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Dinosaur Beach (1971)

av Keith Laumer

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review of
Keith Laumer's Dinosaur Beach
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - April 3, 2015

That was fun. This is the 4th Laumer bk I've read in the past few days. I made a bit of fun of 2 of them as hack work. I looked him up online & read in one place that he had a stroke in the early 1970s & that he cdn't write for awhile after that but that he eventually started writing again. Here's one person's take on him:

"John Keith Laumer was an extremely successful man, an author who kept fit, always. It was therefore more difficult for him when he suffered a massive stroke in 1971 that paralyzed one side of his body and part of his brain and therefore his mind."

[..]

"He was a master of his mind but he could no longer write. He tried, over and again but the paralysis took control of his mind and the rage drove everyone away.

"His writing suffered horribly. He could not write but he was published. It seems apparent no editor would tell Keith Laumer, a world famous author, that he could not write any longer. The publishers were too interested in taking advantage of Keith as he tried desperately to live up to his previous mastery." - http://www.keithlaumer.com/biography.htm

That's a tough break. Everything I've read so far was written up to 1970 but not beyond. Dinosaur Beach was published in 1971. I have 4 more laying around that I might read next. At least 2 of them were written post-stroke. It'll be interesting to see how his writing's changed. Given that I, too, might one day be the old-person-who-has-a-crippling-experience, I'm rooting for Laumer. I'm hoping that I find redeeming qualities in the writing that the above-quoted fan didn't.

In the meantime, I enjoyed this Laumer more than the other 3 I've read recently. In my most recent review of one of his bks, The World Shuffler, I started by quoting the 1st paragraph:

"It was a warm autumnal afternoon in Artesia. Lafayette O'Leary, late of the U.S.A., now Sir Lafayette O'Leary since his official investiture with knighthood by Princess Adoranne, was lounging at ease in a brocaded chair in his spacious library, beside a high, richly draped window overlooking the palace gardens, He was dressed in purple kneepants, a shirt of heavy white silk, gold-buckled shoes of glove-soft kid. A massive emerald winked on one finger beside the heavy silver ring bearing the device of the ax and the dragon. A tall, cool drink stood at his elbow. From a battery of speakers concealed behind the hangings, A Debussy tone poem caressed the air." - p 1, The World Shuffler

Now cf that to the 1st paragraph of Dinosaur Beach:

"It was a pleasant summer evening. We were sitting on the porch swing, Lisa and I, watching the last of the pink fade out of the sky and listening to Fred Hunnicut pushing a lawn mower over his weed crop next door. A cricket in the woodwork started up his fiddle, sounding businesslike and full of energy. A car rattled by, its weak yellow headlights pushing shadows along the brick street and reflecting in the foliage of the sycamores that arched over the pavement. Somewhere a radio sang about harbor lights." - p 7, Dinosaur Beach

Ok, there are some formulaic similarities. The season & place are established, the paragraph ends w/ music referenced. I don't claim this is great writing but expressions like "yellow headlights pushing shadows" & "a radio sang about harbor lights" please me. Headlights, strictly speaking, don't "push" anything (they illuminate the area they drive toward) & radios, strictly speaking, don't sing (the humans being broadcast by the radios do). The writing's just figurative enuf to make it not dryly predictable.

"Then I lifted the pistol I had palmed while he was arranging the chairs, and shot him under the left eye.

"He settled in his chair. His head was bent back over his left shoulder as if he were admiring the water spots on the ceiling. His little pudgy hands opened and closed a couple of times. He leaned sideways quite slowly and hit the floor like two hundred pounds of heavy machinery.

"Which he was, of course."

Right off the fiddling cricket bat, the reader is notified that there are machines posing as humans out to get the narrator. Of course, I'm reminded of James Cameron & Gale Anne Hurd's 1984 Terminator, the extremely popular SciFi story-become-movie about a robot posing as human traveling back in time to kill someone whose future influence is threatening the robot's hegemony. Oddly, this same robot became governor of California after that. Go figger. Anyway, I'm glad Laumer got to this type of story 1st.

""Beautiful, don't you agree?" the Karg said. He waved a hand at the hundred or so square miles of stainless steel we were standing on. Against a black sky, sharp-cornered steel buildings thrust up like gap teeth. Great searchlights dazzled against the complex shapes of giant machines that trundled slowly, with much rumbling, among the structures." - p 104

"In the case of the space garbage, it had taken half a dozen major collisions to convince the early space authorities of the need to sweep circumterrestrial space clean of fifty years' debris in the form of spent rocket casings, defunct telemetry gear, and derelict relay satellites long lost track of. In the process they'd turned up a surprising number of odds and ends, including lumps of meteoric rock and iron, chondrites of clearly earthly origin, possibly volcanic, the mummified body of an astronaut lost on an early space walk, and a number of artifacts that the authorities of the day had scratched their heads over and finally written off as the equivalent of empty beer cans tossed out by visitors from out-system." - p 18

I'm stretching things a bit here but one might even say that military-man Laumer was a mite bit ahead of peacenik Ed Sanders in regard to the latter's 1972 "Beer Cans on the Moon" ecological warning song - or, at least, roughly contemporaneous to it. In short, I found much more to laud in Dinosaur Beach than I have in t'other bks I've read by him recently. I even liked this bit of love-sickness:

"But every train of thought led back to her. If I tasted a daka-fruit—extinct since the Jurassic—I thought Lisa would like this, and I'd imagine her expression if I brought a couple home in a brown paper sack from the IGA store at the corner, picturing her peeling them and making a fruit salad with grated coconut and blanched almonds. . . ." - p 22

I like the way he sneaks in "a daka-fruit—extinct since the Jurassic" in the context of domestic bliss & segues into the details of a 1939 food store (presumably period-accurate) & foods that might be combined w/ the daka. Nice.

&, yeah, once again again, there are some similarities to The World Shuffler, written in fairly close proximity to each other, the narrator keeps encountering himself - in the 1st case b/c of parallel worlds, in this case b/c of time-traveling:

"I took three steps and stooped and picked up the gun. It was a .01 microjet of Nexx manufacture, with a grip that fitted my hand perfectly.

"It ought to. It was my gun. I looked at the hand it had fallen from. It looked like my hand. I didn't like doing it, but I turned the body over and looked at the face.

"It was my face," - p 43

I've sd it before & I'll say it again again again, I like time travel & parallel worlds stories b/c of the way their logic 'permits' all sorts of things that wd be illogical in more conventional stories - & I seem to like Laumer's writing the best when he's writing in those niches. As the character travels in time, Laumer takes advantage of the possibilities to imagine a prehistoric Earth as well as a future one:

"It was cold on the beach; the sun was too big, but there was no heat in it. I wondered if it had engulfed Mercury yet; if the hydrogen phoenix reaction had run its course; if Venus was now a molten world gliding along the face of the dying monster Sol that filled half its sky." - p 123

In other words, a red giant. Not a Red Star, mind you, That's a Pittsburgh based Adult Kombucha Brewery that I'm hereby promoting b/c my friend who runs it works too much & needs to make more money off it. Ahem. Has yr perception just been changed by knowledge?

"I saw the immaculate precision of the Nexx-built chamber disintegrate in my eyes into the shabby makeshift that it was, saw the glittering complexity of the instrumentation dwindle in my sight until it appeared as no more than the crude mud images of a river tribesman, or the shiny trash in a jackdaw's nest." - p 144

Anyway, all isn't really right in the world but romance wins out in the end - but what will the children be like? ( )
  tENTATIVELY | Apr 3, 2022 |
a time agent from Era4 gets into some serious time screwups. Messes with Era5-7 and turns out to be a robot from the WAY future allowing humanity a chance to survive without timetravel. He loves a woman from 1936 and as a reward goes back there and forgets everything but his cover story about living in that age. Weird. ( )
  BookstoogeLT | Dec 10, 2016 |
Part of Laumer's "Time Sweeper" series, but I think the others were coat-tailed onto this good entertainment. This is my second favourite Time War story just not quite as good as "The Big Time" by Fritz Leiber. Once we accept that time can be played with, then the reader has to spend some time sorting outexactly when things happened, but that's why we read these.
It would make a good film or video game. ( )
  DinadansFriend | May 29, 2016 |
This one is a little dated now, but Laumer was the best Adventure Time Travel Story of the lot-- barring Andre Norton. Still, the exploits of Ravel of Nexx Central are a quick step of puzzles being solved and plots tightening lethally close as he jumps back and forth thru Time-- ever evading Paradox. ( )
  Caragen87 | Dec 30, 2008 |
This starts out simply enough as another timecop story, with Laumer's always entertaining (and often very funny) hard boiled first person narrative . Somewhere in the middle it shifts gear into a full blown Van Vogt type "recomplicated plot" drama, and you're shot out the end of the novel having read one of the best time travel novels ever written.
Exceedingly entertaining. I can't wait to read again and can't recommend it enough. IMO, it's as good as Harness' The Paradox Men.
And I should add, that there are dinosaurs in the book. So if you're looking for some, while they're not the focus of the book, they do make an appearance in an amusing sequence.

****1/2 -Four and a half stars ( )
4 rösta arthurfrayn | Jul 1, 2007 |
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Författarens namnRollTyp av författareVerk?Status
Laumer, KeithFörfattareprimär författarealla utgåvorbekräftat
Freas, KellyOmslagmedförfattarevissa utgåvorbekräftat
Kidd, TomOmslagmedförfattarevissa utgåvorbekräftat
Whelan, MichaelOmslagmedförfattarevissa utgåvorbekräftat

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A shorter version of this novel appeared in the August 1969 issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact under the title "The Timesweepers".
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