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The Long Twilight and Other Stories
A huge volume of edge-of-the-seat science fiction adventure, including: * The Long Twilight: Grayle and Falconer met in relentless combat with no quarter in prehistoric ages past, their endless battle now remembered only as dark myths and legends. Now their long battle is nearing its climaxAand the final battleground is an uncontrolled experimental power plant that threatens the Earth itself!
* Night of Delusions: A detective is hired by men claiming to be government agents and given an assignment that may lead to his being hailed as the savior of the nationAor executed for treason. His mysterious clients also give him devices to use in the assignment, devices which seem to be far beyond anything human technology is capable of. And as he doggedly pursues the case, he finds that the very fabric of reality seems to be changing around him, even to the point that he himself seems never to have existed!
* Plus three short novels of equally stunning concepts and breathtaking action.
* Night of Delusions: A detective is hired by men claiming to be government agents and given an assignment that may lead to his being hailed as the savior of the nationAor executed for treason. His mysterious clients also give him devices to use in the assignment, devices which seem to be far beyond anything human technology is capable of. And as he doggedly pursues the case, he finds that the very fabric of reality seems to be changing around him, even to the point that he himself seems never to have existed!
* Plus three short novels of equally stunning concepts and breathtaking action.
- GenresScience Fiction
368 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2008
34 people want to read
About the author
Keith Laumer
498 books227 followersJohn 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 magazine 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.
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 magazine 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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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 15, 2022
The book is extremely well written, but I found the stories extremely confusing and difficult to follow. I think the only way I could fully appreciate these stories would be if someone read them to me while I was visiting Timothy Leary!
November 5, 2022
A peculiar story that reads like something circling a drain. It goes around and back around, touching the same characters with slight variation until it comes out at the end.
April 19, 2013
Seldom have my opinions of a book swung so widely as I read it.
This collection includes four short stories and two longer stories. The longer ones, The Long Twilight and Night of Delusions, I found to be interesting. Silly, and a little cliched in their execution, but interesting and fun in their own way. It's not often that one reads about immortal aliens, who are actually Thor and Loki of Norse myth, but actually just aliens, battling across Earth's history under the machinations of a sinister giant cat, and I appreciated the spectacle.
But it was the short stories that soured me on Laumer. Birthday Party and The Half Man were interesting, the latter especially so, but The Lawgiver and The Plague were odious, hackneyed, reactionary, unpleasant political allegories. The first begins with the rant of an ignorant Bible-thumper accusing a politician of being a baby killer for advocating abortion as a means of population control, and spends its entirety proving the politician to be exactly that.
The Plague is worse: a contrived screed against the evils of "socialism," wherein a farmer fights off an invading charitable organization that wants to occupy his land and give all his food to the poor. The farmer defiantly claims "I know these good people...I tried to hire some of them when I was breaking ground here. They laughed. They're the untrainables, the unemployables. They've had a free ride all their lives..." and so on and so forth. Just how the protagonist knows that the people he's talking about are the same ones his antagonists are talking about is beyond me. The fact that they're poor seems proof enough; they're all alike, aren't they?
After forcing myself through what was essentially Animal Farm for the John Birch Society, it was harder for me to ignore Laumer's other regrettable tendencies, like his consistently patronizing attitude toward women. Even when I reached some imaginative passage that genuinely impressed me, I couldn't get over how badly soured I was by those stories. And on top of all that, Laumer's best (at least in this collection) would never have been enough to put him above three stars from me.
This collection includes four short stories and two longer stories. The longer ones, The Long Twilight and Night of Delusions, I found to be interesting. Silly, and a little cliched in their execution, but interesting and fun in their own way. It's not often that one reads about immortal aliens, who are actually Thor and Loki of Norse myth, but actually just aliens, battling across Earth's history under the machinations of a sinister giant cat, and I appreciated the spectacle.
But it was the short stories that soured me on Laumer. Birthday Party and The Half Man were interesting, the latter especially so, but The Lawgiver and The Plague were odious, hackneyed, reactionary, unpleasant political allegories. The first begins with the rant of an ignorant Bible-thumper accusing a politician of being a baby killer for advocating abortion as a means of population control, and spends its entirety proving the politician to be exactly that.
The Plague is worse: a contrived screed against the evils of "socialism," wherein a farmer fights off an invading charitable organization that wants to occupy his land and give all his food to the poor. The farmer defiantly claims "I know these good people...I tried to hire some of them when I was breaking ground here. They laughed. They're the untrainables, the unemployables. They've had a free ride all their lives..." and so on and so forth. Just how the protagonist knows that the people he's talking about are the same ones his antagonists are talking about is beyond me. The fact that they're poor seems proof enough; they're all alike, aren't they?
After forcing myself through what was essentially Animal Farm for the John Birch Society, it was harder for me to ignore Laumer's other regrettable tendencies, like his consistently patronizing attitude toward women. Even when I reached some imaginative passage that genuinely impressed me, I couldn't get over how badly soured I was by those stories. And on top of all that, Laumer's best (at least in this collection) would never have been enough to put him above three stars from me.
March 25, 2016
Edition I have is only "The long Twilight".
Weird. Two "men" of an ancient space faring navy have a blood feud lasting a couple thousand years. Not sure what I thought. Very "dated" writing style that makes it a bit dry to read. Some neat ideas in it though.
Author is a favorite of my fathers and this is my first exposure to him. Will have to read more before I draw an firm opinions....
Weird. Two "men" of an ancient space faring navy have a blood feud lasting a couple thousand years. Not sure what I thought. Very "dated" writing style that makes it a bit dry to read. Some neat ideas in it though.
Author is a favorite of my fathers and this is my first exposure to him. Will have to read more before I draw an firm opinions....
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews