BAEN Books should be applauded for keeping Keith Lawmer’s works in print over the years. Laumer suffered a stroke in the 1971 and was unable to write for a few years. When Laumer did write novels in the late 1970s, the quality was sub-par. Of all Keith Laumer’s works, the Retief stories are my favorites. Retief: Emissary to the Stars contains seven hilarious diplomatic stories where Retief, a Terran diplomat, outwits the bureaucracy and the alien Groaci. “The Hoob Melon Crisis,” “The Garbage Invasion,” “The Troubleshooter,” “The Negotiators,” “Giant Killer,” “The Forest in the Sky,” and “Trick or Treaty” display all the statecraft you would ever want to enjoy. The stories are clever and witty. If you’re looking for something different, Laumer’s Retief stories (the ones published before 1971) are first-rate.
BAEN RETIEF SERIES:
Retief of the CDT
The Return of Retief
Retief: Emissary to the Stars
Retief and the Pangalactic Pageant of Pulchritude
Retief in the Ruins
Retief and the Warlords
Retief’s War
Thanks for that George – of Laumer’s shot stories I have the ‘best of’ collection from 1978 edited by Barry Malzberg that doesn’t include any of these – shall seek it out, really sounds like fun.
Sergio, the early Retief stories are full of fun. Laumer had some diplomatic experience and it shows in these stories.
I well remember Laumer’s scathing description of the Earthling diplomats, afaik modelled on his experiences with US diplomacy in the far East, had a lot of fun reading Retief’s adventures!
His kind of “Space Opera” was really enjoyable for me, in a way similar to jack Vance’s, though of course totally different scenarios …
Oh, those were the days in the 70s when on every visit to London’s bookshops I would discover new fantastic authors!
Wolf, you’re right about the Seventies being the Golden Age of SF paperbacks.
I got a lot of laughs from the Retief stories. Haven’t reread them in a long time, though.
Bill, the early Retief stories hold up, the later ones don’t.
I have the Baen collection, RETIEF! The only overlap seems to be RETIEF’S WAR. All the stories in the earlier collection are from the 1960s.
Jeff, you have a winner with that collection. The early Retief stories are the best. After that, there’s a huge fall-off in quality.
I’ve read a lot of the Retief stories, but am surprised at your strong emphasis on stories before and after a specific date. I only remembered that I liked the stories, and I’m sure I’ve read almost all of them. I have some of them in a collection or two, but without going to the catalog or shelves (I’m too lazy to do that right now) I couldn’t tell you which ones.
Rick, the stroke that Laumer suffered affected his writing. After 1971, it’s just not the same.
George – I managed to get all the Baen Laumer reprints. Love the RETIEF and the Lafayette O’Leary stories too.
Scott, I need to reread those Lafayette O’Leary stories, too. Laumer wrote some great stuff in his prime.
I was disappointed with one Retief story I happened to read not too long ago. It didn’t have the same light humor and sense of adventure to it as the ones I remembered reading in the 1960s. I wondered if was me, or — as you suggested — perhaps it was one he wrote after his stroke. I no longer remember the date.
I do remember that even in the 60s Laumer well widely recognized as writing terrific beginnings to his novels only to have them weaken drastically as the book went on. But one novel published after his strike was quite bad, with story lines jumping all over the place and characters disappearing in the middle of scenes when they were no longer needed. Whoever published the book (it may have been Baen) I thought did Laumer a serious disservice by publishing a book that needed some intensive editing.
Steve, I think Jim Baen published a lot of Keith Laumer’s work to help an ailing writer that he admired. I would be suspicious of anything by Laumer published after 1975.
Not too much OT:
I met a German SF writer once called Kurt Brand. he was part of the team that wrote the very successful (at least in Germany)1960s pulp series “Perry Rhodan” – don’t know if you even heard about it in the States.
He spent his later years in Italy (must have made some money) and the summers in a nudist camping site in Croatia (Yugoslavia) at the sea where I also had a kind of “permanent residence”. We often talked, he was quite frank about the commercial side of those SF series (kind of space opera) and he also told me that after a stroke he started writing again – the book was published without any editing and his fans realised that the whole thing was totally illogical, his brain just couldn’t work as it used to …
So he decided to retire …
He even has an entry in wiki – though the English version only contains his name …
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Brand
Wolf, I had dozens of Perry Rhodan books (now they reside at SUNY at Buffalo’s Special Collections Library). Thanks for the link!
Hey George, you were young then …
I stopped reading them soon – found them too simplistic (and their fans too …) and switched to “US Space Opera” like Laumer Jack Vance and others – but I also liked the British:
E C Tubb and Ken Bulmer (but you already know that …)
Oh, those were the days – Sense of Wonder …
A bit OT:
Were you already part of the SF fandom then? I’ve read some crazy stories, people traveling thousands of miles to conventions, by car or by train, to get to meet their favourite authors. From experience I know that the USA is biiig …
Wolf, I went to World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto, Canada back in 1973. Saw Harlan Ellison and Isaac Asimov. Yes, there’s a whole community that travel from convention to convention. I usually go to BOUCHERCON, the World Mystery Convention. This year it’s in Raleigh, North Carolina in October.
North Americans, a whole lot of us, get into the habit of long journeys in our lives (I drove to my aunt’s funeral in Barre, VT, near the Canadian border, from my Philadelphia suburb home. And some convention fans love to travel, including to the likes of Heidelberg.
For several years, Ace Books in the US published translations of PERRY RHODAN novels as a sort of magazine in paperback format, with a few features and short stories added to the package, in the 1970s. We got about a hundred issues/volumes of that, if I remember correctly. (Not nearly what you saw in Germany, and perhaps much of the rest of Europe).
See Barry Malzberg’s interview with Cele Goldsmith Lalli for an account of how Laumer first saw publication, via his brother March Laumer (the only person I’ve heard of with that for a given name)==link below. Goldsmith Lalli and Frederik Pohl were his most enthusiastic editors in the ’60s…Algis Budrys, as a diplo kid, noted that he never had the sort of Foreign Service experiences that Laumer loved to parody, but he granted that Laumer’s experiences might’ve been very different.
http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2012/07/cele-goldsmithlalli-interviewed-by.html
For that matter, this seems to be the only photo of Cele Goldsmith Lalli on the web:
http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2015/08/cele-goldsmith-lalli.html
Todd, thanks for the links!
George and Todd, thanks from me too!
Yes, sometimes it can be fun to remember those times, though when I was younger I didn’t have the money to go to many cons and when I had the money I was no longer interested, had too many other things on my mind …