There are some writers who are superstars and whose names and works live long after they have entered the long night. There are others who do consistently good work, have their cadres of fans, and are forgotten within a few years or decades of their passing.

Keith Laumer

One such author was Keith Laumer (1925-1993), who was born on this day, June 9. Laumer died nearly three decades ago. In the early 2000’s Baen published a number of omnibuses of his work. Since then, he’s fallen into neglect.

Laumer is best remembered for his tales of the diplomat Retief or perhaps the Bolo series of intelligent tanks. But he wrote a number of other things, all of them enjoyable. He could do action and adventure, space opera, and time travel. He knew how to tell an entertaining story, and he could hide a moral lesson in it without detracting from the entertainment or beating you over the head with his message.

For today’s post, I’m going to look at the short story “Message to an Alien”. It was first published in the June 1970 issue of Analog.

Dalton runs a junkyard on an isolated colony world, and one afternoon he’s taking a flight, just to relax, when he sees a ship enter the atmosphere and head towards an isolated area. The ship is a scout ship for the alien Hukk. Humans defeated the Hukk seven years prior.

Dalton should know. He-, well I’m not gonna tell and spoil the surprise.

Dalton tries to get the colony’s governor to call up the militia. He’s too concerned with what the Council will think. Laumer doesn’t have a lot of sympathy for bureaucrats, and it shows in this story.

So Dalton is going to have to take things into his own hands. So with only a sergeant he’s essentially kidnapped, that’s what he sets out to do.

There’s more going on in this story than first meets the eye, including Dalton’s motivations. It was a good story, a sharp message that didn’t get in the way of the story, and a lot of fun.

“Message to an Alien” is  available in Legions of Space. The omnibus contains four short stories and two novels, one of them being Planet Run, written in collaboration with Gordon R. Dickson. I thought the book was still in print, but when Amazon didn’t list it, I checked Baen’s website. The ebook is no longer for sale.

If I had known that, I would have chosen a story that you could download if you are interested. The book is available on the secondary market, and I recommend it.