fiction.  Our narrator is a tough guy who is trying to avoid marrying some dame and being pushed around by other tough guys and says stuff like "The idea left me cold as an Eskimo's tombstone."  The setting of the story is the future, a time when a segment of the population, of which the narrator is a member, prefers to store their bodies safely in government facilities where they are kept alive by an IV drip and live life through a remote sensory hook up to a robot body.  Your brain inside your cold inert body controls the robot body remotely almost as if it is your own; if you have enough money you can get some sweet accessories for your robot body, like one that allows it to eat food and transmit the taste back to your brain.  Wealthy people have different bodies, entire fleets of them, each appropriate for a different occasion.

The robot bodies in the story are based on those of famous celebrities; Laumer just gives the last names of the models, so for us 21st-century readers "The Body Builders" serves as a kind of test of our knowledge of mid-century pop culture.  I figured the "Astaire" and "Arcano" models owned by the narrator must be Fred and Eddie, and that the "Liston" and "Wayne" bodies of some thugs were Sonny and John; a comic relief character's "Cantor" must be Eddie.  I had trouble with the lead villain's "Sullivan," but have settled on the theory that the reference is to pioneering boxer John L. Sullivan.  Women in the story own Dietrichs and Pickfords, no doubt Marlene and Mary.    

(Conservative types who reject using robot bodies and walk around in their real bodies are called "Organo-Republicans" or just "Orggies," and some of them use cosmetic surgery and appliances like contact lenses and toupees to improve their appearance.  Also, Bolos are mentioned, so I guess this story is in the same universe as Retief's Bolo tales.) 

The plot:  Our narrator is a successful gladiator.  (As we are well aware, SF is full of people fighting in the arena.)  A thug in a Sullivan picks a fight with him in a night club; duels between people in robot bodies are common in this milieu and the Sullivan wants one immediately.  Our hero is operating his Arcano body, which is too small to really fight head-to-head with a Sullivan, so he flees to get his Davy Crockett body, and there is a chase scene as the John Wayne-clad thug pursues him.  It turns out the brute in the Sullivan is a government official, so our hero, now in his Crockett, ends up in prison.  His career will collapse if he isn't at a fight scheduled for tonight versus Mysterious Marvin the Hooded Holocaust, so he jumps out a window--the Crockett is destroyed and the main character is in control of his real body again.  He leaves the government storage facility and goes to the arena to fight in his flesh and blood body!  Mysterious Marvin the Hooded Holocaust is of course in a powerful robot body, but unexpected advantages of a real human body lead to a triumph for the main character.  Not only has he beat the villain (Mysterious Marvin the Hooded Holocaust turns out to be that government swine who tried to swat him with his Sullivan), he swears off robot bodies forever after experiencing the excitement of interfacing with life directly, and sets a date to marry not the Dietrich-clad woman who was chasing him, but a nice Organo-Republican girl.  It is also suggested that his example is going to end the fad for using robot bodies and institute the kind of paradigm shift we often see in SF stories.

I'm skeptical of joke stories, but "Mysterious Marvin the Hooded Holocaust" is actually funny, the pace of the story is fast, and Laumer actually does a decent job of speculating about and dramatizing all the little ins and outs of the operation of the robot bodies, so I can "The Body Builders" a mild recommendation.  Presumably our pal Barry liked it in part because it depicts technology chipping away at our humanity, turning us into machines, one of his favored themes.   

"The Body Builders" made its debut in Galaxy, and has been translated into Italian, German and Dutch.

"The Lawgiver" (1970)

"The Lawgiver" first appeared in Harry Harrison's The Year 2000, an anthology of new stories set (you guessed it) in the year 2000.

In the hardcover edition of The Year 2000 available at the internet archive, Laumer's story is listed under the heading "Overpopulation," and, just like the Fred Saberhagen novel we just read, Love Conquers All, "The Lawgiver" is set in a world in which fears of overpopulation have lead the government to force menstruators into having abortions against their will. 

"The Lawgiver" is an extravagant melodrama, full of tragic ironies and dramatic coincidences.  It is the future of self-driving cars and videophones and towering skyscrapers.  Senator Eubanks has spent his career fighting for laws mandating abortions as a means of staving off overpopulation and associated famine and starvation.  Just recently he finally achieved success and saw his law passed--but only narrowly!  As the story begins he is on the videophone, arguing with a constituent who thinks a fetus is a live human being with a soul; Eubanks and this woman repeat the same arguments for and against abortion that you have heard a hundred times already and will likely hear a hundred times more in just the next week.  Then a second womb-carrier enters the story, busting into Eubank's apartment on the 76th floor and exclaiming that she is in labor with Senator Eubanks's grandson!  The baby could come any minute!

Will Senator Eubanks stick to his principles and have his own grandson destroyed mere moments before he is born?  Will this unhealthy uterus-owner survive the ordeal of childbirth in the Senator's apartment?  Where the hell is the baby's father, Ron Eubanks, and will this love 'em and leave 'em type have a change of heart and drive back to the capital so fast in hopes of reuniting with the mother of his son that his manually-operated car flies off the road and he suffers a life-threatening injury?

I'm judging "The Lawgiver" barely acceptable.  There is nothing innovative or surprising or exciting about it; it is soap-opera stuff you've already experienced married to arguments about abortion that aren't new, either.  

It feels like filler to me, but "The Lawgiver" has been reprinted in several Laumer collections as well as a 1976 anthology that looks like a textbook that was inflicted on students.

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These stories demonstrate that Keith Laumer is a competent writer, but they are no big deal.  Maybe we'll be more impressed by the other three stories in The Best of Keith Laumer?  Stay tuned to find out!

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 McCaffrey'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?

 
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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.