Great, hilarious book. Lost a star at the end for some problematic gendering and a general theme of a main female character being naked the whole book but, for it's time, (written in serialised form in the mid 60s) it does pretty well.

Worth the read for the absurdity of the premise if nothing else. ( )

review of
Keith Laumer's The Great Time Machine Hoax
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 26, 2013

The advantage of reading bks as entertaining as this one is that I don't feel compelled to write anything intellectually substantial about them. The drawback is that I read them in one day & thusly accumulate bks that I 'must' write reviews of (according to the laws of my own process(es) of intellectual stimulation) more rapidly than my inclination to write such reviews happens. Stalemate. Is that 'Puritanical' of me or what? I pay for my pleasure w/ neurotic afterthought.

Laumer is 'my' 'new' SF 'discovery' & very enjoyable for me indeed. He's joined the ranks of C. M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, & John Brunner. This was the 3rd bk of his I've read so far. Time Trap ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16155621-time-trap ) was 1st, Worlds of the Imperium ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3033917-worlds-of-the-imperium ) was 2nd. I liked them both but it wasn't until this one that I got thoroughly sucked in. Bk as vagina for my head as a dick? Fuck it.

The previous 2 bks & this one all use the main theme, time travel & parallel universes, as a formal excuse for sudden dramatic/comedic plot twists - but The Great Time Machine Hoax took it to a new level. In pre-SF picaresque stories (picaresque not being quite the right term here since The Great Time Machine Hoax's protagonist isn't necessarily a 'rogue' & does, definitely, develop as a character) the adventures were somewhat limited by what was plausible (albeit far-fetched) in the socio-physical reality experienced by the readership (given the way my mind works, objections/exceptions clamor to my mind: The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Thousand Nights and One Night - &, then, my mind objects to those 'exceptions' - in other words this critical process cd go on much longer than I'll hereby allow it to). In SF, however, a character can jump from pre-historic times to the future instantaneously - thusly changing the conditions of the drama w/ whole paradigm shifts.

One of the things that immediately captured (arrested? caught? hhmmm..) my interest was the idea of computers having a limit &, thereby, reaching a point of obsolescence. This was published in 1964.

""The old gentleman called it a Generalized Nonlinear Extrapolator. G.N.E. for short. He made his money in computer components, you know. He was fascinated by computers, and he felt they had tremendous unrealized possibilities. of course, that was before Crmblznski's Limit was discovered. Great-grandfather was convinced that a machine with sufficiently extensive memory banks, adequately cross-connected and supplied with a vast store of data, would be capable of performing prodigious intellectual feats simply by discovering and exploring relationships among apparently unrelated facts."" - p 12

Crmblznski, by the by, is a recurring figure in Laumer's fiction - at least he's referred to on p 69 of The Monitors & I'm expecting to see the name again. Laumer is one of those great SF writers w/ a keen imagination for humorous detail:

"Two hours later, under a bright sun, Chester settled the heli gently onto a patch of velvety grass surrounded by varicolored tulips directly before the ornate decorated portico of the old house. The two men rode the balustraded escalator to the broad verandah, stepped off under a carved dinosaur with fluorescent eyes. The porter chimed softly as the door slid open. Inside, light filtering through stained-plastic panels depicted traditional service-station and supermarket scenes bathed the cavernous entry hall in an amber glow.

"Case looked around at the plastic alligator-hide hangings, the beaded glass floor, the ostrich-feather chandeliers, the zircon doorknobs.

""I see why neo-Victorian stuff is rare," he said. "It was all burned by enraged mobs as soon as they got a look at it."

""Great-grandfather liked it," said Chester, averting his eyes from a lithograph titled Rush Hour at the Insemomat. "I told you he was eccentric."" - p 14

As Chester & Case explore the capabilities of the G.N.E. they ask it "What happened to Ambrose Bierce?" (p 18). Bierce, of course, was the author of The Devil's Dictionary, an icon of iconoclasm, & he disappeared while traveling w/ revolutionaries during the Mexican Revolution. Laumer's far-reaching imagination uses the main plot of The Great Time Machine Hoax to enable him to go off on little tangents like this. [I was listening to the music of György Kósa & now I'm listening to that of Fletcher Henderson while I write this.] 15pp later, the G.N.E. clarifies things for its slow-witted interrogators:

""You make the understandable error of egocentric anthropomorphization of viewpoint, Mr. Chester," said the voice. "Your so-called 'reality' is, after all, no more than a pattern produced in the mind by abstraction from a very limited set of sensory impressions. You perceive a pattern of reflected radiation at the visible wave lengths—only a small fraction of the full spectrum, of course; to this you add auditory stimuli, tactile and olfactory sensations, as well as other perceptions in the Psi group of which you are not consciously aware at the third power—all of which can easily be misled by mirrors, ventriloquism, distorted perspective, hypnosis, and so on. The resultant image appears to you an adequate approximation of reality."" - pp 33-34

When I review narratives, I like to take the reader thru the bk w/o necessarily spoiling the plot for them. As such, my review is somewhat deliberately skewed toward "asides". One of the asides I'm often on the look-out for are anti-religious ones:

""It's going to be a headache picking the right kind of scenes. Take ancient Greece, for example. They had some customs that wouldn't do for a family-type show. In the original Olympics none of the contestants wanted to be loaded with anything as confining as a G string. And there were the public baths—coeducational—and the slave markets, with the merchandise in full view. We'll have to watch our step, Chester. Practically everything in ancient history was too dirty for the public to look at."

""We'd better restrict ourselves to later times when people were Christians," Chester said. "We can show the Inquisition, seventeenth-century witch burnings—you know, wholesome stuff." - p 45

Yep, y'know, Christians & Moslems, the 2 largest practitioners of brotherly love & charity? The ones that brought us the atomic bomb & 9/11?

""What do you say to a nice cave-man scene, Chester?" said Case. "Stone axes, animal skins around the waist, bear-tooth necklaces—the regular Alley Oop routine." - p 45

"Alley Oop"? Presumably most of Laumer's readers wd've gotten this pop culture reference in 1964 - but now? I reckon this has become somewhat esoteric.

I'm reminded of my review of Captains Outrageous Or, For Doom the Bell Tolls (see that here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/416565.Captains_Outrageous ): "As in the Kipling, there's a spoiled wealthy young male thrust into difficult circumstances & maturing as a result. This is standard fare for a coming-of-age plot.":

""What were you trained in, Chester?"

""Well," said Chester, considering, "I . . . ah . . . majored in liberal arts."

""You mean you paint pictures?"

""No, nothing like that. Business administration."

""I don't think I've heard of that. Is it a game of skill or chance?"

""Both." Chester smiled patiently. "No, in biz ad we're taught how to manage large commercial enterprises."

""I see. And after receiving your training you went on to actual management of some such organization?"

""Well, no. Funny, but I couldn't seem to find any big businessmen who were looking for a fresh college graduate to tell them how to run their companies."" - pp 78-79

When Chester does receive a valuable & arduous training as a result of his adventures Laumer's vision of what they'd consist of is perhaps the most practically inspired part of the bk - & one of the things about it that distinguishes it from the mere pulp humor of someone like Ron Goulart (whose stories I still like anyway). This education, however, leads to Laumer putting words in Chester's mouth that I find disappointingly naive:

""Bandon, learn to do something that other people want or need and you won't have to worry about being stepped on. Most of the shrill cries of social injustice come from people who contribute nothing to the scene that a chimpanzee couldn't do better. Why do you think people treasure the few really talented singers, actors, ball players, medical men, engineers that crop up? Because there are far too few of them—every one is a treasure." - p 147

Really, Laumer?! What a disappointment you are here! Does the above describe the treatment that Vincent Van Gogh received in his lifetime? His paintings sell for incredible sums of money now but poor ole Vincent certainly never saw a penny of it! He's EXPLOITED in retrospect by typical art market forces. & what about the great architect Antonio Gaudi? He died in a hospital ward for indigents - it appears he believed a little too much in the Catholic Church, poor guy.

Later, Chester encounters a society in wch ""Everybody dances and everybody sings. They all play games and they all make statues out of mud and they all paint. Some are better than others, but it's doing it that counts. In our setup everybody's an artist, not just a few half-cracked far-outers."" (p 168) This whole issue of "everybody's an artist" vs 'only the talented can be great artists' is a theoretical issue that's been at the forefront of much 20th c discussion. In some ways, I don't find it very interesting anymore.

I can clean a wound & put a bandage on it - does that make me a doctor? I can arbitrate a disagreement - does that make me a lawyer? The problem here, for me, is that a person who dedicates their life to being creative gets lumped together w/ 'Sunday painters'. That doesn't happen to lawyers & doctors. They get respect AND MONEY. Artists are undervalued while they're alive largely b/c the standards for appraising their work are so often incomprehensibly abstract to the general public.

Doctors have practical standards that they can be appraised by: if the patient gets better, the doctor's good. Same w/ lawyers, if the client 'gets off', the lawyer's good. But doctors get paid big money no matter whether they succeed or fail & are still respected even if the patient dies - & lawyers get the rich & white-collar criminals off all the time: money buys 'justice'. Now, imagine, a painter hired to do a portrait: the painter charges hundreds of thousands of dollars &, in the end, the painting doesn't look anything like the sitter, the sitter dies of boredom sitting there, & a relative who brought the painter & the sitter together knowing of this probable eventuality takes off w/ a huge inheritance. Wd the painter still be respected? ( )

Keith Laumer wrote two kinds of books. They were either serious or fun adventure. The fun stories were written for young adults. They include the Lafayette O'Leary adventures and the Retief adventures.

This one was of the absurd, fast moving, fun adventures. It's fluff and not his best but it moves so fast it keeps you interested to the end. As a teen this was great. As an adult I generally avoid silly, daft, absurd and meaningless adventures by any author. Most of them are social commentary mask as SF. They bore me to tears. But Laumer's fun stories are fun so I will try them all. ( )

Ouch. Disappointing. For some reason I had convinced myself this was a "good book" (i.e. on David Pringle's list of the best SF novels, or some such thing). Well, that wasn't the case, and it was abundantly clear soon enough.

It was somewhat competently written, with a few interesting moments, enough to earn it a grudging 2 star rating. But oh, the many annoyances:

1. Bait and switch--there is no great time machine hoax. I was expecting a fun, perhaps dated, perhaps sexist, romp, with characters attempting to keep this hoax going against all odds, etc., but nope, no hoax. It's like calling The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe "The Pevenseys' Delightful Visit with the Professor."

2. The plot structure feels like the author embarked on one book, couldn't figure out where to go, switched plans midstream, got stuck again, tried a new tack, and then eventually wrapped it up and called it a day. It reeks of Firstdraftitis.

3. The viewpoint character appears to shift between the opening and the unfolding of the plot. Not the end of the world, if handled knowingly, but in this case it's just odd.

4. Little that happens is remotely plausible, especially the central premise. "This ... makes ... no ... sense ..." I kept repeating to myself.

5. Some serious Marty-Stu going on as the book develops.

6. As others have noted, there's a good third of the book (and by "a good third" I mean "at least a third" not "wow, this is good") that's so far removed from the tone of the prior passages (and increasingly boring to boot) as to cause considerably headscratching, between yawns.

Not happy!

(Note: 5 stars = rare and amazing, 4 = very good book, 3 = a decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. There are a lot of 4s and 3s in the world!) ( )

I've read this a number of times, most recently in 2012. It was more political than I remembered, and the part I admired, the mental and physical training, was not as interesting in the mental/philosophical training as my memory of it. I did decide to discard the book with the belief that I won't want to read it again. Now {4-10-13} and I have all my books and bookcases in, and I realize that I don't want to throw it away because I may want to look something up about it.