Laumer, Keith

• Dinosaur Beach (4)

  • A fairly convoluted time-travel plot seen through the eyes of a "soldier" of sorts whose mission is to fix the space-time continuum after time travel of previous generations had created a lot of chaos. Of course, there are forces working against him whose origins are unknown. It is no surprise that there are plot holes you can drive a truck through (sadly typical of time-travel stories). By the end of the novel, the plot machinations were absurdly prosaic and, to me, unnecessary. To be honest, Simon Hawke wrote a series of similar (but more skillfully constructed) stories called the "Time Wars" that I would readily recommend ahead of this novel for those interested in a good soldier's-eye-view of conflicts across time.

• A Plague of Demons (7)

  • A much better effort here, but still, for me, the style was really jarring. I guess that's because I grew up reading a different kind (arguably not as good) of fiction. These days, a story with such a densely packed plot as this one would never come out as a thin little 160-page book...it would be at least a megalith like a Clancy novel or perhaps even a trilogy. This book most closely resembles Steakley's "Armor" for me, in that it describes (particularly in the latter half) combat against a host of vile creatures from a soldier's point of view.

    Anyway, the book opens on a reasonably slow pace, following an intelligence operative sent to observe strange happenings at a staged war (similar to the wars described by Hawke's series, as referenced above!). Once the operative (John Bravais) discovers a strange secret about what's happening to some of the dead bodies, things start to happen extremely fast as John finds himself on the run from a virtual army of alien supermen. He manages to hide out for a while with an associate, and he manages to "equip himself" to the teeth so that at least it will be a fair fight, but it takes a while for him (and the reader) to finally emerge from the darkness to figure out what the heck is going on. If it sounds confusing, it is, but Laumer keeps things moving at such a fast pace, it's difficult to put the book down. Everything is revealed in time, but as I said, this might have been stronger had Laumer been given some latitude to flesh out the story a bit more.

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