review of
Keith Laumer's Time Trap
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 16, 2013

Keith Laumer's yet-another of those SF authors I seem to've vaguely avoided reading for decades- perhaps subconsciously slotting him in some sort of category like: cheesy pulp. BUT, now that I've read him, I'm once-again reminded that 'pulp' writers are usually very much to my liking regardless of whether they're 'cheesy' or not.

I think of my recently deceased pal "Blaster" Al Ackerman. He was extremely impressed & influenced by pulp writers - mostly, but not exclusively, pulp SF. & I truly think that Blaster was one of the greatest writers in English of the last 40 yrs - still way too underappreciated to this day (although I'm sure that'll change). The thing about many of these 'pulp' writers is that they often have a particular type of voice that bespeaks of actual human experience rather than a simulation thereof thru university training. Blaster's writing exemplifies that.

Laumer's bk, having been written in 1970, might also be a sortof 2nd generation (but still highly valid) 'pulp' writing - as was Blaster's. Nonetheless, for me, it's evocative of its predecessors:

""Suppose he sticks me in a straightjacket and calls for the fellows with the butterfly nets?" the thought occurred to Roger. "They say once you're in, you have a heck of a time getting out again."" - p 22

Is mention of "butterfly nets" as a tool for catching people to be put in a mental institution still an understandable expression for people, say, born after 1980? Dunno.

""The last stall," the girl's voic e said. "Sorry about the mix-up, but I left here in something of a hurry."

""I should think so!" Roger said. "What were you doing in a men's room?"

""No time to explain now. Just swing that door open."

"Roger did so. The cubicle contained the usual plumbing, nothing more.

""A little to the left—there!"

"A glowing line had appeared in mid-air, directly over the bowl, shining with a greenish light of its own, brilliant in the gloom. when Roger moved his head a few inches, it disappeared.

""An optical illusion," he said doubtfully.

""By no means. It's an Aperture. Now, here's what I want you to do: write a note—I'll dictate—and simply toss it through. That's all. I'll just have to trust to luck that it lands where I want it to." - p 25

For me, such passages are evocative of an era. I'm reminded of my own 1st short story (wch I, alas, destroyed) written around 1966 or 1967, about a character trying to escape from a mental institution by sliding down laundry chutes. Surely, I was influenced by writing like this.

Blaster Al had a vocabulary of mythical characters - sometimes he & I called it a Bull-Shitters' Mythology". One of these was "The Entity" (or, "The Ntity"). Laumer: ""You mean—he's not an agent of the Entity?"" (p 68) Blaster's mythology sometimes came from SF. Cd this be a case of that?

""What about the rest of the Board?" S'lunt asked.

""Uh, they finally got rid of them entirely," Roger said, "but—"

""Goodness!"

""You don't mean . . . they did away with the whole capitalistic system?" R'heet exclaimed." - p 70

For reasons that I'll avoid enumerating here for the sake of avoiding a spoiler, this is pure BSer's Mythology.

Laumer refers back to an era that must've influenced him: "a shelf stacked with dog-eared Tom Swift books and untrimmed pulp magazines with B. Paul covers." See my review of a Tom Swift bk here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6349868-tom-swift-jr-his-flying-lab

Perhaps particularly characteristic of many pulp SF writers & those influenced by them is humor:

""Robber!" Roger yelled, "I'll give you the first billion years and not a century more!"

""I'll have to have a portion of the Cenozoic, of course," Oob said crisply, steepling his upper tentacles. "What would you say to the whole of the Pre-Cambrian for you, plus, say the Roaring Twenties?"

""Nonsense," Roger retorted, "But just to show you my heart's in the right place, I'll let you have the first three billion years, plus a small slice of the Devonian."

""Surely you jest," the Rhox said blandly. "The human-occupied portion is the most amusing sideshow attraction to come along in half a dozen hydrogen-hydrogen cycles. Suppose I take the Christian Era, minus the Late Middle Ages if you insist; and as a gesture of goodwill, I'll also give up the Silurian!"" - p 137

Laumer's got humor aplenty & this bk came dangerously close to getting a 4 star rating. I look forward to reading more by him. ( )

Laumer has always struck me as being Ron Goulart without the wit . . .

Roger Tyson's car breaks down in the midst of a thunderstorm. He tries to flag down a cute lady motorcyclist but she swerves to miss him, plunges off the road, and hits a tree. Before she dies she gives him instructions as to what he should do, most notably that he should take the gadget she's just pulled out of her ear and stick it in his own -- which he does, to discover that, even though she is dead, her thoughts aren't and she can communicate with him. Back on the road, he tries to flag down another motorist, noticing just too late that this one looks like a giant tentacled rutabaga with a pizza for its single eye. This traveller, too, swerves; it dies in the resulting smash. Roger climbs aboard the dead woman's bike and heads for town. There, with the help of the instructions from his earpiece, he discovers in the restroom of the bus station an Aperture -- a dazzling line of light. To escape arrest under suspicion of intent to commit graffiti in the restroom (I told you this lacked Goulart's wit), he dives through the Aperture and into another world.

Thanks to Apertures, he proceeds to pass through an array of other worlds, often pursued by the rutabaga (whom he later discovers is an alien being of a species called the Rhox) -- which continues the pursuit no matter how often he kills it. Indeed, as he adds friendly (and not so friendly) companions, he discovers that, in whichever world they might be, they seem to be confined to a single, endlessly looping day: with each new dawn the food that they ate yesterday is restored, anyone who died yesterday is restored to life, and so forth. It's up to Roger to try to establish the rules of this time trap and, of course, to break them. His adventuring eventually leads him to the far-future epoch where the lady motorcyclist, Q'nell, came from; he recognizes her, although for her it's the first time she's met him. She and her colleagues are in effect museum curators; all the different realities through which Roger has chased are, so Q'nell and co believe, museum exhibits, and they're intent on putting an end to the disruption to the museum that he and his chums have been causing. To this end, they propose to send Q'nell back in time . . . thereby, as Roger points out, futilely restarting the loop. So, this time, he goes back with her . . .

Obviously, this being a wacky novel, that doesn't go to plan either. At last Roger finds himself in the presence of a robot, UKR, who really knows what's going on: there are 10,404,941,602 capsule realities, of which Roger has experienced but a tiny fraction, and they're in effect the 10,404,941,602 microscope slides of an experimental series that UKR is maintaining as part of a Filing System he -- it? -- runs for the mysterious extratemporal Builders, or Builder. By story's end, all is stabilized and of course Roger gets the girl. No one gets a cigar for guessing who the Builder turns out to be.

As will be evident, there are some jolly good skiffy ideas mixed in here among the lavatory humour, some truly appalling sexism and a plethora of jokes that aren't so much overburdened as beaten repeatedly into the ground with the flat of a shovel. Here's the moment when Roger gets a glimmer of understanding as to what the whole string of realities, and his place therein, might represent:

He paused as a concept formed in his mind: three-dimensional reality, gathered up at the corners, pulled up to form a closed space, as a washwoman folds up the edges of a sheet to form a bag . . . (p29)

And here's UKR's explanation of the way that four-dimensional creatures function:

[T:]here's only one Rhox in the entire cosmos; like most entities above fourth level, he is unique. When the process you know as evolution progresses beyond a certain point, the species-fragmentation characteristic of [the:] third order merges to form a higher, compound life-form. Such a being can insert a large number of third-order aspects into contiguous space. (p137)

While these and a few other ideas are very pretty, I'm not sure they're enough to make me hunt down this book's sequel, Back to the Time Trap (1992). ( )

I've read this one before -- 29 years ago. But I was feeling nostalgic for some of the stories I'd read as a teen and I tracked this one down and decided to re-read it for kicks. It's a sf book in a light-hearted vein with a bumbling anti-hero named Roger Tyson who gets caught up a time warp. He meets a comely agent from the the future named Q'nell and the pair of them are pursued by the mysterious Oob the Rhox through a series of time portals. They try to figure out how to repair the damage caused by these as various people all over Earth and from different times find themselves reliving the same day over and over again. Silly, fast-moving stuff. (Written in 1970.) ( )