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Timetracks

Keith Laumer

3.61 · Rating details · 36 ratings · 5 reviews

One of the most prolific and gifted writers in a very fast field. For science fiction is really where it's at these days. In fact, anyone not writing s.f. is clearly out-of-step.
In this arena, Laumer is close to being one of the old-timers (no pun intended despite the theme of this collection). He is, quite simply, very good indeed and one helluva lot of fun to read.

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Paperback, 216 pages

Published April 1972 by Ballantine Books (first published 1972)

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Apr 12, 2015 tENTATIVELY, cONVENIENCE rated it really liked it

Shelves: sf

review of Keith Laumer's Timetracks
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - April 11, 2015

This is the 5th bk by Laumer I've read in a row in the last mnth. I started off basically justifying reading them by saying that I'm depressed & they help me get thru the day (better for you than meds, eh?!). Then I started liking his writing again w/ Dinosaur Beach
( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6... ) &, dagnabbit all to shit'n'shinola if I didn't like this one even more.

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Dec 29, 2011 Valerie added it

This is short stories, so it's probably of variable quality, as most collections are. I'll keep a running tab of the particular stories.

(1) Timesweepers: This seems to be a typical Cold War fantasy, so
far--a 'O07 time travels' sort of thing. I have no idea why the agents are conditioned to amnesia when they are debriefed. What would anybody hope to gain thereby? And the opponents seem totally motiveless. There also seems to be a strong trend of the 'robots have no rights' thesis. If the robots This is short stories, so it's probably of variable quality, as most collections are. I'll keep a running tab of the particular stories.

(1) Timesweepers: This seems to be a typical Cold War fantasy, so
far--a 'O07 time travels' sort of thing. I have no idea why the agents are conditioned to amnesia when they are debriefed. What would anybody hope to gain thereby? And the opponents seem totally motiveless. There also seems to be a strong trend of the 'robots have no rights' thesis. If the robots have needs and motives, they must have rights. We'll see how it ends--Laumer is noted for his ironic twists. As in this case. But what bothers me is the uncritical acceptance of the idea of progressive evolution. Despite a minor nod to the idea that there are regressions, there's no apparent belief that there may not BE any pervasive direction in evolution, which is a theory only of change, not of direction or purpose. There's also a strong anthropocentrism. I've noticed this in Laumer's works before. It's not just that 'mechanical' life is given short shrift. Nonhuman life is almost nonexistent. There's the odd bushes--but never so much as a dog or a partridge otherwise (oh, wait, there's a pig in the Lafayette O'Leary series).

(2) The Devil You Don't: (As in 'better the devil you know...'). This story begins by distinguishing between evil and sin (sin is what's pleasurable, it's argued). It's a promising start, anyway. With an interesting development, though I would question the premise that there were never any slapstick comedies in Classical Theater. Just because satirical material was less likely to be preserved than 'serious' dramas and comedies doesn't mean that there was no cartoonish buffoonery. There definitely was in Shakespeare's time, and in Chaucer (cf the gatekeeper in the Scottish play who laments that alcohol consumption stimulates libido...and then prevents follow-through.). And remember the crudely erotic jokes in the staging of Lysistrata. Maybe the chain accidents weren't as common in the past...but how would one know?

(3) The Time Thieves: Not to be confused with the movie The Time Bandits (although I wouldn't rule out some connection). There are so many different agents and agencies in this story that it's hard to come up with a coherent motivation or chain of consequences. The notion of imprisoning malcontents in 'unoccupied' loci is an interesting one, if a little disturbing (is it really a good idea to place outposts in areas that are quite definitely inhabited, if not by sapients?). But the part that upset me the most is the repeated slander that early modern humans practiced genocide against other hominids (in our timeline). There's no evidence for any such practice. Stephen Jay Gould argued that it was a contingent fact of history that we don't now cohabit the globe with other species of hominids: but there's no need to presuppose any murderous rampages, even so. Just as a sidenote, I don't see any reason to believe that Neanderthals would have blue faces. It's not impossible, of course. But why would it be so?

(4) The Other Sky: This is a journey into the land under the hills (sometimes known as Tir Na Nog, or the Land of Youth), rationalized as a type of 'portals' which involve time travel as a consequence of relativity. There are a few niggling questions (such as what happens to the age of the travelers?), but my main quarrel is the invention of a form of monstra ex machina (here called the Niss), whom it's not only permissible but even meritorious to mercilessly exterminate. I've always regarded this sort of thing as an attempt to provide surrogates for our own murderous behavior, which we externalize into 'aliens' to whom we owe no consideration of kindness. But Walt Kelly's immortal aphorism "We have met the enemy, and he is us." still applies if we try to project our hostility to manufactured 'aliens'. Note, for example, that the 'Niss' are never identified by gender. How do they reproduce, if not by sex? Other intelligent life forms are identified as bisexual...sometimes, at least).

(5) Mind Out of Time: A couple of space travelers find themselves freed from time by traveling further and faster than is intended in the experiment they're part of. This has been handled better elsewhere (as in James White's Tomorrow Is Too Far). One odd thing: Laumer gives the impression of being a very uxorious man. Many of his characters are very strongly devoted to their wives. But the wives seldom make any actual appearance in the stories. One of Laumer's stories includes a part where a man actually ends up cohabiting a woman's body--but otherwise, women seem too often to be offstage shadows.

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Dec 07, 2014 Sam Jones rated it really liked it

These stories do show their age (they were all written in the 1960s), but despite the retro feel, they are all pretty interesting. They do what short stories do best -- take a weird idea and explore it without needing to flesh out a world too far. Good quick read.

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Dec 21, 2014 John rated it really liked it

Shelves: scifi

1989 grade B-

short stories with other authors

aka Time Tracks

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About Keith Laumer

Keith Laumer

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John Keith Laumer was an American science fiction author. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, he was an officer in the U.S. Air Force and a U.S. diplomat. His brother March Laumer was also a writer, known for his adult reinterpretations of the Land of Oz (also mentioned in Keith's The Other Side of Time).

Keith Laumer (aka J.K Laumer, J. Keith Laumer) is best known for his Bolo stories and his John Keith Laumer was an American science fiction author. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, he was an officer in the U.S. Air Force and a U.S. diplomat. His brother March Laumer was also a writer, known for his adult reinterpretations of the Land of Oz (also mentioned in Keith's The Other Side of Time).

Keith Laumer (aka J.K Laumer, J. Keith Laumer) is best known for his Bolo stories and his satirical Retief series. The former chronicles the evolution of juggernaut-sized tanks that eventually become self-aware through the constant improvement resulting from centuries of intermittent warfare against various alien races. The latter deals with the adventures of a cynical spacefaring diplomat who constantly has to overcome the red-tape-infused failures of people with names like Ambassador Grossblunder. The Retief stories were greatly influenced by Laumer's earlier career in the United States Foreign Service. In an interview with Paul Walker of Luna Monthly, Laumer states "I had no shortage of iniquitous memories of the Foreign Service."

Four of his shorter works received Hugo or Nebula Award nominations (one of them, "In the Queue", received nominations for both) and his novel A Plague of Demons was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1966.

During the peak years of 1959–1971, Laumer was a prolific science fiction writer, with his novels tending to follow one of two patterns: fast-paced, straight adventures in time and space, with an emphasis on lone-wolf, latent superman protagonists, self-sacrifice and transcendence or, broad comedies, sometimes of the over-the-top variety.

In 1971, Laumer suffered a stroke while working on the novel The Ultimax Man. As a result, he was unable to write for a few years. As he explained in an interview with Charles Platt published in The Dream Makers (1987), he refused to accept the doctors' diagnosis. He came up with an alternative explanation and developed an alternative (and very painful) treatment program. Although he was unable to write in the early 1970s, he had a number of books which were in the pipeline at the time of the stroke published during that time.

In the mid-1970s, Laumer partially recovered from the stroke and resumed writing. However, the quality of his work suffered and his career declined (Piers Anthony, How Precious Was That While, 2002). In later years Laumer also reused scenarios and characters from his earlier works to create "new" books, which some critics felt was to their detriment:

Alas, Retief to the Rescue doesn't seem so much like a new Retief novel, but a kind of Cuisnart mélange of past books.

-- Somtow Sucharitkul (Washington Post, Mar 27, 1983. p. BW11)

His Bolo creations were popular enough that other authors have written standalone science-fiction novels about them.

Laumer was also a model airplane enthusiast, and published two dozen designs between 1956 and 1962 in the U.S. magazines Air Trails, Model Airplane News and Flying Models, as well as the British Aero Modeler. He published one book on the subject, How to Design and Build Flying Models in 1960. His later designs were mostly gas-powered free flight planes, and had a whimsical charm with names to match, like the "Twin Lizzie" and the "Lulla-Bi". His designs are still being revisited, reinvented and built today.
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