review of
Keith Laumer's Nine by Laumer
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 4, 2013

Whew! Harlan Ellison's introduction to this is spot-on. In it, he refers over & over again to the "Retief" bks of Laumer's, none of wch have I read yet, & to how their humor is so different from the stories in this bk: "For without exception—even when there is a humorous or satiric strain—every piece in the following nine is serious" (p 1) - INDEED!

I've previously known nothing about Laumer's background. Ellison informs us that "Laumer uses his familiarity with matters diplomatic (based on over two years with the U.S. Foreign Service)" (p 1). Ellison's Laumer bio includes a rather surprising, to me, military background: "In August of 1943 Keith volunteered for the U.S. Army, took his basic training at Fort Benning". (p 5) "Fort Benning", eh? I don't know what was happening at Fort Benning in 1943 but it went on to become the School of the Americas where the thugs for South American dictators have gone for torture training & the like. Now known as WHINSEC, is it? I'm writing this review while my internet's not working so I'm relying on ye olde memory - probably good exercise - in fact, this bk is incredibly relevant under such conditions. ""Toured Buchenwald the day after liberation."" (p 5) "With the Army, Keith saw Holland, Luxenbourg, Belgium, and other capitals of Europe". (p 5)

"He returned to the United States in 1946 and was discharged from the service." (p 6) "The following summer he decided to attend the University of Stockholm, and sailed in September for Sweden". (p 6) "In January 1953 Laumer enlisted once again, this time as a first lieutenant in the Air Force. / He was sent to Labrador—alone." (p 6) "He applied for the U.S. Foreign Service, and after eighteen months of elaborate testing, was appointed Vice Consul of Career in the Consular Service, Third Secretary of Embassy in the Diplomatic Service, and Foreign Service Officer of Class Six in the Foreign Service. He was trained in Washington and then assigned to Rangoon". (pp 6-7)

"He and the State Department parted company late in 1958 and during the same period he wrote his first story, "Greylorn," which was purchased immediately out of the slush pile by the then-editor of Amazing Stories / Fantastic magazines, Cele Goldsmith." (p 7) "He returned to active duty with the USAF, as Captain, in May of 1960, stationed in London. Three years in London, and he returned to the United States where he settled down into off-base suburbia in a house with an air conditioner. / After two years this became intolerable and he left the service." (p 7)

Laumer's intermittent military career seems to involve an extraordinary amt of traveling & his stories ARE so serious that I'm reminded of 'James Tiptree''s, whose CIA connection is now long since public. Is there more to Laumer's 22 yr military career than meets the eye in Ellison's telling of it?

Whatever the case, Laumer has more than a little touch of the anti-military in him too: "Somewhere there was a beach of white sand, and dunes with graceful sea-oats that leaned in a gentle wind. There was blue water to the far horizon, and a blue sky, and nowhere were there any generals with medals and television cameras, or flint-eyed bureaucrats with long schemes . . ." (p 61) One story, "Dinochrome", tells the tale of a military robot reactivating itself after an unknown period of down-time & going straight back into combat again - fulfilling its original purpose but w/o knowing, or caring, what the current conditions are: "I have lost my general memory banks and my Command circuit, and my power supply is limited; but I am still a fighter unit of the Dinochrome Brigade. I have my offensive power unimpaired, and my sensory equipment if operating adequately. I am ready." (p 79) Laumer may not have written this as a cautionary tale against rabid wolverine like aggression, & the story has a nice twist, but I can take it as such.

Ellison tells us that "if the student of science fiction wishes to seriously understand and appreciate Laumer" [..] "this book is inestimably more valuable than the "entertainments" (as Graham Greene would tag them) of the Retief drolleries." (p 2) I'm not convinced that seriousness is of more value than humor but I do agree that this is, by far, the most serious Laumer bk I've read yet - & my reading of it was much slower as a result. & I agree w/ Ellison that there's great value herein. These are consistently very strong stories.

I often mention that my personal canon of great SF writers was fairly solidly fixed at Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, & J. G. Ballard for a long time - w/ the Strugatski Brothers & Stanislav Lem gradually creeping in. Here, I'm reminded of Ballard b/c of the intensity of his critical perception of contemporary society - but Laumer isn't just 'like' Ballard, he's easily his equal. These stories are written w/ a warning clarity of pessimism that cuts right to the conceptual bone. Take, eg, "The Walls", in wch a woman laments her never leaving her apartment while her husband at least gets to go out to work:

""Harry, could I go with you some day—tomorrow? I'd like to see where you work, meet your friends—"

""Flora, are you out of your mind? You've seen the commuter car; you know how crowded it is. And what would you do when you got there? Just stand around all day, blocking the aisle? Why don't you appreciate the luxury of having your own place, a little privacy, and now two Full-walls—"

""Then could I go somewhere else? I could take a later car. I want to get out in the open air, Harry. I . . . haven't seen the sky for . . . years, it seems."" - p 67

[..]

"He broke off. "Never mind. That was then. This is now. They've paved the beach, and built processing plants on it, and they've paved the farms and the parks and the gardens—but they've given us Full-wall to make up for it. And—"" - p 71

I'm reminded of the Ballard short story where the character gets on the train to get out of the city only to discover that the train now goes 'round the world & that there isn't any 'outside-of-the-city' anymore. &, actually, Laumer HAS such a story but this one's very different, not as 'easy' actually - ie: a story about a guy in a small town who decides to go to the city who then finds that some sort of "gel" has taken over the city & replaced humans w/ "golems", replicas of humans who stay-inside-the-script. People who disturb the script get consumed by the gels.

Laumer HATES TV & that seems to be a recurring theme. In his bk The Monitors Laumer has his character avoid TV: "Blondel slid onto a stool as far as possible from the sound of the telly." (p 6) (My review of that is here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16298805-the-monitors ) TVs, esp in public places, are my nemesis. A bar w/ TVs on everywhere is NOT a bar I want to be in. In the above-quoted story, "The Walls", the trapped housewife's husband keeps buying her wall-sized TV screens as 'luxuries' to hypothetically enable her to enjoy being trapped home all day. She doesn't want it, but he ignores her desires:

""Harry, the old screen is good enough. Couldn't we use the money for a trip—"

""How do you know if it's good enough? You never have it on. I have to turn it on myself when I get home.""

[..]

""Harry—can I turn it off if I want to?"

""Turn it off?" Harry sounded puzzled. "The idea is to leave it on. That's why I'm having it installed for you, you know—so you can use it!"

""But sometimes I like to just think—""- p 64

The story is so serious that it's suffocatingly claustrophobic:

"He waved his hand at the screen. "There it is; the whole world. You can sit right here and view it all—"

""But I want to do more than just view it. I want to live it. I want to be in those places, and feel leaves under my feet, and have rain on my face—"

"Harry frowned incredulously. "You mean you want to be an actress?"" - p 69

Laumer envisions a world entirely too much like what we have now, what we're heading for now, a world in wch simulations are accepted as somehow better than what they're simulations of, a world of Asperger's - much like the people raised w/ computers. How many people go thru their day w/ ear-buds in, checking their 'smart'-fones constantly? How many people unconsciously 'think' of people in sitcoms & soap operas as their family? I've known some.

"Sid Throndyke overrode his respirator to heave a deep sigh.

""Wow!" he said, flipping to his wife's personal channel. "A tough day on the Office channel."

"The contact screens attached to his eyeballs stayed blank: Cluster was out. Impatiently, Sid toed the console, checking the channels: Light, Medium, and Deep Sitcom; authohypno; Light and Deep Narco; four, six and eight-party Social; and finally, muttering to himself, Psychan. Cluster's identity symbol appeared on his screens.

""There you are," he grieved. "Psychan again. After a hard day, the least a man expects is to find his wife tuned to his channel—"

""Oh, Sid: there's this wonderful analyst. A new model. It's doing so much for me, really wonderful. . . ."

""I know," Sid grumped. "That orgasm-association technique. That's all I hear. I'd think you'd want to keep in touch with the Sitcoms, so you know what's going on; but I suppose you've been tied into Psychan all day—while I burned my skull out on Office."

""Now, Sid; didn't I program your dinner and everything?"

""Um." Mollified, Sid groped with his tongue for the dinner lever, eased the limp plastic tube into his mouth. He sucked a mouthful of the soft paste—

""Cluster! You know I hate Vege-pap. Looks like you could at least dial a nice Prote-sim or Sucromash . . ."

""Sid, you ought to tune to Psychan. It would do you a world of good . . ." Her sub-vocalized voice trailed off in the earphones. Sid snorted, dialed a double Prote-sim and a Sucromash, fuming at the delay. He gulped his dinner, not even noticing the rich gluey consistency, then in a somewhat better mood, flipped to the Light Sitcom.

"It was good enough stuff, he conceded; the husband was a congenital psychopath inferior who maintained his family in luxury by a series of fantastic accidents. You had to chuckle when his suicide attempt failed at the last moment, after he'd lost all that blood. The look on his face when they dragged him back . . .

"But somehow it wasn't enough. Sid dialed the medium; it wasn't much better. The deep, maybe.


"Sid viewed for a few minutes with growing impatience. Sure, you had to hand it to the Sitcom people; there was a lot of meat in the deep sitcom. It was pretty subtle stuff, the way the wife got the money the husband had been saving and spent it for a vacation trip for her chihuahua; had a real social content, too deep for most folks. But like the rest of the sitcoms, it was historical. Sure, using old-time settings gave a lot of scope for action. But how about something more pertinent to the contemporary situation? Nowadays, even though people led the kind of rich, full lives that Vital Programming supplied, there was still a certain lack. Maybe it was just a sort of atavistic need for gross muscular exertion. He'd viewed a discussion of the idea of a few nights earlier on the usual Wednesday night four-party hookup with the boys. Still, in his case, he had plenty of muscle tone. He'd spent plenty on a micro-spasm attachment for use with the narco-channel . . ." - pp 161-162

In "The Long Remembered Thunder": "There are no railroads, Tremaine thought. But no jet planes, no radio, no movies, no automatic dish-washers. But then there's no TV, either. That makes up for a lot." - p 159

There's much more here than just a thorough imagining of the dystopic possibilities (probabilities?) of the increasing encroachment into our lives of electronically centralized 'entertainment' & 'news'. Take, eg, "Hybrid":

"The Yanda worked over the body of Pantelle, adjusting, correcting, reinforcing, discarding a useless appendix or tonsil here, adding a reserve air storage unit there. A vestigial eye deep in the brain was refurbished for sensitivity at the radio frequencies, linked with controls. The spine was deftly fused at the base; additional mesenteries were added for intestinal support." - p 26

""Listen!" Maldon caught at the portly man's arm. "They're making idiots out of intelligent people so they can do work you could train a chimp to do, and if you ask any questions—" - p 96

""Wednesday's testing is for . . . ah . . . Vehicle Positioning Specialists, Instrumentation Inspectors, Sanitary Facility Supervisors—"

""Uh-huh. Toilet Attendants," Mart said. "Meter readers—"" - p 97

Seem familiar? The use of grandiose euphemisms to describe shitty jobs? The story that those last 2 quotes are from, "Placement Test", was published in 1964, but the 1st time I remember noticing such euphemisms was when I saw an ad for "Fingernail Technicians" in the early 1990s. Since then, I wasted my time applying for a job advertised as something like "Omnimax Console Technician". Since I'm a projectionist & have some knowledge of IMAX projection booths, this seemed like a potentially good job for me. What was it? Popcorn stand work.. I shit you not. Don't remember whether I told the interviewer off for wasting my time - but I shd have. ( )

9 really good short stories. I read this too young the first time (10 or 12?) from a school library & then looked for it for 25 years. Couldn't remember the name of the author or the title of the book or even any of the stories. I remembered two of the stories pretty clearly though & when I ran into one again, the rest finally clicked together & I managed to get a copy. I didn't like it quite as much the second time through, but it will always hold a special place for me. The story I remembered was about the trolls - one of his first Bolo stories. ( )