The Long Twilight
Keith Laumer
222 pages
published in 1969

Keith Laumer is one of the authors I devoured dozens of books from in my personal golden age of science fiction, first in Dutch translation, later in English. That's because he had a knack for writing gripping, fun adventure stories that pushed all my sf buttons. Time travel, parallel worlds, supersecret superhuman agents who don't know who they are themselves, that's the stuff science fiction is made off when you're twelve (and still is when you're (at least nominally) an adult). His is a type of science fiction no longer being written, as it no longer seems to be commercially viable. Short novels you can read in less than two hours are no longer a good buy when the average paperback barely gets you change back from a tenner. No matter how much fun they are.

But fun Laumer's books are, with The Long Twilight no exception. Laumer is at the height of his powers in this book, making this story about two feuding alien warriors stranded on Earth much better than it needed to be. Published in 1969, it came out only two years before Laumer would suffer a near-fatal stroke from which he would eventually recover enough to write again, but never again with the same skills. Which is a bit sad, because if not for that stroke, who knows what Laumer could've achieved...

Grayle is an oldtimer model prisoner who has been in prison for so long nobody knows anymore when he was imprisoned or for what crime. When he inexplainably flies in a rage one day he's transferred to Gull Key, the highest security, most modern prison in the country. Coincidently Gull Key is also one of the government installations scheduled for the first large scale trial of broadcast power...

Meanwhile in a large city some way away, an old drunk called Falconer wakes up from his stupor and undergoes a transformation. Scarred and covered with the remnants of old wounds, he checks into a sauna to sweat out his poison. When he does so his instincts take over and the scars start to disappear while the wounds heal themselves...

The broadcast power trial starts up, but runs into trouble as something or someone is diverting the output. At the same time, a huge cyclone starts to form up near Bermuda, behaving quite different from a normal cyclone, as it keeps on growing without having the energy that would fuel this growth. As the fringes of this storm lash Florida, the lack of broadcast power causes the electricity to fail in Gull Key, while Grayle has already escaped from the transport that brought him to the prison, diving into the sea... Nobody could survive this, or could they?

Of course all these plot elements are connected with the two strange old men, who turn out to be aliens engaged in a long feud between each other, having come to Earth in Viking times and having been stranded there ever since. Before that they were friends, soldiers in a long war against an ancient enemy. Laumer reveals all this gradually, keeping the exact resolution a mystery until the very end, even though you can guess the broad outlines almost immediately. He writes here in a sort of hardboiled detective style, reminiscent of an author like John D. MacDonald, embedding the fantastic in this mundane style, which for me works quite well.

If you haven't had the pleasure of reading any Laumer stories yet, you might do worse than to start with The Long Twilight, as it has everything that makes his novels so much fun while you don't need to have read anything else by him.

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