Tue 8 Aug 2017
A Science Fiction Review: KEITH LAUMER – The Other Side of Time.
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Science Fiction & Fantasy[5] Comments
KEITH LAUMER – The Other Side of Time. Imperium agent Brion Bayard #2. Berkley F1129, paperback original; 1st printing, August 1965. Signet, paperback, November 1972. Collected in Beyond the Imperium (Tor, paperback, 1981) with Assignment in Nowhere (1968). Also collected in Imperium (Baen, paperback, 2005) by adding Worlds of the Imperium (1962) to the preceding volume. First hardcover edition: Walker, 1971. Originally serialized in Fantastic Stories, April-June 1965.
From the title you might expect this to be a time-travel novel, and it is, but only in a way. What it really is is a novel of parallel universes, each separated from the other by the slimmest fabric of branched-off possibilities. What the world ruled by the Imperiumis is is an alternate Earth, one in which subtle differences between that world and ours are slowly but surely designed to be picked up on. (The time travel aspect comes in when it is discovered that in some parallel universes time travels at a different rate than it does in others.)
It might be best to read Worlds of Imperium, the first in the series, before tackling this one. The Other Side of Time is a mapcap adventure in time and space that starts out in high gear and then notches the action up every two or three chapters along the way. What leading protagonist Bryon Bayard, based in Stockholm Zero-Zero, learns almost at once is that his world is being invaded by the orge-ish creatures called the Hagroon, and unless he does something about it, he will be the only one who survives. The rest of the books consists of him fighting a one-man resistance against the invaders, and as he does so, getting tossed this way and that in world after world, sometimes a captive and sometimes an utterly abandoned castaway.
As a man of some endurance and ingenuity, Bayard is a MacGyver of his time times ten. It is a lot of fun seeing him juryrigging a shuttle based on a box and a few magnetic coils and setting off across a space-time continuum otherwise completely impossible to fathom — except in the imagination of an author like Keith Laumer.
I cannot do better than to quote directly from page 152 of the Signet edition:
If it worked, that was.
August 8th, 2017 at 3:41 pm
Laumer was very prolific in the ’60s. A nice meld of Heinlein (admiration for the no-nonsense Man Who Knows How to Do Everything), Van Vogt (tricky time/dimension/reality twists, and concepts like the above-quoted “null entropy”), and the Raymond Chandler prose school of tough. terse, and wry. “The Timesweepers” and its novel-length expansion DINOSAUR BEACH are my favorites. The Baen reprints have kept his name in the bookstores over the last decade, but I expect not much longer, sadly.
August 8th, 2017 at 5:28 pm
Tn the sixties and early seventies Laumer could always be counted on as an entertaining storyteller. After his 1971 stroke, his work seemed to go into a steep decline (as did his personality). Many of the Baen books sadly mine these later books, but they appear to have been popular so what do I know?
August 8th, 2017 at 5:47 pm
Personally I don’t believe Baen Books did his reputation any big favors by publishing some of those later books. You could tell from one I read that his writing skills had deteriorated badly.
On the other hand, if he needed the money at the time, I’m sure he appreciated their efforts on his behalf.
August 8th, 2017 at 11:05 pm
His THE LONG TWILIGHT is a personal favorite of mine, and his best work was well written, fast moving, and bubbling over with ideas, which was what I was looking for in SF when I started reading seriously in my teens.
At his best, and he was frequently at or near his best, no one quite told a straight SF adventure story like Laumer.
August 9th, 2017 at 12:32 pm
For some reason the Laumer novel that made the biggest impression on me was NIGHT OF DELUSIONS (1972), easily the most paranoid plot I had encountered up to that time. The Amazon product description pretty much encapsulates it:
“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?”
I do remember that in one of Laumer’s Imperium stories Hitler’s air force commander, Hermann Göring, turns out to be a heck of a nice guy in a (nearly) parallel Earth, proving that anything’s possible in a multiverse setup.