Keith Laumer Books

The other reviewers have provided good synopses of this book. I had the curse of reading the first half in Analog, where it went by the title "The Wonderful Secret." The serial version ended with Dammy stealing the space vehicle to head out to the stars. Years later, when I finally read the entire book, I was disappointed that the second half really did not go anywhere, and I also found the stream-of-consciousness narration difficult to follow. Overall, an interesting book, with a humanistic premise that we're all capable of being the best in the Galaxy (or at least "Class 2, Special") and capable of kicking anyone's tail feathers who messes with us.

Simple enough premise about an everyman, abducted by a human-appearing agent and trained to utilize his mind to its fullest. The alien-turned-handler finds the tables turned on him as he realizes he has created an intellect and power superior to his own mind and technology. I first read this book when I was 15 and for years found it not even listed in Laumer's biblio. I would recommend locating this book for any Laumer fan due to its rarity, and definitely loan it to any avid sci-fi middle schooler.

This book is an easy read and slightly entertaining. Summary: A man is kidnaped by an alien and trained mentaly and phsycially to become superhuman. Some of his talents include matter transmission, matter conversion, levation and telepathy. These are just a few of his talents and once gained he must use them to solve a mystery for all mankind.

In The Ultimax Man, an alien abducts a common criminal for an experiment - to imbue him with all of the knowledge and skills of human history...to make him a true superman; the Ultimax Man. But, once our hero reaches the pinnacle of all of this knowledge and all of these skills, what next? He breaks the bonds of his creator and sets himself free in search of where to go from here.

This is an interesting story that is better at getting to the third act than finding a satisfying ending to our character's story. As another reviewer put it, once he is free it is all down hill from there. In the end I was pretty disappointed with what promised to be, but failed to deliver.

This book is not in the class of Laumer's Retief books. The 1st half is relatively straight-forward but the rest is a hodgepodge of activity--attempting, I believe, to combine SF with mystery. The ending has a twist, but wasn't very satisfying IMHO. Still, there's some innovative thinking and a good quote: "What one doesn't understand seems arbitrary and meaningless."

As a reading experience, I might actually have given Knight of Delusions a lower score. On the other hand, I give Laumer credit for developing a virtual reality story years before it was commonly attempted (1972).

A tough guy detective named Florin gets a very strange assignment. He is supposed to guard a senator during a last ditch effort to restore the senator's mental health. Or perhaps he is trying to guard the senator against the advisors who are actually trying to kill him? Or maybe he has some kind of future with the girl who seems to keep appearing in the bar with him? Or perhaps it really is all linked to giant alien lizards after all?

The prose is interesting, as Laumer uses the diction of hard-boiled detective fiction to take on a science fiction subject. It mostly works well, although there are times that it ends up making the description feel abbreviated, and not much time is spent exploring the world(s) the character moves through. My larger quarrel is with the plotting. It almost seemed as though Laumer had a really good idea, and then painted himself into a corner trying to work it out.

Knight of Delusions may well be a good read for people with a particular interest in treatments of virtual reality. The Tor 1982 edition comes bound with two other stories: "Thunderhead" and "The Last Command".

The alternate or simulated reality within reality idea has become almost a genre unto itself these days, but this was one of the earliest works I know of to explore the idea. Given that, is easy for me to forgive the fact that a sense of closure was difficult to achieve, or perhaps none was intended. I read this long ago, but I do recall feeling a bit lost and unsatisfied at the end. But its not the destination, its the journey, right?

_Retief's War_ (1967) is the third Retief book and the first Retief novel. It was originally a three-part serial in _If_ in 1965 and was accompanied by some handsome Jack Gaughan illustrations. I have always felt that the ideal length for a Retief story is that of the short novelette. When you stretch a Retief piece to novel length, you become more aware that the characters are cardboard and that the plot is all external action rather than internal conflict. Yet Laumer does better with the novel than you might expect.

Part of the appeal of the novel is the snappy dialogue:

"Closer attention to your _Daily Bulletin from the Bird's Nest_ ," [Magnan said], "would go far toward homogenizing your thinking on the subject."
"I thought that was something they did to milk."
"The term refers to a voluntary alignment of viewpoint of group-oriented polarity; a sort of moral horsepower for maximal thrust toward the objective."
"I'm not sure that pasteurized thinking is rich enough in intellectual vitamins to satisfy my growing curiosity about what Ikk is up to." (23)

Another asset is the color of the setting. It is a jungle-filled planet populated with a large number of creatures who are part chiton, part wheels, part machines. The plot centers around one rascally race called the Voions who have been given police powers by the Diplomatic Corps and who are on the verge of taking over the planet. Thrown into the mix are a would-be dictator, a group of Terran rum traders, a spaceship full of beautiful girls that has crashed in the jungle, a number of bungling ambassadors, some villainous and calculating Groaci, several tribes of cannibals, some giant flying carnivores... and, of course, the unflappable Jame Retief. Laumer manages to juggle enough of these colored balls so that you are at least partly distracted from the limitations of the novel. Good, light fun.

While Retief is perhaps best presented in short story form, this novel is a fun romp through a wacky world full of (perhaps *too* full of) dialect and oddities. A worthwhile read in a somewhat unusual area - funny SF.

You know what this book is about? Aliens who have WHEELS instead of legs. Yes, WHEELS. Now, suspention of disbelief is one thing, but aliens with wheels is just too unbelievable. Add in the poor writing style and the utterly predictable story, and you get th biggest peice of claptrap ever published. I'm astonished that there are a whople series of these Retief books as I found the charachter to be utterly forgetable. This book is utterly terrible.

If you are looking for a fun book which doesn't take the world too serious then this is it!

This book was a great change from the typicaly long and extensively developed books which are becoming more and more common nowadays. Though not a deep and moving book (which I appreciate) it does provide many inovative ideas about possible (if improbable) alien species; their lovable too. You really get into saving the aliens and bagging the bad guys, all in the Retief fashion (two fisted diplomat, James Bond in space?), of course.

Lots of laughs.

The secret to the Retief series is their strong tongue-in-cheek attitude. Taken at face value, the unimaginative reader might stumble over the sub-moronic aliens, the unlikely settings, or the fact that reality seems to often stand on it's head, for no obvious reason. But if you read these series as a parody of the James Bond series, then you can relax and enjoy the experience.

And the subtext of Mankind as having a noble, heroic streak is the best ego boost I get from Sci-Fi. Let other authors portray humans as weak, greedy, venal, flawed : Laumer's Retief is a hero in the strongest sense of the word. If the future holds people like Retief, then maybe Mankind will survive to grow out of our weaknesses.

I've read all of the Bolo books since day one and have fond memories of the stories - some being better than others. However this book was a real, real struggle to finish. Not enough about the Bolos, too much on the humans and creatures they were fighting. Could easily have been condensed to 20 - 30 pages. Get it to complete the set but don't expect too much from it.

They weren't needed in this story - the Concordiate could have sent a few dozen grav tanks to fight the Tersae.

The novel starts out smooth, a once peaceful world, is smashed by war, and Bolos and their commanders risk their existence to fight the attackers. But the novel's most touching plot line of a Bolo modified for a mining colony ends in the middle of the book. The novel then concentrates on the warfare that erupts around the humans, that evolves into almost trench warefare, or Korean war style conflict.

Bolos do arrive in the nick of time and save the day, but a couple dozen grav tanks could have done the same thing it seems. And - the humans did as much as the Bolos to save themselves. More hellbore shots were made to get a bolo unstuck from the mud - than there were in anger. If this novel was to demonstrate that a Bolo can do more than fight in thermonuclear environments, and fight jungle warfare - it was done in a poor manor. Having read many of the Bolo books, it was downright dissapointing to see the hellbores fired only four or so times against enemy targets.

The plot line went into a major 40-60 page deviation about a scientist making first contact with the Tersae. But this was drawn out far too long. And if you are a Bolo book fan, you always know how many pages there are until you get to the italics.... 20 pages into this muck of first contact, I finally skipped the other 40, and it had no impact on the rest of the story.

As a novel, it is _good_. But as a Bolo novel, it was dissapointing. I had to decide hard between a one star and a two star. The touching story line of the mining bolo earned it a 2nd star.

This is Book 6 in the Bolo series, originally created by Keith Laumer. The action takes place on a remote mining colony world that has an... indigenous population of a sort... that no one knew existed previously.

When things go sour, the colonists enlist the aid of the bolos... one of whom, Dirk, is an obsolete hulk that has been converted to a strip mining machine, and another, Senator, who is an upgraded antique who does not have proper control over his weapons systems.

For those not familiar, a bolo is a self-guided tank of sorts, though they are much more massive and powerful than any tank currently in use by anyone... it would be more accurate to say that they are land-going battleships on treads... though even that analogy is flawed. Bolos... at least the later marks are self-aware and there are not many forces that can stand against their might.

As badly prepared as these particular bolos are, the massive metal soldiers do their best and inspire the efforts of the Human colonists as well. The Humans are down to using WWI marble throwers, longbows, and a Sharps breech-loader... but they hold their own against an enemy that is not the real enemy.

With Humanity embroiled in a dispute with the Deng, not much effort can be spared to defend the colony. This book also introduces the Melconians to the time-line, with whom Humanity is destined to have another Galaxy-wide conflict that will leave both races barely enough genetic material to survive.

Like all the bolo books, this one is worth reading twice. The self-sacrifice and dedication that these living machines display will inspire the heart of any desk-bound warrior. Go ahead and buy it, if you like action-adventure, and/or hard science fiction, you won't be disappointed.

Dale A. Raby
Editor/Publisher
The Green Bay Web

There are two types of AI(Artificial Intelligence)that stand out very favorably in my extensive reading and viewing of sci-fi books and TV. One is Star Trek's Data, who, other than his presumably deceased evil twin, Lor, is literally in a class by himself. The other is a gigantic, self aware battle tank called a Bolo. Bolos are numerous, evolving over the course of decades, even centuries into different classes and types. Of the two, I have found the Bolo to be the most compelling. Why? Picture a war machine endowed with enough firepower to glaze a planet,yet embued with the soul of a poet. This incongruity is all the more remarkable in that there is nothing remotely anthropomorphic about these machines in the physical sense. Unlike Data, whose resemblance to humans makes it easier for audiences to identify and sympathize with his desire to be human. The Bolos featured in the four books I've read so far, have no wish to be any more or less than what they are. However, they have all demonstrated the best qualities of human nature: honor, loyalty, integrity, duty,even humor. Their abilities to speculate and philosophize on matters unrelated to their programming makes them more than self aware, that designation, in my view, being a diminishing one, but sentient in very humanlike sense. The stories in Bolos: Cold Steel, continues in that fine vein of portraying not only the destructive capabilities of these facinating machines, but providing us with their thoughts in delightfully rendered first person sequences. The setting is a volatile planet called Thule, which is being exploited by the Confederation, a human dominated entity. The planet is rich in the type of deposits important to the Confederation's war against a hostile species. Suddenly, Thule's colonists find themselves under attack by natives whose existence escaped the notice of Confederation surveyers. The indigenous population is Stone Age primitive, but armed with hi-tech weapons and using them to devastating effect. Confederation reinforcements, including Bolos are sent to the rescue. There's a lot of great action in this book, not all restricted to Bolo combat. The non-Bolo characters, I'll call them organics, are interesting and suitably complex. But it's the Bolos who are the stars of the show. There was one minor, but persistent problem that the writers of each story shared: their referal to Thule's natives as aliens. If a population is indigenous to an area, it cannot be alien. Other than this redundant mistake, Bolos: Cold Steel, is a worthy contribution to the Bolos' ongoing saga.

This is not the best book, and I had to force myself to finish it. But WHY, you may ask, did I force myself? Because I had so much enjoyed the earlier books in the series dealing with the same main character, Lafayette O'Leary. Omigoodness -- read "World Shuffler" and "Time Bender" -- they are worth it. Read this book if you NEED to know more about Lafayette and if you have an ability to push through books no matter what.

Continuation of the Time Bender series with Lafayette O'Leary wandering helplessly through his own delusions helped by a limited cast. Lacks the spontaneity & elan of the earlier books & meanders to a predictable & uninspiring conclusion. Don't read if you wish to preserve the flavour of the other novels.

Don't want to eat your vegetables? (As if they'd let you.)Ready to swallow enough puns to make an artichoke while Earth takes abeeting or maybe even gets squashed? (But something may turnup.)

Then LETTUCE ENTERTAIN YOU with an anthology of vegetable villains from outer space. Stories range from the serious to the (who would have guessed it?) silly. Introductions by Ben Bova.

This is a science fiction tale in Keith Laumer's Retief series. Retief is a youthful member of the protocol-obsessed Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne. Much of the fun comes from Laumer's satirical parody of Grand Diplomatic traditions, which are eagerly overturned by the action-focused Retief.

In this short story, Retief is attending a grand diplomatic reception on a backwater planet, when he discovers the kitchen staff are guiltily clutching rather too many sharp knifes...

It's an amusing short tale. But the price seems rather high for a short story that is out of copyright and is only about 25 paper pages.

This book contains three short stories that detail the surreptitious invasion of Earth by aliens. The cover declares it to be "... based on the smash ABC-TV hit". I happened across it some years ago and recognized the space ship on the front cover as a model flying saucer I'd built some years before. I now have both on display in my library.

One of Keith Laumer's longer works, this book is rather disjointed and episodic, but still manages to create an interesting scenario of the development of the earth colony on a distant planet. The shorter episodes are the best, and the story was left open to further installments. All in all, a good read, but not a classic.

This is a light science-fiction satire in Keith Laumer's Retief series.

Retief is a irreverent youthful member of the protocol-obsessed Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne. Laumer himself had served as a diplomat in the US Foreign Service and he happily satirizes the niceties of formal diplomacy, which is bypassed and confounded by Retief's James Bond antics.

In this short story, the Terran diplomats face an array of subtle and overt insults as they arrive on the planet Yillian. But what do the Yillians really mean by this?

It's a reasonably amusing short tale. But the price seems very high for a short story that is out of copyright and is only about 20 paper pages.