| Cloggie: booklog: Keith Laumer |
Time Trap
Keith Laumer
143 pages.
Next to his Bolo and Retief stories, Laumer is probably best know for the various time travel, alternate history and parallel world stories he has written. This is one of them, but not his best. All over time, various people get caught in time circles, forever reliving one day. Our hero manages to break throught he circles, moving from one "stage" to another, finally revealing all the secrets in a series of ever greater revelations.
There are better novels to showcase Laumer's strenghts on this subject: try for example Worlds of the Imperium or Assignment in Nowhere
Nine By Laumer
Keith Laumer
222 pages.
Contains:
A fair overview of Laumer's talents as a short story writer. As often with him, there's a fair bit of paranoia evident, as well as playing with the reader's expectations.
Assignment in Nowhere
Keith Laumer
143 pages
published in 1968
I've read this novel before, in Dutch. I've always liked Laumer, he's one of the better writers of light sf adventure novels, of a sort not often written anymore.
Chaos was spreading all over the world and it seemed Johnny Curlon was at the centre of it. Not only is the mob on his heels, now strange clad men with wierd weapons try to kill him. What he doesn't know is that only he can save the entire space-time continuum from succombing to chaos...
Swiftly told, swiftly read, nowhere does the plot stall. Recommended for light summer reading.
Dinosaur Beach
Keith Laumer
151 pages
published in 1971
This is yet another Laumer novel I first read in a Dutch translation. For some reason, most of Laumer's work which was translated to Dutch was not his more popular Retief stories, but were his time travel/alternate history books. Dinosaur Beach is a classic example of the former.
Ravel is a Nexx Central agent, a fourth generation time travellers organisation dedicated to cleaning up the wreckage left in the timestream by previous timetravellers. On his return from a routine mission to 1930ties America, something goes horribly wrong.
In a series of time jumps, loops, paradoxes and cosmic revelations our view of what's really going on keeps getting turned around, upside down and inside out. As regular readers of Laumer may know, this is often the case in his novels. What he does here is to keep the action and revelations coming at such a fast pace you're dazzled with bullshit as a reader.
A Trace of Memory
Keith Laumer
174 pages
published in 1962
If there's one writer who mastered the art of writing fast moving, entertaining adventure science fiction, it has to be Keith Laumer. He just sucks you in whatever wild adventure he has cooked up this time and before you know it an hour has gone past, your beer is warm and you've finished the story. Case in point: A Trace of Memory. I had read this years before, in Dutch and remember liking it. The question was if I would still like it, rereading it in English. Fortunately, as with all of Laumer's novels, I did.
A Trace of Memory uses one of Laumer's standard twists, that of an alien stranded on Earth, possesing supranatural powers but unknowing of his origin, having to rewin his birthright. (Laumer's heroes are rarely female...) In this case, there's a slight twist, as the tough but down on his luck hero is not the alien in question, but was hired by him to regain his past.
The hero of A Trace of Memory is a man named Legion, an ex-army man down on his luck, sunk so far that he's contemplating holding up a newsstand, when he spies an advertisement in the local paper:
Help wanted: soldier of fortune seeks companion in arms to share unusual adventure. Foster, Box 19.
It would be false to say Legion leaps at this opportunity to redeem himself, but circumstances beyond his control force him to take up Foster's offer. Before the adventure can even get underway however, they have to flee Foster's fortress like home, running away from what Foster calls the Hunters: terrying and deadly creatures of light. Things don't get better for Legion when the stress of this prematurely starts Foster's rejuvenation process -causing him to lose his memories as well. And now not only the Hunters are on his trail, but also the police for the murder of Foster...
And that only covers the first forty pages. Okay, it starts a bit slow, but from then on the sotry accelerates and it isn't long before Legion is on an Alein planet, fighting not only for his own life, but also to bring freedom back to its population.
I told you Laumer was good at this sort of thing.